how do you play this game?

[bundesbank]

and how quickly do you get attacked out of npp these days?

[bundesbank]

damn it, i've lost my posting title as Grand Arbiter of NPAC.

[Carlos Danger]

welcome back bundesbank

Dauthi and Goblins are taking a break and if your unguilded you can't be hit more then a few times so your pretty safe.

I have been trying to figure out how to play this game for a long time, but if you have specific questions and someone else doesn't come along and answer them I will do my best to help.

[Jokingjoe]

That avatar looks strangely familiar...

[Kaz]

Welcome back

Depending on which game you are playing, it might be the case that UG protection is turned on, this basically means that UG's cannot declare war on guilded/quaded players and vica verca. In those games, once guilded or quaded, the usual unwritten rules still generally apply regarding attacking guilded targets. Dauthi's goblins guild do have a tendency to attack undefended targets whether they are guilded or not, but the easiest way to avoid that is to ensure that you have some defences out of NPP.

For the most part, the game is identical to how it played when you were last around, even the troop stats are pretty much the same. There are a few options that make it a different experience though, and they are the things it's worth learning.

During NPP you can Load or Save a build, this is basically to enable you to skip the repetitive parts of building, but can save a lot of time in games like Conquest2 that have a high NPP. Troops are not stored as part of the build, so if you plan to create a save, make sure that you've not wasted cash or turns on them.

After NPP ends, the Load/Save screen starts to function as the Restore screen. Basically you can revert back to the state your kingdom was in 2 days ago, minus a tax in land, buildings and turns. You are also placed into RPP (restore period protection) for a set duration (changes game to game). RPP works just like NPP preventing you attacking or being attacked. You can also restore after death.

Some games also have Bounties, these are granted when you make the final attack on a kingdom and kill them. Bounties include taking turns, (a percentage of) land, elan or gold from the kingdom that you killed. Not all bounty options are available in every game.

Forts are no longer a part of the troop cap, instead, the individual per-fort expenses increases as you get more forts. Essentially they become a lot harder to manage at around 8 to 10%.

Tithe is basically the same as it used to be, the screen might look very different but the core functionality is identical. I just swapped the pointless troop rewards that everyone downsized, for more useful tithe rewards. The drop-down just allows you to pick from a selection of common tithing options and avoid getting out a calculator.

Basically the code includes all the modifications made for Massacre, Unity and LQS at Evernight (plus some new features), merged into a single code-base and then turned on or off by an option. If you scroll to the bottom of the game screen, there is an option to view the race stats (which now has a lot more useful info) and also the game stats, which lists all the new game options and their status (which reminds me, I need to finish the summaries on the game status info).

You could also have a look through the Change-log thread (in Admin News), which details some of the recent changes that have occurred.

Game-wise:

• Conquest2 is essentially the Massacre game I created at Evernight without any major changes.
• Domination2 is a bit like a cross between Quad/LQS and Turomoil/Castaway. Basically you can join quads with others, but you can also create 4 kingdoms.
• Bloodbath is essentially speed with two kingdoms, I guess it's the closest thing to solo (we don't really have an equivalent)
• Guilds is obviously a guilded game, but is a little more like Unity due to having two kingdoms and there being a lot of extra stuff available.

[bundesbank]

Mhmm, i looked through many of the public builds. My assumption based off of them is that everyone must get attacked pretty quickly right out of npp - thus my question...

I'll probably post my build strategy publicly shortly (you can maintain a slightly higher brt with the new tithe bonuses than the useless troops). Who knows how useful it'll be, though, in the current environment.

[bundesbank]

Mhmm, i looked through many of the public builds. My assumption based off of them is that everyone must get attacked pretty quickly right out of npp - thus my question...

I'll probably post my build strategy publicly shortly (you can maintain a slightly higher brt with the new tithe bonuses than the useless troops). Who knows how useful it'll be, though, in the current environment.

[Kaz]

The problem with the public builds is basically that anyone can save one, regardless of skill level or experience, so they are 'mostly' bad builds, with a handful of useful ones scattered among them.

Many of the - lets say - better builders tend to not want to share strategy and create private builds instead. Actually a big reason why there are a handful of good builds in there, is because a year or two ago I made all the private builds public, and also created a selection myself to ensure at least one reset and one high BRT build per race.

In the end, the high BRT builds are the only ones I'd personally ever consider using. At some point it might even be worth going through a deleting a lot of the less useful ones.

[bundesbank]

pfft, screw that, i'm making them public! if people don't start building well, i will be most disappointed.

also, i can't believe i made two elemental realms in bloodbath. doh!

also, i imagine that i'm going to get my ass whooped right out of npp now that i've posted my build in all three games (they are slightly different, in particular because i made a few mistakes in guilds - was still testing things out, and was too lazy to restart from zero ).

[edit]now i understand! when you restore a build, it also takes the race.

i didn't notice that tithing was any different for goblin, elemental or human. am i mistaken?

[Kaz]

Goblin, Elemental and Human all have 3/5 for tithing so they all have pretty much an identical tithe.

You can see racial differences in game, but the purposes of linking I need to link to something out of game (so I'll pick guilds, although all the races are the same between games).

http://www.monarchygame.com/troopinfo/g ... race=Human

Most of the races actually have 3/5 for tithe, but not all. Vampire are 1/5 and Dwarven and Fae are 2/5. That means that they get smaller amounts of land back per tithe, and also run through the tithe gifts (which trigger reductions in a hidden tithe variable) quicker.

[bundesbank]

would it be possible to make it so that when you restore human, elemental and goblin builds, it doesn't take the race as well? or is there actually some minute difference in tithing that would throw off the game balance?

[edit]also, holy crap can you ever build quickly :S

i did notice that the tithing mechanics have changed slightly. you guys got rid of the uber micro tithing that we used to do for 28-34 acres lol

probably a good thing.

[Kaz]

It's not just differences in tithing, the races have various other little differences, e.g. elan generation. The other races are there to give you the option to change your race to an available one should you wish to.

Yes, it 'could' be coded so that it doesn't swap your race, but I personally prefer to have the option of doing so. At some point I want to change the look and feel of the save build system, and when I do that I''ll try to make it clearer that you'd swap race if you pick a different one.

On the micro tithing note, it's not gone, it's just that 3/5 tithe is a better tithe bonus than used to be 'standard' so you end up with bigger tithes as a side effect. If you pick a race with a low tithe score (e.g. Vampire) then you'll get smaller amounts per micro-tithe

[bundesbank]

ahh, good point on the elan generation. i had noticed a discrepancy between my elemental and human realms - should have thought that through more fully

and noted about the micro tithing.

now i guess i'll need to find some time to make public builds for all the races

[edit]i have noticed that we can no longer see whether we have news/msgs from the account portal page where all the kingdoms are listed. i'm not sure if my anxiety is higher or lower: higher from not knowing what's going on, or lower from not seeing the 'News' tag and being unable to log in to an encamped kingdom haha

[Leif]

Oh hai! Welcome back!

[Kaz]

People keep asking about getting back the news and messages on the portal. It's on the list (along with a billion other things lol). Problem is that the portal is nothing at all like the old Evernight Games portal, which was quite inefficient in how it retrieved that information from the games, so I can't just turn it back on.

I originally designed the Monarchy portal with the intention of it being able to launch 'other' totally different games easily. The portal itself wasn't actually designed to hold Monarchy, Brian and I had left Evernight and were working on a completely new thing when Dustin finally decided to pull the plug and we ended up stopping work on what we were doing, and re-creating Monarchy instead.

With the portal being originally designed to support multiple different game engines, it obviously cannot assume that every game will store news and messages in exactly the same was that Monarchy did (especially considering we were going to store news/messages in a totally different way).

It is on the list, and I keep meaning to do something to bring back the news/messages alert in some form. Although I'd prefer something a little more interesting that just the words 'News' or 'Messages'. I was thinking more along the lines of a short news summary to give an idea of the type of news.

But as I said, it's on the list of things to do, but not quite as simple to implement as you might think.

[bundesbank]

haha, i wouldn't worry about it. some changes from the old game are more than welcome it adds to the suspense!

y helo thar leif, it has been many moons since i last saw you!

[Jokingjoe]

bund, I see you playing a Leto in bloodbath. I'm your neighbor, if you need anything, feel free to ask.

[Nymphsong]

Welcome back, looks like we both came back around the same time.

Maybe I will get my old Bloodbath realms up and going...I think we can...shake each others rust off.

Nymph