I’m saying it over and over again, age for age. So here’s the blogged version, so I can just link to it every age. T/Ms are usually pretty uneffective. To be effective, they must coordinate their spells and ops optimally. What No-nos and best practices are there, I’m trying to explain here.

General advice

Attacking vector - A province is best attacked in one and only one point. If you kill its pezzies (and income), you shouldn’t kill its buildings (as then jobs don’t get filled and BE lowers) and its troops (as these are needing the money you just cut). Same other way round: If you kill troops, you don’t need to kill anything else; same with buildings. Choose an attacking vector for all your T/M targets. Either make it troops (MS, NS), pezzies (kidnapping, fireballs, MS) or buildings (tornadoes, arson) and let every T/M and hybrid contribute the correct ops and spells to the target. Another option is foodkilling, if you see a province thats no shepherd and doesn’t have much food (tornadoes, arson for farms, steal granaries, droughts and the foodrotting spell). DON’T USE MORE T/M-TARGETS THAN YOU HAVE FULL T/Ms! (If you don’t concentrate well, T/M ops and spells are easily ignored by a good player).

Antagonistic spells: Just to make this clear again … if you use NS and fireballs on one province, you effectively cancel yourself out. Fireballs –> lesser income , fewer troops –> fewer income needed. Therefore either use pezziekilling OR troopkilling, but not both.

General spells / ops: Mehul didn’t create all spells and ops equal when he built the game. Therefore, some spells and ops should be used no-matter-what. Meteor-shower is the singlemost reason T/Ms exist in the first place. It deals massive damage and should generally be spread onto all enemy attackers before any targeted action takes place. Yes, 20 Meteor Showers are worth much more than a pezzie-less province. Its the only exeption where you can use troopkilling and pezziekilling together with, as it kills massive number of both. After MS, all main targets should get Greed, Incite Riots (if they’re not immune) and storms (only foodkilling should use droughts). Attacker targets must get pitfalls.

Building-killing: If enough buildings are destroyed, the pezzies produce no more money due to missing jobs, and of course the buildin-bonusses are gone.

Attacker support - As long as attacker have not much to do (pre-war and in the first few hours of war where gains are small), attackers can support T/Ms. Buidingskilling can be supported using razes and peziiekilling with massacres. Troops-killing should not be supported till the province is down in military power, and then just take the acres.

Just to make one thing clear: Attackers shouldn’t help T/Ms often. The best attacker-option is the tradmarch always. It kills land, buildings, troops, takes away living space for pezzies and gives your attackers some more land to play with. If you combine enough marches on one province (like 6 in 6 hours), you have the equivalent of a full tornado-, pezzie- and troopkilling-spree from T/Ms added to the land loss and the land gain.

Supporting the attackers: The main attacker targets should have MS of course and should be supplied with pitfalls, which in this case is a stronger version of nightstrike.

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Jolt asked for game changes, this is what I think needs to be done:

(I also posted this to their forums, but its buried in a long thread of “make undeads better”-style posts of course, so I also post it here)

First said, the game mechanics are okay. No need to change this, this is nothing the people run away from. They always brag about this and that should be changed, but the most important factor is the bad interface.

1. Most of our kd left because of the bad usability of the website. That said, improve it. As I’m acually a software-developer implementing a lot of GUIs, I’ll stick you to some easily changeable points:

2. Make the “news” link show kd-news first.

3. Let the throne page show ALL news from the last time province news were checked. Most of the time I wouldn’t even recognize that I have been attacked if I wouldn’t check back with about 3 mouse clicks. If you need more mouse clicks than in the old game, people won’t stop running away from the game.

4. Put Wizards back in the mystics page; put the explore-stuff in the Grow-page; put the Aid-stuff on the players own Kd-page; put “Game Lobby” and “WoL”-links the the top nav bar and make bigger buttons for the rest of the links, so I have a distant chance to hit them on my mobile phone. Put the “Gift Credits”-stuff under “Preferences” make the “Rankings”-links single links on the “Preferences”, the “Throne” or the “Politics”-page. So your menu is filled with fewer thrashy links that are rarely clicked, which would help the interface and allow you to make these important links bigger.

5. Hide the “guild descriptions” (that is the text everone began to read one time, but no one ever has finished reading) and make them extendable with a “description”-button.

6. Put “Self Spells” and “Offensive Spells” in the same dropdownlist. Yes the old page was better, sorry. If you had lightning speed loading times or would use AJAX-refreshes only for the list, everything would be fine, but you’re not.

7. Make the forums show the LAST PAGE of a thread first. Clicking through each time for each thread makes me shiver.

8. Make provinces only update once a day or when they are touched (that means targeted by something) so you can stop updating them all every hours, what makes those horrible tick times. Those (and the overall speed of the page) are terrible and surely only got better as so many player just left the game from frustration.

If you manage to do all this, the game would actually have improved. Then I’d go on playing, otherwise I don’t know how much bad design I can endure.

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Utopiapimp is a website where you can share Utopia intel like CBs, SoMs, SoS and such with the rest of your Utopia kingdom. The intel is also sorted and put up in a good overview, so you always see which targets could be good for you, especially when you’re at war.

To use Utopiapimp, go to http://www.utopiapimp.com and press the “Register for Utopiapimp”-link in the upper left. You’ll need to pick a usename, a password and an E-Mail-Adress of yours. After logging in, you need a Pimpcode that you get from the forums of your kingdom or from your monarch. Pimp needs this code to know in which kingdom you are. When you login, be sure to pick the correct server (usually World of Legends if you got the link to this site from someone called Akku in the game).

After you have logged in, you’ll see a whole lot of a complicated site! Don’t be afraid - its all fine! The main menu looks like this:

Play around a bit with this menu. Ich you click on your self-kd and then general, you’ll see all the provinces of your kingdom and which intel they loaded up. Same with the other kds and the KD-less provs. If you want to attack a province, choose the Attack link because the data is then set up to show all the relevant data. Same with Thief … all data here is made up to show you the resources and the tpa / wpa and stuff.

If you want to enter data into pimp, you can just copy the page in your browser where the data is shown and paste the whole thing in the white form in pimp. Click on “Add this data” and you’ll see that it gets included in the datasets. You can enter CBs, SoS, SoMs, your science page, your military advisor, your throne page, the paper, kd-pages (careful: those then get set up as a kd in pimp, only enter kd-pages that you think are good war targets or that are already lined up in the menu), attacks you made, ops or spells you cast (then you should only copy the op or attack text, not the complete page) …. and more. Just use it and you’ll love it.

Remember: the data is always the latest version that was copied and not always correct anymore! If you want to attack a target, always get a fresh CB! If you want your Angel to automatically post all intel you get to pimp, use this guide.

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Utopia Angel is a program you can download from http://www.utopiatemple.com/angel.php … If you really want to play Utopia, you’ll definitely need it as its superior to the online tools on Utopiatemple. You’ll see the system requirements on that page: you’ll need Windows and just execute the .exe-file. Grant it all accesses it needs for connecting to the internet, its not a harmful program.

What do I need it for? First: it will save you A LOT OF TIME! So read this small explanation and you’ll be happy ever after. After you installed it, Angel will monitor you clipboard - that is where the stuff you copy on Windows goes. After installing it, go to your Utopia-throne-page, click in the frame where your CB data is, so its focused by the browser. Use “Ctrl+A” to mark the whole page and then “Ctrl+C” to copy the marked page to the clipboard. Angel pops up a window with calculated stuff about your province, like defense per acre (dpa) and such. When doing it the first time, Angel also asks on which server you play … this will be WoL usually if you got this link from me (I’m always called Sir Akku in the game). You can do this “Ctrl+A Ctrl+C” on a whole lotta other pages too.

But the best thing is when you first use this on your throne page, then use it on a CB you took from someone you want to attack. A Military Calculator pops up, where you can see all your numbers and those of your enemy, and where you can exactly see if you would win or loose an attack. No more hoping when you hit the attack-button! Try to always send so many troops, that you’re oversending 7%, then your attacks should be safe. Angel also shows a successful atack if you only oversend 4%, but I found out that this not always does it.

If the military calculator is open and you also copy a SoM (Spy on Military) of the enemy province, his armies that are out are also exacly calculated into the calculator. Angel only has problems sometimes when different generals did different attacks, in that case sometimes you need to adjust values yourself (if you see Angel didn’t change anything after copying the SoM, you can just enter the numbers yourself).

Just try it. Here you can see how Angel needs to be configured to update utopiapimp

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