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[Yoink]

Can I necro this? ...Yes I can.

So, for some reason I was reminded of this game the other day, and after wracking my brains and puzzling over it for some time I was able to find it again by searching the Other Games board with the query "garrison archers".

After resetting my password, logging in and reforming my party I am told that the Kingdom of the Slaves To Armok has fallen.
What happened? Did everyone simply stop playing the game or were our forces finally crushed in a climatic battle at the end of a cataclysmic, all-encompassing war for supremacy? Honestly I can't even remember what was going on when I played or why I stopped.

I don't suppose anyone's still playing?
I remember the game being rather enjoyable, so I think I shall start playing it again and see if I can get back into it.
'Tis a shame all my party members save for my main character are lost in the mists of time. I vaguely remember being attached to some of them. I wonder what became of that one monk I gave a cool name and left in a town somewhere to preach to the filthy heathenish populace.

[Reelya]

At the end there were two of us in Armok holding about 40% of the map. This was stable for ages. Then, the other Armok guy stopped playing. After that, the two players of the red kingdom started wiping everything out. Basically it was a war of attrition: I could have held them off, but only if I devoted every waking minute to playing the game.

The game has a high player attrition rate because it gets repetitive and the interface is clunky, especially as you get to high levels, you need to cast a lot of heal spells between battles, and the HTML interface is slow for that.

The dev hasn't made any improvements in years. There are also some incredibly bad game design decisions that backfire, yet the dev won't do anything to fix them.

e.g. one player can just keep spamming characters, take over all the cities, fill the map with one color. The dev then said "but you can fight him". But that's not the point. A new player jumps in, see a whole red map, assumes that Red Nation is way too powerful to challenge. Sure the dev knows that the rules say Red Nation isn't as powerful as it looks, but that information is not being transmitted to players.

I'm sticking with Might and Fealty now. Could use people there.

[Reelya]

btw this is probably the final post I'm going to make about this game. The title is:

Why you should always be a dwarf

Ok, so you should be a dwarf just because. But in this game there's a gameplay reason that dwarves are the best. And it's to do with how the stat system works.

Human have minimum 5 starting points in all stats. The maximum starting value is 18. Each character also gets a pool of 30 points to add to any stat (up to 18).

So..how to races work? Each non-human races gets a -2, -1, 0, +1, +2 stat each. Note, these only affect the starting minimums, not maximums, and the overall stat total is the same:

Dwarves get mins of 5 STR, 4 AGI, 3 INT, 6 DIV, 7 CON
Elves get mins of 4 STR, 6 AGI, 7 INT, 5 DIV, 3 CON

So let's make warriors, see which race is Best Warrior. First you max out CON and STR, then throw the remaining points into AGI. Let's compare:

Human STR 18 (+13), CON 18 (+13), AGI 9 (+4) , INT 5, DIV 5
Elf STR 18 (+14), CON 18 (+15), AGI 7 (+1), (INT 7, DIV 5)
Dwarf STR 18 (+13), CON 18 (+11), AGI 10 (+6), INT 3, DIV 6

How about that? Elves actually make the least agile warriors because they're forced to lock 2 extra points up in Int, whereas dwarves make the most agile warriors, because they dump 2 points on int, while spending 1 more on div, giving them 1 extra free point compared to a human warrior to spend on AGI.

But surely Elves make the best archers, right? Let's check. For archers, you want to max AGI + CON, and throw the rest in STR so you can carry more gear. Let's check:

Human STR 9 (+4), CON 18 (+13), AGI 18 (+13) , INT 5, DIV 5
Elf STR 7 (+3), CON 18 (+15), AGI 18 (+12), INT 7, DIV 5
Dwarf STR 10 (+5), CON 18 (+11), AGI 18 (+14), INT 3, DIV 6

So here, the main stat that varies is STR - carrying capacity for our archers. You can see that elves are screwed over again for the same reason as above: they have 2 extra points locked up in INT/DIV, whereas Dwarves have 1 less point locked up in INT/DIV, meaning 1 extra STR point. Meaning they can carry a little more armor or gear.

Ok so lets try it for priests now. Max out DIV+CON, then split between STR / AGI

Human STR 7 (+2), CON 18 (+13), AGI 7 (+2) , INT 5, DIV 18 (+13)
Elf STR 6 (+2), CON 18 (+15), AGI 6, INT 7, DIV 18 (+13)
Dwarf STR 8 (+3) , CON 18 (+11), AGI 8 (+4), INT 3, DIV 18 (+12)

So here you can see Dwarf kicks ass again as a priest! 2 free points from lower INT gives 1 extra STR+AGI compared to a human, and 2 extra STR+AGI compared to an elf. Dwarves FTW again.

Ok, we're down to out last class - MAGE. Surely Elves will be good mages? After all, +2 INT is for that very purpose. For a mage, you'd want to max out INT, CON, then the rest into STR + AGI.

Human STR 7 (+2), CON 18 (+13), AGI 7 (+2) , INT 18 (+13), DIV 5
Elf STR 7 (+3), CON 18 (+15), AGI 7 (+1), INT 18 (+11), DIV 5
Dwarf STR 7 (+2), CON 18 (+11), AGI 6 (+2), INT 18 (+15), DIV 6

Finally, something that Dwarves aren't the automatic best race at. In this case, because the dwarf has a +1 minimum Div score, they can't spend that point on AGI instead. A Human or Elf therefore could have slightly more defense (AGI) or carrying capacity (STR) than a Dwarf Mage.

So, you can see the rule here: always make dwarves, except for mages where it might be slightly better to make a Human or Elf. And even here, dwarves are only 1 point off being the best (DIV acts like a luck score).

[Girlinhat]

Oh hello.  What's the 'improved automation' bit?

[Yoink]

Ah well, thanks for the reply, Reelya!
I doubt I'll stick with this game for terribly long, given how it's apparently abandoned by the dev and has a host of problems, but I'll probably mess around levelling up characters and what-not for a while at least. I do need to try and sink my teeth into M&F one of these days... probably today. Maybe. I'll give it a shot, at least.

Right now, though, I'm still kind of chuffed about finding this game again.
Also I found Father Thom, he's lying in a mortuary somewhere on the other side of the map after being killed in a scuffle.
Maybe one day I should go back and revive him, but I remember having a hard time getting the hang of using casters. That's why I ditched him in the first place, the big wuss kept dying all the time and costing me money. I did see a dual-wield shields technique mentioned on the forums for toughening up spellcasters. Maybe I'll try that sometime. At least now I have some higher-level characters who could babysit him.

[Reelya]

Oh hello.  What's the 'improved automation' bit?

That's a greasemonkey script I wrote. It does a lot of little things. I'd be willing to update it, if people want to play with it.

One thing is you can make an "upgrade profile" which is customized to each character, it controls stats, skills and spell point spends, and is build-order based, so you could tell it to raise CON first to 25, then AGI to 50, then split points between STR/AGI until both are 20, then spend the rest in DIV again, for a priest. I needed this because I ended up with hundreds of characters spread out and it started taking hours just to go through them and sort out who had leveled up. The script is not only more convenient, it only does the minimum needed server traffic, cutting the time down to a minute or two from hours.

There's also auto-heal, which scans your characters spell lists, then spams heals as long as anyone is hurt above some threshold (e.g. spam heals until nobody has more than 20 points of damage). This both saves time and makes healing more efficient since you can tell it to cap out below 100%, thus wasting less spells.

I also made auto-combat and auto-target/re-target, features. Basically,

- made button onto the monster portraits that causes all characters to target them.
- made an auto-combat feature that targets all players onto one monster each round
- made auto-combat feature that keeps fighting rounds
- added a call to the auto-heal at the end of auto-combat.
A few issues arose later that need debugging but I did have this working fine. It made high-level dungeon crawls much more fun.

... but wait there's more.

- it scans blacksmiths, and edits the link to tell you what quality they are without having to check yourself.
- it counts building materials, then adds that to the front page of the town
- it scans all shops for a (customizable) list of magical properties, then info-dumps that into the town's front page

I think I also got it so that it edits in encumberance information when you're shopping as well, and it tells you how much wood/stone etc you can actually buy and carry. I added that because buying the mats for castles was frikking annoying and I needed a calculator.

And ... these are just some of the things that I got it to do.

[Neonivek]

Elves basically suffer from having a nonsense stat split with a stat array that doesn't make sense with itself.

While Dwarves have a very good array that works perfectly with what they have to do.

Basically Elves are 3.5 Monks

[Yoink]

So, dwarves are the only race worth creating characters with.
But the race of characters you hire doesn't really matter, right?

I should really give those scripts a try, although I'm not at the point where things get really spammy yet.
Think I was just starting to reach that point when I played before.

[Reelya]

Well you can make a token Elf Mage who gets an extra point to spend on STR or AGI. I'd probably say focus them on STR, as carrying capacity is limited, but defense can be boosted with magical gear. So an elf mage could carry more gear than a dwarf mage, in a great twist of logic.

[Neonivek]

Well you can make a token Elf Mage who gets an extra point to spend on STR or AGI. I'd probably say focus them on STR, as carrying capacity is limited, but defense can be boosted with magical gear. So an elf mage could carry more gear than a dwarf mage, in a great twist of logic.

One of these days I want to see wizards getting a physical education!

But then I remember Dragon Age Inquisition with its... Magic... martial arts moves of stupidity... and maybe we are better off.

[Reelya]

BTW here is the magic script:

http://retrogressiongames.com/kingdoms/crownofconquest.user.js

It probably needs some dusting off. There's also the amazing database I made. By adding user info into the script, it automatically logs things wherever you go to a database. You can interact with it here. Note: I couldn't get the map image background working properly with Chrome, so this only looks 100% in FireFox.

http://retrogressiongames.com/kingdoms/

PM me for the password. It's sort of a work in progress, but you can click on any tile to edit data about it (including adding misc. notes). When you have the game script running, you can set up user name on both the server and in the script so that it sends data back to the server and shows "you are here" on the map.

[Yoink]

Well you can make a token Elf Mage who gets an extra point to spend on STR or AGI. I'd probably say focus them on STR, as carrying capacity is limited, but defense can be boosted with magical gear. So an elf mage could carry more gear than a dwarf mage, in a great twist of logic.

What I mean is, you can't make new characters after starting the game, can you? You just buy them in towns? Or am I missing something?
Are pre-bought characters still better off being dwarves, despite the fact that you can't min-max them fully?


Unrelated, I found what appears to be the grave of a Bay12 character buried in some tiny, inconsequential town I visited for healing simply because it's located near the dungeon I'm currently delving. Seems like an ignominious end to an adventuring career, even for an elf, but at least their memory lives on.

Here lies Hertha Naguin, Buried on Day 1110. First elf to die inservice of the great toad my the Tweleth bay last for ever. R.I.P. R.I.P.

[Reelya]

Once your party is level 15 you can train guys from scratch again, but it costs quite a bit of gold, 50000 I think. If you have exactly 1 level 15 character, you can put everyone else in the inn or similar, then get him to train them.

A good way to get nice optimized characters is to garrison fresh level 1 guys in a town, then once they're level 6+ you give them good gear and put them into wilderness garrisons. Of course, they need maxxed out barracks in both locations. What you should really not be doing is the naive method of swapping out your good party characters to "train up" low-level characters. That just reduces the level of combat your main party can achieve, and they tend to get killed a lot and have poor carrying capacity. Use the passive level system of city garrisons and castles to get low-level guys up to the level of your party.

Generally pre-bought characters suck because they don't have a good stat point spend, shitty base HP etc, and usually have absolutely retarded skill selection (e.g melee warriors with no skill but fletching). Any characters you create then fire do end up in the pool however, and they turn up in random towns.

Pre-built characters suck slightly less now though, because one of the last changes the dev made was allowing you to buy the skill-reset books, so if you have one that's low enough level, decent HP, but retarded skill selection you can at least turn them into something useful. You used to have to dungeon-delve level 4 dungeons and the books were pretty rare, you can now buy them at sages i think, and there are different books to reset chars of levels 1-10,11-20, and 21-30.

[Girlinhat]

Honestly, I'd adore if you could make a much more automated system.  Like, basically play the game as a strategy with a side of dungeon crawler.  Be able to recruit, train, garrison troops and to maintain and expand or retract your defensive line of keeps, and be able to automatically find the best soldiers, such as the strongest fighters or the heaviest lifters or most efficient mages, grab them from wherever they're residing, and form a party.  And perhaps most importantly, doing searches and looks through towns to find the best possible gear and upgrades and be able to apply them.  Just run a 10 minute macro of tapping inns and blacksmiths and topping up cities and shuffling troops and gear...

[Reelya]

Yeah, there's a limit to what could be done without being the actual dev, since your party is your main active agent.