I’ve been very busy recently, but I got something funny for you. I’ve made a quick tutorial with the comic of Peng Guo about dodging, hope you like it.

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.

I’ve been trying Lord of Ultima recently and to be honest I’m impress to the level of details and polishes the game have compare to the other title I’ve played.

The game removed some annoyance the other game of the genre have, like your default building queue can actually hold 6 items instead of 2 and you can move around the other of the 5 item waiting in the queue. This feature remove a bit of the time sucking ability of these kind of game usually have.

You can build city guard with no impact your number of soldiers you can have, though they an only stay in your city they give defensive player and more casual player little more option to be competitive.

Each building and terrain complement each other, making you go “Sh*t ! why did I put my sawmill there” and give you a real sense that your building your city.

There are too much resource though, there the classic wood/stone/iron/food from travian (TKO and tirbal war too) and there gold and mana. I never got the understand how to use mana though so for now it’s always full and with gold I can currently only buy mage…

On the minus side there are so much stuff to do and to track that I just don’t know what to build sometime. Like right now I have to much iron and I bought to many ranger so I have to level up my barrack and training ground to be able to recruit guardian instead.

So far, that what I’ve noticed. I haven’t try to plunder or attack something yet. More comment and tips on the game to come.

Feel free to leave some comment about the game.

"In battles, as verbal communication cannot be heard clearly, cymbals and drums are used as commands" As visual communication and eye contact are hampered, banners and flags are used as signals. Now the purpose of using cymbals, drums, flags and banners is to draw attention of the troops and focus them for combat under the direction of the commander. Once the troops are united as one body, the courageous ones will not advance forward by themselves and the cowardly ones will not retreat by themselves. This is the art of directing larges forces in battles. – Chapter Seven, Sun Tzu Art of War

In war good, communication with your troops, allies and even enemies his the key.

In most games MMO browser-based strategy game (like Three kingdom online, tribal war and travian) they have these feature built in.

If your a veteran player you can probably skips that part for other the advantage and disadvantage of each method will be explained.

In game feature

In game message

All these game have in game message, the quickest way to got a player whatever he his online or the next time he login.

It help you to find out if the user is still active, if he doesn’t answer after a few days or week you can presume he’s out.

The main advantage of this is that it’s quick and you’re almost sure the other player will read it next time he play.

The disadvantage is that entrusted player may read your message.

League message

Same thing has above but use by leadership and elite members of a league or tribes to send a message to the mass.

While it’s great to reach all your members, if there a spy in your league he might be able to read it and like normal message entrusted member can read it to.

Chat

Some of these game have in game chat, it’s great to talk directly to your peer, but you must be aware of the issues each room have.

From TKO chat here are the different room and how to use them.

World

Everybody on the server see it, so don’t tell sensitive info or information about what time it is or if it’s day or night, because other player might use this to attack you when your asleep or working.

League

Like the league message all your league member see this, beware of spy.

Private

Standard – One on one chat, note that you might be speaking to an entrust not the real player.

Internal forum

They work differently depending on the game, but like the league message, all league member see it (accept officer sub-forum). That some of them (like tribal war tribe forum) someone with an entrust can see it.

External to the game communication that might be useful.

External forum

The external forum solves most of the issues player with an entrust, only the player who registered can access it.

It can be useful to coordinate with ally too, an ally can have is own section of a forum and each tribes/leagues can share a section forum.

The main disadvantage is that you lose most of the feature of the in game forum, like writing the coordinate wills create a link directly to the in game location, this don’t work with an external forum.

IRC

You can always set up a IRC channel for you league. The advantage is that user can access it even if they’re not logged to the game and you can have control over who can be in the channel with a bot.

IM

Instant massaging can be useful specially the conference or group chat, you can talk to your buddy evens if they are not online (which can be annoying too if they are always poking you when the see you online).

Collaboration systems

like google wave, wiziq

I honestly haven’t planned anything with google wave but I did with wiziq and it really cool, you can have a draw  board and put the map on it and plan the attack and have a visual representation of the situation. It takes some effort to setup though but it might worth it.

Does any of you have use other method of communication to plan an attack or to plot something with your allies ?