Long time no blog
Still not much to tell
I have an idea:
I leak a screenshot!
Do I have to mention that I am still working on that?
I’ve seen quite a few requests for getting an image of the battlemap. So here is it, free of any attackers. Feel free to use it for your battle planning.
However be warned: Sometime with the upcoming releases, we’ll introduce custom maps for each fort. Then the map will be layouted depending on the fort size and the building levels.
Since the introduction of fort battles, the players have developed a strategy to weaken the enemy by letting low level players join the opposite side. While this is a quite valid strategy, it is still nerving and not wanted. As a result we made a decision at the end of the development of 1.21 to pull a feature that we wanted to have in 1.22 into 1.21: The mustering page.
Since this feature got in so late it is not so well tested and the user interface is initially not so obvious. So let’s explain it here shortly:
When you are a member of a directly involved town (means the attacking town or one of the fort members) and you are a councilor or a founder of one of these towns, then you are allowed to muster the troops that are joining the battle. You will see the recruiting button once you are taking part in the battle (so you have to join). Then the screen shown above is opened and you can see everyone who has joined the battle already.
By clicking now in the status columns in the cells, you can give players a star or a red cross. The star means that this player has precedence to enter the battle. If the player has a red cross it means that the player will only allowed to join the battle if there is still space left in the battle. You can also remove a precedence by toggling the cell again.
Once you have changed the status, you will notice that it turns orange. This means that you have modified your list, but it is not yet sent out. To do that, you click on “muster” or, if you think you do not wish to change anything, on “cancel” so that nothing is changed at all.
You will also see who has changed the player’s precedence rating, so you might spot people who shouldn’t modify the status of a player (i.e. spies). It is of course possible that a member town has a spy that modifies the list to the attacker / defender’s favor right before the battle starts, but well, you should take care who you promote in your town or who you invite…
A minor addon to this feature did not made it into 1.21 yet – since such a spy could do such a change in the last moment before the battle starts, it would be quite hard to make out who changed the rating of the players. In order to keep this information, it’ll be sent to all players that are taking part in a battle. But this feature is not yet in 1.21.
Today we decided to open the gates again and let some of you join the public beta to experience new releases and help making the game better. Moreover i wanted to remind everybody that the public beta is a sandbox where we want players to test and try stuff out and report us the bugs and ideas.
Ah, almost i forgot to tell you about when we will open the doors 😀
Proposed date: Fr, 07. Aug 2009 around 13:37
New limit: ~ 2500 (raised by 500)
I wish you all good luck
We have updated today the beta and a few additional smaller feature leaped into 1.21.
Fortbattle rule
First, there’s an overview on the rules for a fortbattle. That should clear any doubts on how the battle is being judged and when it’ll be a loss or a win. If we change anything in the future, i.e. the number of rounds that a battle takes, this will be automatically shown in this fact sheet.
Then there’s a still-to-be-improved feature that shows which towns are fighting on which side:
List of defending towns
In this case, you can see which towns are defending the town already. That list includes the main defenders (fort owners) and also every town that has at least one member having joined the battle already. Picking the right side should now be simpler.
Last but not least, there’s a security feature that should greatly help you to identify attacks on your account:
Login attempts are now shown when you log in.
By the time, most of all wanted features are now on the beta. 1.21 is running quite smoothly and we are looking forward to switch to 1.21 once we consider it stable.
A feature that still needs some tweaking is the XP gain for battle participation. But we should be able to fix this till the end of the week.