Today is the day that Three kingdoms online is no more.

Three kingdom online was a little brother to me.I loved to play with you until he grows up a become a teen and started to get greedy.

Most people run away from him when this happen but I didn’t, I’ve just told him it’s not going to happen but we can still play together.

There a lot of good games that came after TKO, some even came after and closed before TKO (I’m looking at you Lord of Ultima)

If you have any games in the MMORTS genre that you want to suggest or anything related Romance of the Three kingdoms feel free to do so. I read every mail (jack at onlinesgamestips.com) and I might decide to write a piece on your game.

Check my initial reaction post to TKO closure or my 4 parts series on how I’ve build a bot to reduce my play time.

I’ve received a mail in my spam today with a grin news. Lord of Ultima will be no more, the stop receiving payment for in-game items, block all new account and will close the game on may 12th 2014.

It a shame considering it was a well polished game compare to some of the crap some other studio come out with.

Knowing EA tough it’s not that surprising, they have been know to kill there social game. They’re not the only one to do that, Zynga is notorious for doing that too.

That bring an interesting though, when you think about it Tribal war and Travian are way less polished and made by smaller developer but still running strong.

It seems smaller publisher continues to release new servers even if there are a bit less people playing just to satisfy their community, while bigger company tends to sunset their games in favor of new one instead. (the announcement came with a free package for a Commander & conquer browser game). Probably fearing the existing user base of the old game mights cannibalize the new one.

You can read more about Lord of Ultima being retired on the main site.

With the help of some post our friend wrote at http://www.lordofultimastrategies.com, we are doing a quick guide on Lord of ultima.

I’m just going to outline the basic, everything you need to know is at http://www.lordofultimastrategies.com.

First step: choosing the location of the city (Full article)

If you just started you can go to the next point, if you are building your next city here what you need to know.

The natural resources available to your city all depend on where you place your city. There are four different map elements that effect each square where you can place a city.

You can check what extra resources will be available by preplacing your city. Check the full how to in the article : Choosing a Location for Your City

Second Step: Building placement (Full article)

Unlike other Travian, TKO or Tribal War, where you place your building is very important in Lord of Ultima.

Natural resource influence the output of your resource producing building and you can add cottage and efficiency building to even increase the output more (example: forest increase the output of the Woodcutter building and the sawmill increase the output has well)

Cottage increase the construction speed of the city, a bit like the builder guild of Travian, Three Kingdom Online. Cottage also increase the output of your city.

If you want to optimize your economy building you need to be touching as many natural resources as possible and connected to the appropriate efficiency building too. The economy building should also touch a cottage also. This sounds simple, but it can get really complex to create the perfect resources output. On way of having to best layout is to use city planners so you can review the placement of these buildings before you commit building them.  One of my favorite is http://louopt.com/ if you are using another one feel free to tell me in the comment below.

The same apply for military building, you can checkout this article that cover everything you need to know about building placement

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.

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 🙂 )

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

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.

I started to play Lord of Ultima.

If you want to check how it work here a quick video from playscope that explain the basic pretty well.

My first impression is that the game have a nice finish that other similar game don’t have, and the concept of having to place you build in other to optimize there production is nice.