Since my wedding and honey moon I haven’t write a lot (only one post …)
but I’ve been trying some new games recently and played less of the others.

Clash of Kingdoms

I’ve started playing this in November in server 2, I’m greatly surprised by this game on many level.
First the game really focus on helping your kingdom, giving to the landmark, improving the cities, fighting other kingdom on the battlefield to grab other cities, which creates a dynamic much more fun than other MMORTS.
The draw back is if you have a bad premiers or if people are not involve enough in the kingdom you might think the game is going nowhere.
Another thing I really like is that they removed a bunch of stuff that annoying in MMORTS. Plundering, building new city … stuff that I found boring in other mmorts.
That game definitely deserve a reviews and probably a few guide, more to come in 2011.

Lord of Ultima

While the game is fun, I basically stopped playing.
Managing 30-40 cities is boring and take too much time.
Yeah the barrack take like only half-hour to build level 10 but for the 5 first level which takes 5 minutes to build you have to build them and wait. Yeah you can go to other city and to the same thing there but after cycling through your 40 cities 2 hrs you get bored pretty easily.
And another thing I liked in this game, that I realized was somewhat lame after I saw what other players do with it.
I am talking about the fact that if there no castle in your city it cannot be taken. So what happen, when a small league dominates a continent a bigger league want to enter the continent, it simply put city everywhere there free land on the continent but without building a castle then with they cram some city with troop, turn them into castle when they have enough troop and conquer all there small league castle.
The game is still fun though but not has much when I started playing, I’ll try to post some strategies and tips I found around the web later this year.

Grepolis

(a Ikariam clone)
I barely play (about a day or two), so here what I discovered about this game.
You start on a Island and you build you village like other MMO RTS. You can build boat to attack other island and there a special “resources” that the gods flavors.
I honestly even played that much (about a day or two) you can always check other sites review for more info.  There some features that seem nice, favors of the god, building ships and having only your island to worry at the beginning, but since most other game have either these feature to or better graphic I tend to try other game first. Maybe you’ll see something about this game later …

Mythopolis

I stopped playing the alpha test, basically because the game was the same has TKO not that a bad game it’s just I don’t have time to play like 6 games at the same time…

Tribal war

I’m currently playing a turtle there, sometime I’m a week without playing.
This one is pretty old school they something have new features but not on my server.
I’ll check if I can post a list of tips I found on the wed later.

Three Kingdoms Online

Still playing this one, after getting squash when we merged.
I’ve posted a few articles on koram forum and I probably will post a few things about the merge.
You can check my article here.

That all for today folk I hope you doing well and happy gaming for 2011 🙂

Today I’ve decided to review a game that I recently started to play about a few months ago on server 11.

I founded the game via gamasutra article Interview: The Rise of Free-To-Play At EA

Lord of ultima is a mmorts like most of the game I’ve reviewed here, the basics of the game are like other game of the genre but some of the mechanics are somewhat different and that make the game much more enjoyable than most of the other.

Game Synopsis

Your Kingdom have been destroyed, open the vast ocean rise a new world to conquer and unite under your banner and be proclaimed the lord of Ultima. Your not alone to share this dream and other lord will try to take your land away from you.

Game Features

Managing your city

While the basis might be the same LoU innovate the way you can build your city.
Instead of having to build yours buildings in one predetermined place (like Tribal war) and instead of having a limit for the number of certain building or resources field (like travian) you can build anywhere in your city.  The only thing that limits how many buildings your city cans have is your town hall and higher your Town allH is more building you can build.

The Town hall is the center of your tech tree so to speak. Each time you level up your town hall you get access to new building.

Each city have resources node scattered around your city than can improve your resource production of surrounding building. And the way you place your building in your city influence other building too, like barrack will reduce recruitment speed of military building, or building cottage will increase resource output of resources building.

Being able to build more than one market makes the market management much easier and the trade interface is simply awesome compare to other games. You can ask other city to send you a type of resource to the city your currently in, so if your building in one city and you go “oh crap, I need more wood” you just go in the trade interface and sort which city have some wood to give away and some trade cart free and request the amount you need. I simply loved it.

Building your army

Lord of Ultima shine from other mmorts  with the management of the army has well.
At first It seems to be a mix of tribal war and travian, You have to build barrack to increase the number of unit you can recruit (like the farm in tribal war) and you have to have the food to keep those troop alive (like Travian and tko).
The of unit are different too, you have the traditional infantry, cavalry and siege weapon but they added new type of unit attack, divine and magic. You can even build ship and carry some troop to attack another city when they are on another continent.  
An interesting thing about military building and unit are that there a defense unit for almost each building. So you have a defensive siege weapon and a defensive ship.
In your city you can upgrade the wall to increase your unit defenses like in other game, but unlike other game you can build multiple tower and trap in some special tower slot. These tower boost the defense of a specific unit and city guard.
EA really tried to make the game enjoyable for both casual and hardcore players, in order to be taken a city must have a castle and to be able to capture plunder or raid other city you must have a castle. So If you just want to lay low and do your thing you should not build a castle and support big player instead.
There so much more to talk about the game, like you can plunder dungeon even if you don’t have a castle, or night protection or that its very easy to build a lot of cities. But all these features will go in another post.

Like and dislike

Like

Lord of ultima bring a lot of new feature and strategies that make it better than most mmorts.

Graphics
One thing that caught my attention is how well the graphic are that because there using the unity plugin, the graphic of the game surpass other game of the genre. I hope we will see more game using the plugin to bring browser game graphic to another level.

Town placement
Other feature I really liked in LoU is the way the town placement is done which is much more fun than other games. It a little hard to grasp at first.

Castle
I like the fact that you can decide when you ready to go to war, sure they can plunder you but you are sure that they won’t take your city.
Build queue of 6 building instead of 2 and more if you have a build minister
The build queue it’s much bigger than other game.

Night protection
Depending on the server time your attack power will be reduce.
The time of the protection will be from midnight to 8h00am server time.

Orb of peace
If you are willing to pays some diamond, they’re a really cool item that can prevents attack on you cities. How it work its that when you use it you have to wait a few days before it activate and when it’s activated you are protected from all attack.

Dislike:

Forum

At least they have an in game forum but the way it’s buillt it’s really clumsy and hard to get by compare to the Tribal War one.

Placement
Placement was hard to grasp at first: every building may affect other building, which make you swear when you realized it later

There are too many units : five type of unit  infantry, cavalry, magical, divine and siege. Add boat into this (they are like siege unit that evades trap) that somewhat hard to manage.

There only one race: Unlike travian or Three kingdoms online there no race everybody has the same unit which can be a good thing too since everybody is equal.

Many resources: there are five type of resource (wood, stone, iron, gold and six if you count mana) which is harder to manage than the typical four (3 fro Tribal War). But that not that much of an issue except you have to plan to have a building for each of them (or a city for each of them) and manage that you have enough of everything.

Too many cities
It’s too easy to have cities which make the game really time consuming when you get to more than fifteen cities. By the time you finish building stuff for all you cities the city you started with might be done and you have to circle through them all over again. Since some buildings are really fast to build and cheap (like the barrack) you have to circle through you city and build has many you can, the build manager can fix that if you use diamond but that can be annoying why not make building build instantly under one minutes like in clash of the kingdom, you can speed up you build if they’re less than five minutes to go.

Diamond
Like Three kingdom online or Travian,  those who are willing to put big buck in the game really have an edge over other player.
Extra resources, building and military manager, special item can be bough with diamond the equivalent of gold in Travian and Three kingdom online.

Overall Lord of ultima is a great game if you’re a MMORTS fan, it time consuming but worths trying.

There some nice update for the war minister and defense minister, some for alliance and ranking but the one I’m really happy it’s for the report, my support report are always lost in the sea of transport report so the filter will fix my problem 🙂

Here the link : http://www.lordofultima.com/en/forum/showthread.php?tid=48611

Koram should take some feature from lord of ultima to make TKO more fun, there made some really neat stuff that make the game less tedious.

I found a really interesting widget yesterday at http://erkie.github.com/

Basicly you add the button on their pages in your bookmark and when you’re on another site you just click on the bookmark and a “spaceship” will appear and you can destroy everything on the site.

Some news, I’m probably out for october, I’ll try to check and awnser the comment but don’t expect new blog post. Note that in november I’ll post about each kingdom of TKO and I have some article coming for Lord of ultima, I’ve been really enjoying this game lately.

Koram have gone crazy, there now a new item (the Earth Seal) the turn a 15 farm field city in a 18 farm field city.

You’ve read it, 18 farm field ! That mean all the field of your city will be for food.

So what a 18 farm field city look like ?

Let’s do some math here :

level 20 farm = 4500/hr

Let compare the 15f vs a 18f (only 3 farmland more):

Base food output
4500 x 15farms = 67500/hr (excluding bonus)
4500 x 18farms = 81000/hr (excluding bonus)

Mill Bonus
67500 x 25%mill bonus = 16875 (15f)
81000 x 25%mill bonus = 20250 (18f)

16875 + 67500 = 84375/hr (15flag city total output excluding oasis and politic)
20250 + 81000 = 101250/hr (18flag city total output excluding oasis and politic)

Oasis
with the 3 50% oasis = 150%
67500 x 150% = 101250 (15f)
81000 x 150% = 121500(18f)

101250 + 84375 =  185625 (w/o politic) (15f)
121500 + 101250 = 222750 food/hr (almost 40k more than the 15 flag city field)

Wow 222750 of standard food output…

If we keep the idea of a old post from the art of war, with some gold you can have some thing real nice
(original post here : http://forum.koramgame.com/viewthread.php?tid=6839&extra=)

With emperor’s order (treasure bowl or token of rain), Cao cao, metal alchemy scroll and the level 10 league resource bonus you can boost you food output even more.
– emperor order provide 25% food bonus.
– Cao cao could provide another 30% food bonus because of his max 150 politic (base = 100 + 30 pol bonus generalissimo + 20 pol history of han) 
– Cao cao have a skill that increase food output by 25%
– league level 10 provide 10% bonus food output
– Metal Alchemy scroll give 5%

So  25% + 30% + 25% + 10% + 5% = 95% food bonus
222750 /hr x 95% = 211612.5/hr
222750 + 211612.5= 434362/hr

Note : that I don’t know if heroes can stack skill book with mid skill, if they can Cao Cao could have a farm skill to increase the food output even more.

Almost 450k of food per hours, with that and let say you go in the red by -150k you have a army of 600k soldier

Official news here

Note : you need to have like 10 three star epic hero to win the Earth Seal, so that mean a lot of gold …

Edit : Like Bazzz pointed out the bonus mid skill don’t stack so I modified the gold section.

Edit : Fixed the math wiht Morenzuul comment that the % bonus are always applied to your base output

EA released a patch for Lord of Ultima.

Nothing big but some usefull feature, like seeing all your citirs ressources at the same time.

Check it out (click here 🙂 )

1- Everybody have the same unit, kingdom, ability.

Everybody have the same unit has you there is no kingdom, town or tribes that can fit your playing style, it’s all the same. It can be a plus though, making all the player perfectly equal.

Like all MMORTS, but since it’s easy to get to 20+ villages, when you get there you can put/waste a lot of time on this game.

3- Boring the first week (nothing much to do)

No quest system and not much stuff to do the first week, some plundering once BP end but that’s it.

4- Not notified when BP end

Maybe it’s just me but I wasn’t notified when my BP ended

5- No quest

No quest/ tutorial bonus which gave a chance to have troupe at the beginning.
There a tutorial but it’s really basic and don’t give much.

6- Low Graphic quality

Graphic are pretty static compare to other game, the game is older though so that probably why.

7- More hardcore than other game of the genre

There seem to have more hardcore player than other game and they are pretty aggressive, since the only way to grab a city is to take someone else city, hardcore player seem to have no tolerance for noob.

8- No chat

It’s a pretty common feature that most game have but tribal war doesn’t have it.

Update : It’s does have a chat but you have to access it from the main page, there seem to be no in game chat.

That’s all,I hope you liked my like and dislike of tribal war. Don’t be afraid to comment what you liked or hated about the game.

If you like the game or you were think about trying it you can join on of the new servers that open this tuesday.

More info on the Lord of Ultima forum

1- Tribes Forum

The main strength of this game compare to other game is it forum.
It’s interface is really smooth, it’s integrated with the game and it’s easy to add in game links like a player, a village coordinate or a tribe.
The tribe forum can be shared with other tribe, which make it easy to communicate with your ally and sisters tribes. A feature that other game don’t have.

2- Rim

I like the idea of a second chance and the unique RIM feature is really neat for that.
When new players arrive or when a player lose all is villages they are placed around that main cluster far from the main cluster where all the action is happening.

3- Moral

Moral is a great way to help newbies or poor soul that have fallen to the RIM.
It’s give them the extra defense that might make bigger player leave them alone.

4- Cheap premium account compare to other game

the premium account is about 6$ (4 Euros) for a month compare to the gold system of TKO and travian that pretty cheap.

5- Can build the same building in queue

That always annoys me when I can`t upgrade the same building twice.

6- Each server have slightly different setting

That make you enjoy the game differently when you restart. Try new unit in one or make you think twice about your upgrade in another.

Cool tools

7- Battle calculator

There a in game battle calculator, really nice to see if you will win you fight or to check your potential casualties.

8- Noble planer

A recent add-on that tell your tribes mate which city your are going to take, the noble claim have a expiration date which remove the claim once the date arrive.

9- TW stats

TW stats is a awesome tool. To planing your attack or checking if a alliance make sense or just to check if a player stop growing this site give you all the tools for that.

10 – Everybody is equal (almost)

The premium account give a edge but not that much compare to what it give in other games. Everybody have the same unit.
You can still be unlucky and start surrounded by a really strong tribes or warmongers.

Today I’ve decided to review a game that I played about a year ago on server 12 and 13 and started a new game on server 51.

Game description

Tribal war is a slow spaced strategy browser game, where you’re the leader of your village and your goal are to grow your village and build troop to attack and take control of other village.

Gameplay

Managing your city

First there is the ?"Sim city" part of this game that is typical to all these game.
You building have a pre-selected place were you can build them and upgrade them.

There no building placement like some other game of the genre have (tko, travain, Lord of ultima)
Another interesting thing is that there only 3 resources instead of 4, food is replaced with a farm which limits the number of troop you can build (like in warcraft or barrack in lord of ultima)

Building your army

All armies are the same for every player, you have the infantry and the mounted troop.
One really nice feature of the game is that depending on your server setting the type of you unit and upgrade you have changed, so be sure to check what your server is about before choosing one.

Unit description

Infantry
Spearman : good vs cavalry, good for harvesting barbarian village, cost more wood, weak attack
Swordman : good vs infantry, slow, small carry load
Axeman : offensive infantry unit, very low on defense
Archer : More balanced vs cavalry and infantry than the sword man and spear man
(available only on some server)
Cavalry Unit
Are more mobile than infantry unit but usually have a high cost vs stats ratio compare to infantry
Scout : Give you intel on your enemies when you attack with them
Light cavalry : offensive cavalry with low defense
Heavy cavalry: mobile defensive cavalry,
Mounter Archer: mobile offence cavalry, strong vs archer (available only on some server)

Paladin

In addition to your main army you can recruit a powerful paladin, the paladin can find item when attacking other village which can increase certain unit attack and defense when fighting the paladin.

Map

The map system is more efficient that some other game, it let you see who near you, and the right map give you a bigger picture of what around you.
By default the villages are colored by your alliance with them (your tribes/allies/enemies)
With the premium account you get a larger map and you can set specific colors to other players and tribes.

Expanding

While in other game you can either grab someone else city or build a new one in TW there only one way to expand,
It’s by grabbing other player or barbarian village with a nobleman.
When attacking with a nobleman, the enemy village slowly lose loyalty (around 20-30%  each attack) and when the loyalty hit 0 the village is your.
The village regains loyalty every hours.

End Game

The server closes to new players when the rim (see rim in the unique section) is filled.
After that any player whipped out is out of the server.
The server end when all other tribe is either removed, merged or whipped out.
The game seen to take awhile before we can see any kind of end game.
I dropped server 12 like 2 year ago and the server is still running.

What make tribal war unique

The RIM

One of the unique feature about TW is that the server start in the middle of the map and
when new players arrive they are placed around that main cluster.
This section around the main cluster is called the rim and
when a player lose all is village he gets a second chance by starting back on the rim which is far from the middle.

Moral

The moral system is a neat protection for new player or player with less point than other
It gets calculated from the points of attacker and defender. A player usually attacks with 100% morale, but if you attack a player that is much smaller than you, you will get a penalty. In an attack with 45% your troops only attack with 45% of they usual attack strength.
If a smaller player attacks a much bigger player, there is no bonus on the attack. The maximum morale is 100%.
It give small player a chance to survive or inflict more damage to biggers players making them think twice before attacking them (or send more nuke :P)

Forum

The main strength of this game compare to other game is it forum.
It’s interface is really smooth, it’s integrated with the game and it’s easy to add in game links like a player, a village coordinate or a tribe.
The tribe forum can be shared with other tribe, which make it easy to communicate with your ally and sisters tribes. A feature that other game don’t have.

The Community

The TW community is huge and there a lot of help site that can help you understand the game when you start.
They’re the tribal war forum where you can see what is going on with your world (http://forum.tribalwars.net/index.php) They’re the TW wiki where you can find a lot of useful information and tactic.
And one of my favorite it the tribal war stats site (http://www.twstats.com/) where you can find all sort of interesting information there. Like the point progression of a certain player, which tribe he was before, an attack planer to plan your attack from different to arrive at a specific time to enemy village. There a map tool to check the size of your new ally or to see which tribes should be scaring you.

That’s it for today
In my next post I’ll talk about what I hate and love about this game.
And some tips and strategy post are coming to.