King's Age

[Kageru]

But strength is pretty much purely a function of time and luck (nearby high point value abandoned towns). The guy attacking has 4 towns and a 7K point capital. None of us would really have any path to victory against the sort of force.

I've not really messed with trade (haven't even built the market). I thought you just loaded resources onto a mule and sent it so that all the costs were on the senders side.

[gryeyes]

You cant send resources to "push" a lowbie town up faster if you don't own the town, regardless if it is a member of your alliance or not. Mechanically you can of course but it violates their nonsensical rules.

If someone with a dozen towns wants to kill you there is not much you can do about it. You avoid drawing aggression by having a substantial defense force. If its not cost effective to take your town over you tend to get ignored. There are many ways to combat someone significantly stronger than yourself. The tactics one uses seems to be based on avoiding waves you cant beat, while trying to take out a count. If we were closer to each other we could defend against the player forever wasting tons of his resources till he gave up or was willing to take a huge loss.

Abandoned towns while convenient are not required. You just have to use scouts extensively to establish what towns have relatively high mines with little in the way of defense. And if you are on the edge (like all beginners) there are many. I don't even bother to farm any longer.

[Kageru]

My first defence..

600 Templar, 600 squire, 600 berserker, 550 long-bow, 20 spy, 270 Crusaders, 180 Black knights
850 Templar, 800 squire, 800 berserker, 800 long bow, 20 spy, 700 Crusaders, 700 Black knights, 100 Battering Ram, 100 Trebuchet.

None of which are coming home. I'm not entirely sure why anyone would use Black knights when assaulting a defended location, not scout out the defences first and send such a small first wave but I do appreciate it. Though I was also sort of hoping I'd get wiped out so I could have a nice opportunity to drop the game.

I also left f13 because there's not much point being in an alliance where everyone else is about a week's travel away.

[gryeyes]

I guess I will leave also, your attacker wasted a fuckton of resources on that offensive. If he would have put the rams/knights/trebuchet/templars/squires into more berskers/crusaders you would have been fucked! I dont believe defensive stats even get calculated if you are the attacker.

[gryeyes]

Blocked me from seeing you online huh! If anyone wants to join the alliance im in tell me. I dont know the relative position but just the name should keep you pretty safe.

[Kageru]

More to check if the button was interactive really.

Though I'd rather get wiped out so I could quit than sit there monitoring attacks, so other than queueing up some builds I'm pretty much always offline :)

[Kageru]

Still playing this. It sucks you into a position where you're not really having fun but don't want to waste the time you've invested so you keep going. And it's a fair amount of time invested since I've been solidly building and my initial town is still under 80% complete. Hopefully I'll get wiped out soon so I can do something more productive.

The problem with this game (and I assume all tribal wars type games) is there seems to be very little stopping the large from getting larger. The economic and military power is largely cumulative so a well established player (eg. the top ranked player has 121 mostly completed settlements) can both extend their own domain and impair others with impunity. Other than the tedium of actually managing all those armies and settlements.

A game like this could work if it had the idea of limits on personal power (eg. in Eve you can still only fly one ship, so there's no solo wars), maneuver (so the smaller force can still hope to use strategy and tactics to their advantage) and shared space in which the defender can focus their power. Ideally with the home space allowing it to be built up so they have a home field advantage but are discouraged from attempting to hold infinitely growing amounts of space. That also allows politics which should be a natural counter-balance to mega-alliances and agressive super-powers.

Kings age with its static settlements. automated fights and conflict at the individual level and with neither space nor limits on growth seems destined to smother itself. Thus the constant opening of new worlds I guess. I'm sort of glad I explored a TW type game, but I cannot see wanting to ever play another one.

[gryeyes]

I gave up a few weeks ago, got up to 30-40k points, but its rather boring after awhile.

[Kageru]

And I'm out after... oh my god, more than a year?

I had a nice little encampment of 5 fully developed castles with defence oriented troops. As such I enjoyed the irritation of the players around me as I interfered with their goal of dominating the map sector I was in. The problem being that while they were huge, to the point where doing their daily turn would be too tedious for me to imagine, the game offers a penalty when they attack smaller players. With the ratio being at a silly level (I think my main neighbor had 200+ castles and everyone else in their alliance was similar) and them only being able to attack with the force from one castle at a time killing me would actually be surprisingly hard. And of course adding players with small numbers of castles who could attack me would lose their position on the leader board (which is castles held / members).

I'd get interesting in game mails like "why haven't you quit yet when you're not growing?" but of course there was no point in growing because catching up was impossible and remaining small was my only practical defence. In the end I got distracted (Curse you Eve!), didn't log in for X days, and my account got zapped.

That said these games are pretty terrible. The tactical depth is nearly non-existent and it's all about getting in early, growing fast and micro-managing far too many identical bases with a sluggish web interface. Nothing that wasn't done a lot more entertainingly by Xbattle in 1991. I could conceivably believe some people find the political level entertaining but that would involve only a handful of people. On top of which the people who take these free web-based games that seriously, or actually pay money for premium, tend to be scary and incoherent.

[Aez]

And yet you played one year... 

[Kageru]

Well, played as in remembered to browse past once a week to refresh the timer... but yeah. Scary how fast time passes.

I'd always heard about "tribes" style games so I figure I can apply this experience pretty much to all of them, since the end result is the same once you strip off the "RP" wrapper.