Changes:

* Elves get +30% Spell Strength (from 25%)
* Gnomes get +50% Thievery Effectiveness (from 40%)
* Dark Elves get a 5/6 Elite (from 4/6)
* Orcs have their science effectiveness penalty replaced by a +25% Science Cost penalty

* Sages get 60% protection from learn attacks (from 50%)
* Warriors get 20% lower attack time (from 15%)
* Artisans get limited 25% building effectiveness bonuses (from 15%)

The last age

The NW-values of the elites last age were:

Peasants = 1
Soldiers = 1.5
Money = 0.001
Thieves = Wizards = 4
War Horses = 0.6
Land (full) = 55
Unbuilt Land = 40
sci = sci/100

Defspecs(/5) 5NW
Human Defspecs(/6) 6NW

Offspecs(5/) 4NW
DE Offspecs(6/) 4.8NW

Dw(6/6) 7NW

Hu(6/4) 5.5NW

Elf(6/5) 5.75NW

Orc(8/2) 6.75NW

DE(4/6) 6.5NW

GN(5/5) 5.25NW

Last age, our kd again decided for the sheer power of the dark elf in a full hybrid kd-strat.  Most went DE/mystic A/T/M or A/M, some DE/sage or DE/thief (A/T) and some others were Elven TMs. A full hybrid strategy made the following things possible: 3tpa and 3wpa throughout the kd, making it hard for enemies to get CBs, SoMs and any other spells and ops through; destroying weakly thievery-defended provinces with ops from the whole kd; having meteors and riots on every enemy 24/7; attacking with nearly all provinces for land.

The dark elf sages grew unbelievable high amounts of science last age - mostly on behalf of the sages auto-sci-ability.

Orc and human were the attacker types.

General impression

The Age Of Awakening is here. Looking at the last ages elite values above, the DE’s elite NW will be raised to 5.75, which would be more of a problem for dark elves than an advantage, as it stays a defensive elite. DE’s would be turtles now too, as they can use their elite for attacking a bit more, but their overall NW would rise a bit. They’re still the number one A/T/M and A/M race in my eyes, as the no-runes-needed trait makes them the perfect meteorslinger. DE / mystic as A/M, DE / sage or rouge as A/T.

Looking for strong A/Ts, I unexpectedly see the orc/sage as new contender. The science cost of the orc doesn’t bother the sage, and the orcs science penalty is gone. Still the orc has +30% gains, -50% wages and draft costs (which will make it possible to get science in peace times not harder than other races with +25% science costs) and it still spreads the plague, which is a kd-strategy factor for chaining plagued targets down. Very high science rates (that also cannot be stolen easily due to the sage bonus) means, that we have a very effective attacker here, that can also afford some thieves. Combined with the thievery-science, it should make a very good A/T. Only 50% bonusses from honor is the only real disadvantage.

Human / sage is the other possibility for having a fine A/T. Works like the orc sage above, but doesn’t deal that much damage as the 30% gains and the plague misses. As the orc/sage, the human/sage would also be a good pure attacker. As pure attacker, they both would need a completely attacker-based kd and a good coordination of attacks to be working, and as full attacker they would need to deliver a double hit each time to make them pickable.

Advice

As there will be many hybrid-kingdoms this age (same as last one), you wouldn’t want to be vulnerable against mages and thiefs, as the hybrids tend to win all longer wars as pure attackers loose the grip and get opped to death with time. As said above, pure attackers would need a completely attacker-based kd (so the enemy ops don’t get concentrated on the single full attacker - who get killed by that helplessly) and a good coordination of attacks to be working, and as full attacker they would need to deliver a double hit each time to make them pickable. We at least don’t have such a coordination. So no pure attacker can be picked if you want to have at least some fun in the game.

The best defense against ops is to be A/T/M yourself. Pick a focus (DE/mystic will be the A/M-type and sages will be the A/T-type), and try to be good at attacking AND spells / ops. If everyone did that, a strong hybrid kd would be the outcome.

Picking T/M is (again) for the weaker players. They’re the best defended in all areas, but they just don’t deal enough damage and don’t really help winning wars as they don’t attack. Their only real purpose is getting spells and ops on enemy T/Ms - which is unnecessary as those aren’t dealing enough damage themselves.

What others think in the forums

Here I got two other opinions.

VT2 from utopiatemples forums writes:

Warrior is fine.

Sage is fine now, despite what everyone says. Anyone silly enough to pick orc, and pretending the lowered ambush-effectiveness of warrior will protect their hordes of elites deserves to be taught a lesson. It’s a nice price.

Mystic is useful to save time, but that’s it. Give it something cool sometime in the future.

Warhero is - for the first time ever - fine.

Artisan is a niché thing for gnomes. Change that, please.

Merchant is fine, but boring.

Rogue is, and has been, fine for several years, but greater arson still does too low damage to be useful for real.

Shepherd remains a comfy personality, but doesn’t really add anything of major value. It’s just a nice thing.

-

Dark elf getting 5/6 won’t change a thing, since it’s still a defensive elite, and it’s going to remain at home. Keep the networth-tag the same, or it’s going to become another beginner’s trap.

Orc is good as it is, really. I don’t see anything majorly wrong with it, or majorly weak. The changed penalty to science won’t make a big difference.

Elf is still not going to make a good offensive caster, because spells eat up runes, and it still won’t make a badass mofo, because it has no economy. Warrior and quick feet can’t be abused unless you skip A LOT of sleep - which I did early this age, but it wasn’t really worth it at my level. Let anyone who wants to use it use it.

Dwarf still has fog, and it’s a problem that dwarf has fog, because it already has everything else that makes a race badassly solid at war. I really don’t like the focus of power, and it should be moved to someone softer. Who’s softer? Well, anyone, really - but preferably a race with wizards that aren’t really awesome.

Human remains solid, but aren’t really awesome. I’m gonna play one next age, because I want a comfy age, where I don’t have to worry about getting massive aid when hit mildly hard. Human’s like shepherd - comfy.

Gnomes suck hard, and it’s the elite’s fault. It’s a beginner’s trap, and we’ve had to kill off so many stubborn idiots who refused to go anything but all-elite, or to even learn when they got raped while sending out their armies. It needs to drop in power, and in networth, so it can be used by new players, without them overdoing it, or getting seduced by the price.

-

Learn blows.
Science isn’t so hard to get it needed THAT big a drop in effectiveness. Seriously.
I tried it once, used it two times on a really, REALLY science-intensive dude, and that’s it.
It’s just not worth using.

“We need to protect n00bs from chain-learns!” Oh, okay. If you say so.

kyte from utopiatemples forums writes:

Learns were only good if you get their sos, survey and see they’re not a sage first. if they have a super high amount of population (especially since it’s about half effective now), tools, and income, and NO GS/Schools… then you’ll get amazing learns. I think with the added level of science more people will be able to have more science, and learns will thus increase in strength. Amnesia will also be more valuable. (maybe sages should have protection against amnesia too?)

The orc change combined with the added science level pretty much makes them more powerful in general, which was needed compared to humans and elves this last age.

Basically these new proposed changes made everyone a little better at what they do, or specialize in…

gnomes better at thievery
humans get the added science level, and science getting tweaked
orcs is the same as humans, with better science they lose a little disadvantage.
sages can now hold their treasure even better which is okay.
Warriors let those active turn tides of wars by themselves,
Artisans aren’t so crappy anymore, although they dont’ seem strong enough compared to merchant, rogue, mystic, warrior, war hero, etc.
Elves better spells, and not needing as many runes for self spells. It will help more than you think. Find a new improved artisan to build a few extra towers for you and you’ll be set.

Dark Elves, however, seem to be getting the only addition that doesn’t fit the “make everyone better at what they do already” strategy. perhaps (and I agree) Swirve has identified that DE’s are very good at what they do (spell cast for free runes)… and they can be a decent attacker with the night rangers. It is a thought to have these stronger elites, though, since it will make playing them just that more interesting. Will they be overpowered? possibly, although it seems every other race and personality (other than mystic, the most popular DE personality) here just got a little better too, so this is just a slight advantage… many will still not want to send out their elites ever. Any NW change will probably not be an issue to a t/m.

Hope that helps you deciding what to pick. Have fun. And leave comments if you want to add something.

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Dual-Monarchy: What is that?

In Utopia, you always have one monarch voted at maximum. This monarch is able to edit the kd’s forums, set relations, press war buttons, set the kd-login-message, send dragons and so on. Additionally, he’s the main diplomat of the kd. Other kingdoms will write to the monarch when wanting war or asking for something else. Players in the kingdom trust the monarch to do the best for the kd and count on the monarch if buttons have to be pressed, players have to be informed or war targets have to be picked. Usually, this means that the most experienced individual in a kingdom needs to be monarch.

Monarchy is a pretty time-consuming job. To help him, the monarch can have one person be page to clean up the forums and grant priviledges in utopiapimp to sub-monarchs, who are able to set some more info there. Then he can ask people in his kd to lead a certain group of players or to take over several tasks, but these won’t be able to press the warbutton or the CF button, when the monarch is not online. But after all, there is an additional possibility, that most kingdoms are not aware of: Dual- or Double-Monarchy.

Dual-Monarchy means that you have two players as monarchs, who trust each other and who are both trusted upon by the members of the kingdom and both have the possibility to press monarch-buttons and so on.

How is that possible?

The monarch of a kingdom is determined by approximately half the number of votes (in fact it are at least one less). If the votes of the players get split up by half on the two monarchs, the submonarch puts his vote on the primary monarch and the monarch puts his vote on the submonarch. The one is primary monarch now and the other has enough votes to make himself monarch by switching his vote on himself. That’s just it. To make it clear, I’ll give an example.

Example of a Dual Monarchy

Example Kindom (23:42) has 25 players with 1 vote each. 12 votes are needed to have monarch. PrimaryMonarch (23:42) want to be the official leader and SecondaryMonarch (23:42) want to be submonarch to assist the main monarch.

13 players put their votes to PrimaryMonarch (23:42), including the submonarch. 12 players put their votes to SecondaryMonarch (23:42), including the vote of PrimaryMonarch (23:42). Now the primary monarch is king.

Say Example Kingdom (23:42) gets waved by another kd and (23:42) just got out of another war. The primary monarch is not online. If the submonarch switches his one vote to himself, he’ll have 13 and the primary monarch will have 12 votes, so the submonarch is able to press buttons and stuff. After proposing the CF, he switches his vote back to PrimaryMonarch (23:42) to make him monarch again. Problem solved.

Problems that may occur

• Some players don’t understand what a dual-monarchy is for. I hope this problem gets adressed with this post.
• Other kingdoms might be confused. Therefore in every establishing of diplomatic contact, the dual-monarchy should be shorty explained to the other side. Lines like these could be added to diplomatic messages: “Please note that SecondaryMonarch (23:42) is my submonarch. He is also diplomatically able to speak for our kingdom. If you have important messages, please send them to him too.”
• Monarchs should always know what their task is and keep to that, otherwise there might arise conflicts.
• Some players do not vote or put their votes on someone else or themselves. Those always need to recieve messages who they need to put their vote on. If they’re not changing, you should think about having them in your team anyways.
• Sometimes when players claim higher honor levels, the votes may get wrong. In such cases, a message to a trusted player to change votes should solve the problem. If its urgent for the main monarch to get back control, he can swich his vote back to himself and act as monarch (for that reason the monarchs should always vote for each other, as fallback-plan when something goes wrong). Then he should nevertheless ask someone else to change votes so he can change back to the submonarch.

I hope you liked this article. I tried this system very often and it really helps. The organization is not too tedious and the effect is a better reaction time for the whole kingdom. Have fun!

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Monarch

• When a war ends, make sure your provinces know this. If there’s no official CF, change the kd message and write a mass message to stop attacking and opping the enemy, otherwise some might not get the point and go on hitting.
• Put the kd stance on fortified. You should keep this for at least two or three full real days to make sure your kd members have sufficient defense out of war.
• Set an acre range for your kd-members to reach before next war. Make sure all players know how big they have to become, and make sure the big players don’t continue to grow.
• Tell the players whether they should make ready for another war or if you’re having some time to pump science and elites.

Players

• Put your science production online, even if its only minimal research.
• Put your wage rates on 50%-100%.
• Build your buildings first to have a higher income, after that train your army.
• Put into place your peacetimes-building strat, which means many money-production buildings and buildings you’ll need for science pumping (if monarch announced a pumping phase) or for growth (if you need to grow a lot till you reach the acre range you should have for next war).
• Make sure you’re ready early enough, so you don’t go to war unprepared.
• When you’re out of war, use your mana and stealth to seek for plunder targets and rob-the-vaults-targets. If you find some, use them and tell your kd about them (well you should anyways load up your intel into utopiapimp).
• Don’t provoke a war till your kd is ready to go.
• If you’re ready, aid those who aren’t.

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This post is about how to find a war for your kingdom. I post it here because I believe many fresh monarchs don’t know how to use the war finder on www.utopiatemple.com it or don’t know which criteria to use.

(1.) If you want to find a war for your kingdom, your kingdom should be ready. Tell them in the kingdom message and the forums that a war target is being searched and that they need to be ready for the war by converting their buildings to war-strat.

(2.) Take a look on your kd-page. Think about what kd you might want to fight against and what your kd doesn’t want to fight against.

Our kingdom does fine, is non-alliance, offensive and mostly-hybrid this age, but we have activity problems from time to time and people don’t hit on-target much. We have a defined pre-war size of about 700-800 acres, as you can see many of our guys grow too big.

We want a warwin, don’t want to loose honor and need someone we can beat. A warwin and not loosing honor is the easiest whenfighting against a bigger kd that doesn’t look professional. If we want to avoid professional kingdoms, we should prefer mixed kd and kds without a theme as this tell us something about not-so-good coordination. Additionally, being hybrid makes us good for long-term wars and against kingdoms that try to win in short time like full attackers with T/M-support.

(3.) Go to the war finder on www.utopiatemple.com. It looks like this:

First add the networth-range you want to fight. Our kingdom has “Total Networth: 2,563,489gc”, so we should search for something that is a bit bigger but not too big for us to handle. I will enter 2600000 in the left and 2700000 in the right form field. To minimize the number of hybrid kingdoms that we don’t want to fight against, I’ll enter a maximum of 10 elves, 10 dark elves and 10 gnomes (this feature didn’t work when I tried it out for this post, but I hope it will be working in the future). Now you could not also enter the enemies NWpA or honor, but we will look at all examples we find. In any case let the kingdoms be sorted by NW/acre ascending (networth per acre shows you how pumped the average provinces in the kd are) and show at least 100 results. So the nearer the result kd is at the top of the list, the weaker it will be. This is the form will the numbers put in:

(4.) After clicking on “search” you get a list of kds. You should take a look at those kds that you want to war. The nearer the result kd is at the top of the list, the weaker it will be, which will mean the most kds at the top will be warring or just out of war, so the most reasonable targets lie in the middle of your results. You usually can already sort out who won’t want to war, as these kds most of the time have STAY OUT or HOSTILE or WAR in their names.

(5.) Look at each kd that doesn’t look like that in utopia by entering their kd-numbers on the kd-page. Check the following

• Sometimes the values in the war finder are not correct or the kd is at war or in fortified/peaceful stance. As I’m assuming you want to find a target for a real war and not a kd to plunder, you should only think about warring kds who are not at war and in either normal or agressive stance.
• If the races setup doesn’t fit your preferred enemies, let them go.
• If they have too many warwins this is a sign of activity and good coordination (which is bad).
• The more of them have the kingdom-theme, the more teamwork is to be expected (which is bad). Also counts for having few new players there, which is also bad.
• The more they keep one acre-size, the more disciplined they are (which is bad).
• If they all or nearly all stick to one or two races, the more likely they have kept to their kd-strategy (which is a bad).
• If they have one to three big provinces, that is good news. Big provinces are seldomly effective as they get bad gains and usually play selfish. Sometimes those are banks and help their kingdom big deal with dragons and aid, but thats usually not the case. Big provinces can easily been taken apart by T/Ms and their land been looted afterwards.

(6.) Sort the provinces and put them in your forums. Name as “Good targets” those who would likely be defeated. Name as Medium targets those who look fine but who you also think could be hidden top-activity- or secretly-good-player-kingdoms. Name as Hard targets those who seem to be as strong as your kingdom. Never list a kd that seems to be stronger. Put the good targets in pimp.

(7.) Now that you have targets that your kingdom will beat up if nothing goes wrong, you need them to fight you back, otherwise there won’t be a war. Post about three good targets as war targets, so your players also have someone to hit after a kd proposed a CF. Tell your players to lure the enemy into fighting you. This means:

• Don’t go for land
• Don’t hit the same kd too often with too many players or they will get frightened
• Use ops and spells to upset enemies and make them hit back, but don’t kill enemies off beforehand
• If you see someone hitting back, tell the province who hit him first to strike him again. Some players build up anger against single provs and can be made fighting, even if their kd doesn’t want to. Thats especially nice with agressive-stance kingdoms.

(8.) If you don’t see them wanting war and hitting back, try to make a war-proposal. Tell them something like the following:

Hi there!

We would like to war your kingdom.
We would like the following war terms:

- Three days of war, winner is determined
  by NW-change (or something like that)

- Dragons allowed / No dragons allowed
  (as you wish)

- No province killing (should be written to make
  them feel good, province killing is undefined
  anyways and won't work)

- No outside help (I would always use this)

I hope this helps you, if it does or if you have something to add, feel free to post a comment. Wish you many warwins!

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