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!

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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

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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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Science

* Raise book production by 0.1 per hour for all levels below Intensive
* Lower costs across the board, mainly at lower levels
* Raise science modifiers for underused categories: Food, Military and Channeling

Review:

Nice changes here. Everything fine.

Race

Human
* No mana penalty
* 6/3 elite at 5.25 NW and 800 gc

Elf
* 30% Magic Effectiveness (from DE)
* 50% wage discount (new)
* 6/5 elite at 5.5 NW and 750 gc
* Fog spell

Dwarf
* No stealth penalty
* -30% thievery effectiveness
* 7/4 elite at 6.75 NW and 1000 gc

Orc
* +40% science cost (from +25%)
* Normal wages (from -50%)
* 8/2 elite at 6.75 NW and 800 gc

Gnome
* +35% thievery effectiveness (from +50%)
* 5/4 elite at 4.5 NW and 250 gc

Dark Elf
* +30% Spell Strength (from Elves)
* 5/6 elite at 6.5 NW and 850 gc

Review:

Catastophic changes all the way. PLEASE look at the “the world”-entry in the utopia-menu to see which races are good and which are not. I had the feeling the races were pretty balanced the last two ages. Dwarf needs an upgrade. BUT GIVING elves fog will let you have 80% elves next age. Elf is strong anyways, he needs no super-boost. Just help those dwarves a bit, perhaps humans or orcs too and change the elites to be more offensive - thats enough change.

Buildings

* Armouries changed to give x2 draft discount (from 1.5)
* Towers changed to produce 12 runes (from 10)

* Homes improve birth rates by x4 (from x3)

Review:

Everything nice. Good changes. (More runes helps elves too, btw.)

Personalities

* Sage gets 0.5 books per acre per hour and -50% science losses

* Warrior - 15% Attack time

* War Hero gets +25% enemy casualties

Review: Why boosting sage even more? He’s the strongest in raw power anyways. Weakening Warrior and boosting War Hero is fine.

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