The Shrine

Got this e-mail today.

Hi there

As a current or former player of Utopia, we just wanted to let you
know that a brand new Utopia game has been launched. Utopia Kingdoms
is a game set within the Utopia universe, with a much more graphical
style than ever before. The original Utopia has been around for almost
a decade so we thought it was about time for a completely new game
(some might even call it a sequel!).

If you're interested, you should take a look at
www.utopiakingdoms.com

Frankly, we're pretty sure some of you will hate it. It's much more
graphical than the current version of Utopia. But we also think that
many of you will like it...because it's much more graphical than the
current version of Utopia

In any case, create an account and go and see for yourself.

www.utopiakingdoms.com

See you there

The Kingdoms team

I created an account..no idea what Im doing, but Ill figure it out.

Same lol, I'm just doing whatever the advisor tells me to do.

I pretty much get it now. It plays a lot like Ikariam. I never played the old Utopia, so no idea if this is similar.

So far, it looks totally different. Utopia is far simpler in terms of presentation.

Join clan tOWS

I created an account too... VERY different. The cartoon animations are a bit... odd looking, but it's definitely a step up

Seems a lot like that last game we played, I forget the name of it, but my clan dominated the server =P

Hopefully this game is less oppressive than Utopia; and I am not talking the game administration, but rather the game mechanics players who run the thing by maximizing strategy and forcing everyone to fail as a result!

Oh darn, I already joined a clan =o

Join us when your time has elapsed, it's what? 5 days?

I am going by my ancient Utopia name, as usual:

Logoth

Essentially what we do is form a council, and then start bringing people into this thing.

I sent in my "application"

The advisor is actually useful... and he gives little quests too to both help you along and give you a reward

one thing I just noticed-- don't put more than 2 things in queue... it'll let you put up to 3 but the 3rd one costs more

Im seraphina..big surprise.

Joined.

I'm in, kingdom name is Leiataua.

Wtf, I didn't actually expect you all to join rofl.

Hush Eric! You know us better than that!

Alright, now we're 5. We should discuss ranks today =)

Perhaps making us all admins, and then we can expand from there or remain an exclusive club?

First course of action, Eric needs to disband from his current clan and join us or risk getting trampled.

EDIT: What the fuck's up with the upper-left quadrant? It looks like some fuckers have been cheating, or the developer was short sighted, and decided to expand the area after it was too late.

Natural Born Seeker wrote:Alright, now we're 5. We should discuss ranks today =)

Perhaps making us all admins, and then we can expand from there or remain an exclusive club?

Make all the original crew admins (or whatever the highest rank is), fill out the clan info and such, then if we're all good to go we can try recruiting

Alright, we're all Shrine Imperial Council.... Which implies we are an Empire =P

Make us Grand Emperors! We can start recruiting people around our areas. Whoever doesn't join us will by crushed by our armies.

EDIT: You created forum topics similar to ours? Come on! Also, giving a Shrine Member "Give Ranks" access is a security risk, because they can just give themselves the highest rank.

EDIT EDIT: I'm updating the clan page, etc. We should start posting our stuff on the clan forum, so that it's not so public.


WTF? How do you attempt to recruit people? Still haven't figured it out, but I'm sending messages to nearby castles:

Template wrote:Hail, quadrant neighbor! Our clan, tOWS, is looking for nearby allies to join our cause.

Would you like to join? The relationship would be advantageous for both nearby protection and the ability to strike out at our enemies.

I would suggest something similar.

We're discussing a banner now. I suggest something of traditional Shrine Colours. Anyone want to take a swing at it?

Our clan is ranked #8! lol I dont know what that means, but woohoo!

Seek, it looks like the crest is created using a generator, from what I can ttell looking at other clans' crests. We dont have access to it.

There are preset Crests, an they cost "10 stars". None of the crests are very good.

Well I can play around with it and make something. Is there a size limit, etc?

kingdom name: Disolve

Anarky wrote:kingdom name: Disolve

Welcome man! Just added you and gave you Shriner ranking, now catch up!

There are a few shields, wreaths, and weapons we can use. Otherwise we have to pay.

Tessian wrote:

Anarky wrote:kingdom name: Disolve

Welcome man! Just added you and gave you Shriner ranking, now catch up!

Any good tips to catching up?

Keep clicking that Old Man up at the top, your advisor. He will have little quests for you that offer rewards. In addition, don't spend coins on ANYTHING except the resource bonus that you can get on the side; myself, and a few others wasted coin before we figured that out... Actually, a little bug lost me 300 coins when I should have only lost 50 (screen refreshed a few times when I had been skipping back and forth between pages, and spent 50 coins 5 additional times on getting 10% additional population (I was trying to figure out how to get to my castle screen again).

Check out the Clan forum, there's a decent amount of research already posted there.

MILITARY STRUCTURE

For implementation within a month.

In my experience a military structure adds a lot to the effectiveness of an Empire in this game. In Utopia, and even more so in Tribal Wars this has proven true. In Tribal Wars we built ourselves off of challenging and defeating seemingly much larger and more powerful Empires until we were the dominant force on the server.

Although others had a similar structure, they did it wrong. The function should be strictly as an organization tool, not as separate cells with comradree and such as this can breed potential problems and can actually have the opposite effect on efficiency.

A report structure is necessary. IE everyone must report their status (military units available for offense) to a commander no less frequently than once a week, and more frequently depending on the severity of our current political situation. 7 days without an update warrants a warning from the commander. 10 days is a second warning. 12 days they are reported to the Council and we investigate. During War, the Council elects a General to control things; during peace we just need someone to handle the commanders. We should aim to make this structure effective and limiting in terms of egos; also not very time consuming for anyone unless the need is there.

Sounds good. I was trying to get some more coordinated rules in place, but some people seem to object to coordinated attacks. Put it on the clan forum.

Also, I found this code on the front page:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://i.khanwars.com/js-utgate/prototype.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://i.khanwars.com/js-utgate/scripta ... "></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://i.khanwars.com/js-utgate/lightbox.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://i.khanwars.com/js-utgate/misc.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://i.khanwars.com/js-utgate/boxover.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://i.khanwars.com/js-utgate/feedback.js"></script>

Quaint little game. It has some flaws, but what can ya do.

My kingdom place needs some food. Damn gluttons. Anyone have an extra tuna casserole they can spare?

Does anybody still play the original Utopia? They have a new age (might be shorter than usual) starting up later today. I used to be all big into this game - I was a regent of a powerful kingdom - but I haven't played it in years. I'm considering giving the next age a shot. UK is pretty cool but it doesn't beat the original.

When you get level 3 I've found the divine ritual is very much worth it. The first day I was able to use it (max 3 times) I got a resource bonus akin to the 45 coin one for a mere 10 coins. Yesterday when I used up my three rituals I got 740 iron or so. Today I got a ton of wood and iron. The other rolls were mostly bullshit (5 coin reward, so pretty much losing 5 coins, have been very common so far). Still, I definitely find it worth it for the resources I've been getting.

Also: Who demoted me to knight??

Shrinweck wrote:Also: Who demoted me to knight??

Sorry, I was re-arranging the ranks today, and put up some rank rules. If you want to be a part of the Council, just ask, and I'll promote you. It's just that you never posted on the clan forum. (What's your clan name, btw?)

For most of my Utopia career I was a member of Absalom or related Alliances. The original Utopia requires too much co-ordination (multiple times a day) for me to really have fun anymore with it. I still play the original, but in such a small capacity that I am often cleared out of Kingdoms at some point =P

I haven't played the original game seriously in almost a year.

SineSwiper wrote:

Shrinweck wrote:Also: Who demoted me to knight??

Sorry, I was re-arranging the ranks today, and put up some rank rules. If you want to be a part of the Council, just ask, and I'll promote you. It's just that you never posted on the clan forum. (What's your clan name, btw?)

Ah figured it was some joke that I wasn't aware of :P

I'm in as Leiataua

I just haven't seen a need to post a topic or add to anything yet, really.

So yeah, a week into this game and it's quite obvious it has some issues.

Nothing is really balanced, it's like they just threw a bunch of numbers out there for every unit/resource and added a multiplier to it per level. A far cry from Utopia where the numbers are somewhat balanced against every race/personality combination.

Resource flow is downright atrocious, I don't think this needs much explanation, but I'm at the point where I login once every 12 hours to build a building or two and log back out, if you're not a VIP you have no building queue, which is just bad design.

VIP program is overpowered/required, to access core features that helps you actually progress and be on an even playing ground with everyone else, you have to be a VIP, not only that you need PAY ACTUAL MONEY FOR THIS FEATURE. Utopia Classic never made you pay cash money to compete with others, this is very stupid.

Bottomfeeding is king and the combat system is retarded, again this needs little to no explanation for those of you that have experienced combat. If you attack somebody, and win, you wipe out their entire army, and wiping out armies isn't limited to smaller provinces, this means 3 months into the game when somebody comes through and wipes out your army of 20,000 archers(random number/unit), you need to rebuild them, which is completely and utterly unreasonable. You will never recover from that kind of attack. My current clan mates have offered the idea of sending your army out on patrol regularly in order to protect them, since losing resources > losing your army. Why in the fuck do I NEED TO PROTECT MY ARMY FROM BEING WIPED OUT WHEN MY KINGDOM IS ATTACKED.

Needless to say I hope they take a good hard look at this game, because it has potential, but it's current form is extremely flawed. They need to make it more like Utopia Classic in terms of balance/flow and less like whatever game they blatantly and obviously copied.

agreed.

Yeah I expected this game to be somewhat balanced... but this is more obviously a 2nd beta than anything else. Attacking is too risky and costly, walls are invulnerable structures that will attack you every time you go to a castle, and the whole VIP thing is dumb too. They did mention they'll be giving everyone coins on a monthly basis but didn't say how much.

I'm losing the desire to play more and more each day... the system's too crippled right now to really play through it. Resources are unbalanced, units are more unbalanced (out of about 20 units only 4 are worth ever getting?), they pretty much force you to pillage other cities but this can only be done against inactives you managed to play enough to get out of protection but not enough to put up a defense... stupid stuff. Tribal Wars was much better than this.

I do love the quests though, those were excellent and a fantastic way to get new players into the game and learning how to play.

I basically lost all desire to play when I saw how much war mages cost (1750 resources per). With at least 20 needed to start safely farming walled level 3ish inactives, it'll be days before I can farm.

You can demote me from my current rank, I just can't see myself playing this seriously for now, but I'll log in once and a while to try shit out.

I'll continue playing, but it seems like everybody is thinking the same thing. Armies are just too fucking expensive, and resources are too shallow.

I can't do anything until I get some good war mages, and do you know what else? In order to use wizards, you need an army of at least 500 population. Light Cavalry equals 4 pop and War Mages are 5, but the rest of the archers and infantry are 1 pop. So you would need something like 200 SBM, 100 Pikemen, 25 LC, and 20 WMs. I guess that isn't so bad, but it's yet another useless limitation.

Making an army takes fucking forever, too. It would take 75 hours to make the above, and that's only if you have the 72K in resources.

Infantry sucks.... don't waste your resources on them. Build up some light cavalry as they make great scavengers, and a lot of the resource pillaging in this broken, silly game is from scavenging the leftovers from an attack made by a clan mate or any random player rather than having to bust walls and do the dirty work yourself. They also wipe out shortbowman pretty easily in kingdoms from levels 2 to 4ish who haven't yet put up a wall and have idled for a number of hours so that their resources have built up a bit. Between this and a strong economy (and calculated use of the marketplace), income is steady enough in this game where it doesn't become an absolute snail's pace. I'm cruising at more of a turtle's pace.

kali o. wrote:I basically lost all desire to play when I saw how much war mages cost (1750 resources per). With at least 20 needed to start safely farming walled level 3ish inactives, it'll be days before I can farm.

They have come down already from what was in the help file. (It's only 1575.) Also, the attack upgrades help a LOT, and it is cheap to get to level 5. It brings your attack to buildings from 180 to 450. So, you can take down a lv3 wall with only 6-7 of these things.

Hello. I will make this as brief as possible.
As you may well know already, War is on the horizon. In order to protect ourselves and some specific other clans, TrueAlliance has entered into a formal Alliance with other smaller clans and as well as the clan Brotherhood.

We would like to invite you to this Alliance. Requirements are simple. You fight who we fight, defend against anyone who attacks us.

Please let me know if you accept. I wait for your humble response.

-regards.

I am unsure if anyone else got this. If you did, just ignore it. Build defenses up and don't worry about clan squabbles over things that can gain us nothing. Maybe in a month and a half we'll talk about this sort of stuff.

Good, I want to target the scrub guilds like Marijuana, DARQ, and League of Pants. Fucking annoying spammers need to be put in their place.

Bleah. Would I be any use to you guys if I joined up now? You can basically just tell me what to do. I just want to support the Otherworld war effort.