Hey people … I just quit Utopia. That developers message about scripters and cheaters destroying Utopia was just the last drop.

I mean they told us, that their game would have a better interface and would be faster than the old stuff. But of course its a lot slower than the original one - they really thought PHP would make a difference, but after all its the programming skills that matter, not the language. And they completely did not understand the touch principle. Trying to update every province every hour and everytime something happens takes lot of server times. And if you look into your browser bar and see the request being accepted by the server and the server calculating for about 5 seconds, before the response is generated - think of bad programming.

Well. Inform me if the game gets upgraded some day. If someone want to blog here, write an email at akku(at-sign)utopia-blog.com … Farewell!

How to calc an ambush in brief:

Get an accurate SoM (use 100+ thieves). Use Angels military calculator. Set your own ME to 100% and the defending ME to 80%. Enter their soldiers one the targets soldiers. Look at their elite’s defensive value, multiply it with the number of elites the target has left home and add that to its soldiers. Set their elite number to 0. Look at their offspecs attack value, multiply that with the number of offspecs used in the attack and add that to their soldiers. Set their defspec number to 0. Set your generals to ONE. Oversend by at least 7%.

Example: You hit a human, who has 4-offspec and 6 defspec and a 8/3 elite. He used 500 offspecs, 100 soldiers and 5k elites in his attack. 5000*3 = 15000 + 100 + 500*4 = 17100. You put your generals to 1, your ME to 100%, their ME to 80% and enter 17100 soldiers and no defspecs and elites. If you’re oversending by at least 7%, you SHOULD be successful IF the SoM was correct. Therefore, better oversend a bit more OR have an exact SoM.

Note: People say that you can better calculate the stuff that was actually sent by taking two SoMs. I don’t believe this. Here’s the explanation from the Utopia-Wiki: http://wiki.utopia-game.com/index.php/Guide:Ambush

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.

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.