reine blanche 2 commentary

[hedgehog]

after a problem that required immediate attention this morning, reine blanche 2 is now up and ready for players.

i'm gonna be on holiday most of the week, but i'll try and duck in and see how everyone's doin.

so far day one saw a spike in team1 players, most of which who did very little other than tom (who got the lumber industry started with a tree farm) and noskillz, who ...well pretty much traded wood and observed that most of his team had since gone offline

team 2 had a spike of players later in the evening...first puggy kicked things off with a tree farm, followed closely by henk (assisted by lunaga) in getting a water treatment center up. lunaga's now got a grains farm up, and is starting to slowly get his cash level back up to prepare the push towards level two.

where things stand for team two at the moment: they've completed about 75% of level 1, with the exception that they still need to complete their fuel production line, and additionally a lvl-1 robot factory to make getting around a bit easier. the big challenge now however comes in gearing up to build the second materials house (level 2: concrete), which will cost somewhere in the neighborhood of 4,000 sheckles to build, all told. the food gets cheaper from there, but the building costs only get worse

(so that i don't get personally bored of camping on the server all day, i've taken to building the teams all the roads they'll need to get around for the time being (walking around in the dirt in a v1 pretty much brings you to a standstill). when a team unlocks boats or planes, they can elect to give some money and materials back to the government in exchange for a harbor and a runway, which i'll design as they continue playing.)

so far, i've gotten lucky in that things have gone roughly as planned. the teamwork has been great - most of the top ten list is still the people that haven't done anything, largely because the active players are distributing wealth in order to start up their industries and advance to the next level. there's been very little player-to-player competitiveness, since everyone is working against the material requirements of the buildings (and the idea of the other team) rather than against each other. now we just need team 1 to get online and shake stuff up a bit. while building the second materials house (which unlocks level 2), the team will be temporarially preoccupied with transferring the materials to that, providing others with a chance to catch up.

we've seen what can happen in a day....who knows what sort of doom team 1 can bring by tomorrow...

some quick stats:

number of jobs available: 124
number of jobs currently employed: 20
skills learnt: 12

level 1
team 1 - 19% completed
team 2 - 75% completed

today's screenshot:

[hedgehog]

the start of day two, and team 1 is starting to really get things moving.

tom single-handedly now owns a grains farm, tree farm, and water treatment center, in part assisted by duke, who had the skill tom needed.
leigon's also been in but hasn't made any sudden moves just yet.

while team one is certainly catching up, a good 70% through the first level, the max building limit will probably mean tom will have to hope for more permanent teammates in the near future. alternatively he could fully stock the supply house and destroy the grains farm, hoping he has enough to eat while he constructs materials house B.

as the economies for both teams are almost fully ignited, it should be fun to see what strategies get employed as they enter the next level. it's been non-stop transfers and learning up to this point - we'll see if the economy can handle the continued strain of new players and advancing levels.


update: nicholai and bunny101 have also joined onto team1, though puggy and several other team 2 people are back on and rushing to make up for lost time. in other news, fooli found a great hill for sitting around on:

[hedgehog]

i've been on a holiday, but in the meantime it looks like both teams have gotten to level two, after building a beta house, and have already advanced to producing concrete.

next they'll need to construct boats and begin building the third materials house, which gets them better boats and puts them on the path towards airplanes and airports.

anyone with some nice screenshots, feel free to mail me and i'll post 'em. i'll catch up with updates, etc when i return.

[hedgehog]

the boats have arrived
(congradulations to henk and the rest of team 2!)


is team one up to the challenge? who will be the first to make weapons and change the face of the team econ battle as we know it?

after a nearly dead heat, team two seems to be emerging, but with weapons still a level away it's anyone's game still. sure, team two now has access to double the resources, but they're still stuck giving team one the cash - until they can make up for that with some heavy warfare.

besides, since resources are the thing that is more important than cash for level progression, they're not really doing team one any favors...

tom better rally the troops

[hedgehog]

some development summary when i get caught up, but atm i just wanted to announce three changes:


a] vehicle facs no longer require fuel

b] build special is now in the schools. you'll be most interested in the "leisure" section

c] building inactivity of seven days will now cause you to lose your buildings (it was previously 7)

it will be lowered to five within 3 days.

[hedgehog]

more updates:

d] ride hitching disabled due to exploits

e] building product decay doesn't start until it reaches 500 of an item (used to be 100).

f] upped the materials required to build a supply house (surprised no one took advantage of that...)

[hedgehog]

right. the week in pictures:


team one builds CHI house.


team two begins construction on delta house


addition of new item - forcefield domes - to be placed over important buildings to add extra armour


a few stats as of noon today.

as far as the island goes (barring any secret strategies i don't know about) , team 1 is about 43% of the way there, team two is coming up on 57% of the way complete to total econ efficiency + weapons.

[hedgehog]

a turning point in reine's development may only be a day or two away now. from what i can tell, the current breakdown of team leaders looks something like:

team one:
tom (41 hours, pretty much owns feckin everything )
magicfinger (35 hours, has quite a few major skills and a few holdings)
leigon (28 hours, owns a considerable plot)

honorable mentions in team one go to blaze and duke for a presence of 8+ hours and holding at least one key building. a not-so-honorable mention to bunny101, who pretty much missed the whole concept of team play and built stuff way on top of some hill someplace, somehow figuring he'd strike it rich, and hasn't seemed to do much since.

team two:
puggy (61 hours, a good chunk of buildings)
lunaga (60 hours, a ton of cash)
henk (18 hours but most of the significant buildings)

honorable mentions in team two go to nightattack and miku for a presence of 10+ hours and holding at least one key building. also, a second, extra special mention to lunaga, who's only joined the universe recently and has already shown great ability insofar as teamwork, persistence and general all-around not bugging me too much cheers to lunaga.

the above list is a summary for one week of gameplay, ending at level three. these are simply the players that helped get the island where it is now. a well placed grenade or similar morale destruction could easily displace one of these people with a new breed. or perhaps these ten will go on to continue setting the pace for their team.

level three summary:
while team one seems better balanced time-wise, team two's leaders are burning the midnight oil, and clearly it's paying off. while team one is definitely making a profit --it has a strong second level econ, has advanced to CHI house, even started construction on a DELTA house-- team two on the other hand has manged to not only begin delta, but still holds the distinction of being the only boat owners, which has allowed them to loot the other town's resources (to much crying and whining and fanfare i've heard tale).

a move is now being made by team two to construct weapons. if this happens before team one has solidified its level 3 econ and gotten boats from level 2 underway, they will need to develop some kind of alternative, largely defensive strategy to combat the issue.


on the subject of defense....


since leaders in both teams have approached me independently regarding island-wide wall barriars, and the game currently doesn't allow wall construction outside of town limits, i've taken the liberty of constructing a sea wall around the perimeter of both islands.

when you next log in, you'll see for yourself - both islands have both a wall and impassable tile at their base, which prohibits boats from entering or leaving, except at a small, two tile "port" opening at the center of each team's island. from there, a river leads in and out of the island, allowing for a single defendable position.

of course grenades can still be lobbed over to ruin buildings or defenses, and sea battles will hopefully also occur. we'll probably see the next two or three days deciding how the island goes for a bit, as whoever loses out on the next few will surely have to catch up by considerable leaps and bounds.


will team one rise to the challenge? is team two obsessed? we'll find out this weekend on reine blanche.

[hedgehog]

midway through the first day of week two, and it's been a bit of a slow one so far.

team one has a brand new player, smogganatrix, who's still getting down the transfer concepts but could prove to be useful. leigon funded him a bit this afternoon by investing into his buildings a bit, but smogg was largely ignored as a resource so far. spider was in last night setting a few things in motion, duke seems to have the most promising team one holding atm - a boat fac over 50% built.

tom has yet to appear the past few days. if he's given up on the island, praps he should do his team a favor and sell off some of his more important holdings. building ownership limit is now down to five, so he's got two or three days left to make his move before the rest of his team makes it for him.

on the team two front: puggy continued to put in some hours, but devi was team two's VIP this morning, clocking in about three hours (he's now a 10+ member) this morning with transfers, construction, and work towards a superfarm.

haven't seen lunaga yet, but with several paydays past, we'll see how his quest for cash goes. nightattack's in here now, making transfers.

[hedgehog]

today is going to be major. team one has just made a significant advancement, and team two is about a day or two away on unspeakable horrors of technology.

a few stat updates in a few...more on the tech developments as they..er.....develop.

[hedgehog]

today was interesting. by monday i'm wondering if i'll recognize the island

first thing to note, team one finally got boats. congradulations to duke, owner of the lab, and spider, who i think assisted with some materials.


here's lunaga, who i think bought the first boat, landing in team two's base:


in other news, team two and the usual bunch over there managed to start the massively, massively expensive armament building up. it's over a third constructed... thousands of wood and steel... can't even begin to imagine the labor involved....


delta house is still being worked on by both sides. team one is about 51% of the way, team two 79%.

tom has also returned after a two or three day hiatus, and for the first time in days, team one outnumbered team two for a bit. i'm sure tom would like me to illustrate his meteoric rise to cash fame and fortune (which may or may not be a boon to his team), so here's that:



is he pooling cash to push towards a weapon shop for the team? or is this just tom pulling greedy business-as-usual? what's going through the minds of the rest of team one? and how's team two going to hold up against reciprocitous opponents now being able to pilfer there wares as well? surely it'll be an interesting weekend as these and other developments unfold on the blanchiest of reines, reine blanche.

oh btw i made a nice lil panoram of team two's twin towers:

[hedgehog]

day eleven, year 8 on reine blanche:

SAIKO has returned after, like tom, some computer problems. being a rather large net worth and cash holder, this definitely will benefit team two in the long run. saiko's currently top in wealth and net worth... this is going to start looking like clash of the titans soon
delta house over there is almost complete, with about 700 steel (9%) to go.

a quiet day after the rush of team one last night. bunny was in for a bit, no doubt admiring his nearly obsolete technology buildings up on the hill. the delta house there still stands at 51%, but i have a feeling we'll be seeing some heavy team one activity either tonight or by midday tomorrow. sunday's always a bit slow.

[hedgehog]

so team two finished delta house today, and are waiting for saiko to return and put some invest in the thing.

there's been a lot of back and forth on how to deal with resource-piracy. earlier tom stole ore from team two, but then team two just stole the resulting steel from team one. team two tends to stuff team one's supply house full to get double the gov cash, but the high product decay there means it never quite fills up on either end, so i have to wonder if that's not just kinda a waste of fuel :}

weapons are 53% complete on team two. if saiko comes on i'm betting they'll have it done by monday night / tuesday afternoon, but if he has comp troubles again it could run until wednesday or thursday if they have to rely on CHI-house to produce the stuff.

team one kinda showed up today, but sundays are always traditionally slow for our lil' game, so i wasn't expecting much. they got another 1% chipped away on delta house, and there seems to be a lot of construction going up in various industries at once, so who knows. i'm worried that by the time they get the big stuff up is when team two gets the weapons, although there's stiill a decent wad of cash between tom, duke and spider.

this weapons situation is funny. i really thought it woulda been sorted earlier. i was talking about it with a friend on AIM who doesn't play, but is nevertheless curious:

friend (4:49:13 PM): The pirate wars have been fought and won?
sniffleshedgehog (4:49:34 PM): nah still a bit to go. they're almost done inventing some grenades
sniffleshedgehog (4:49:47 PM): probably early in the week they'll start blowing each other up
sniffleshedgehog (4:50:00 PM): they're kinda slacking on forcefield development too :/
friend (4:51:06 PM): Must be what god feels like. "When I left you assholes you'd almost cured cancer! What's this mp3 shinola?"
sniffleshedgehog (4:51:22 PM): i suspect it's probably a lot like that

[hedgehog]

defenses have arrived

each team now has a limited number of defense turret buildings surrounding their territories (limited trial run, to see how things work out bugwise)

be warned that if you're going out of your township, you'll need to dodge plasma rays and grenades coming from these things.

also, revamped the radio entirely.give a listen if you haven't already


as for today / yesterday, we're on the home stretch of team two's arms, but still waiting for saiko to return so they can get their delta going. team one's throwing sizable materials into their own delta, so there's the very real chance they might catch up in that area of development if they can manage the steel.


to be continued this afternoon...

[hedgehog]

well, i just locked the island. two weeks to the day and we've completed it...screenshots of the after hours party are here:

http://universal.graphicsdesign.org/reine/end/

click each image to advance to the next. you'll be returned to this thread when you reach the last image.

it's been a few days since i updated. i couldn't really, as i was a bit too busy with...well, i'm getting ahead of myself.

we last left off with team two on it's way to completing their arms fac. they indeed completed it, saiko returned long enough to set sale prices in the delta materials house, and team one was losing morale and dropping clocked-in-hours left and right.

and then a funny thing happened. well, several funny things really.

lunaga, who spent the most hours out of any player the first week of reine, suddenly vanished. gone. as with saiko, team two was left to decide if they wanted to attempt building another armament (which was thankfully now much easier thanks to the delta house), or if they wanted to sit tight and wait for the building to go up for sale. they did a bit of both in the end.

the delta house also unlocked a powerful secret. selling materials at an alarming rate, and nearly free, any team commanding a delta could trade the items back to the government, earning about 100 sheckles every two minutes. although initially players laughed at this, presuming the planet would become meaningless with this gigantic influx of wealth, they soon noted that there were still several buildings that had material and tax requirements so obscene, that even a pair of deltas weren't the econ-breaker initially suspected. either way, the work still had to be done.

lastly, though i was at first skeptical of team one's apparent lack of teamwork, i decided to put my sheckles where my mouth was, and see if my advice to both teams was really of any use. handing my powers to fooli, i stripped myself of my godly robes and became a common player. i also alloted myself a few handicaps: no starting inventory and 100 sheckles less starting cash than the default. the remaining text here chronicals team one's rise to power from the view of a once god, now common player.

[hedgehog]

(continued from previous)

i've started out and decide to grab a cheap house. there's a dead noob mushroom nearby, so i grab that for four sheckles, since for the first hour on the island i'll maybe need to sit tight and keep my thirst/hunger needs off while i think about what the heck i'm gonna do. next i pop over to the vehicle shop and get a fast hoverdroid - no way am i trading stuff with mr. slow robes. a quick trip up the hill to learn driver, and after making a few bucks doing transfers for ten minutes, i'm driving around my shiny new droid.

i grabbed the engineer skill while i was there, and after the 20 minute learn time i applied to a few jobs...ahhh 20 sheckles a month of sweet, delicious government cash. now i was ready to start actually helping these guys out.

at this point team one hadn't even begun an armament, though it was suspected tom had begun saving for one. he'd returned and taken some profits off leigon for CHI-house (which leigon wasn't terribly pleased about at the time), and was nearly to the 18k he needed. also, the delta was 58% completed, though team one wasn't aware of the cash advantage to it at the time, and i had forgotten it was delta where that happened, confusing it with epsilon.

a tree farm was the first commercial building i owned, and about 1k came from just trading trees back to the government woodshed for an hour or two, and trading the occasional items from the water plants and grain farms. once i'd gotten a decent amount of cash up, i began purchasing huge amounts of steel and concrete from the materials houses, and working on the delta.

during that time, tom came by, and finally had the cash needed to build the armament. we decided to put it near a few of our defenses, thinking that the defenses wouldn't hurt it, but a minor distinction in how that works would prove near fatal for team one later down the road. more on that in a few.

tom loaned me about 3 grand, and team one decided to go loot team two's village. popping in our boats, we navigated through enemy defenses in what would become an all too familiar route: jetpack a bit to evade the initial plasma, then keep the pack gunned as you veer into the first sharp right turn, then hugging the right side as the river tugs a slight left, keep flying over the jagged rocks on the southern bank, and finally reach the port.

once inside, we headed to check out the deltas, and noticed that saiko, who's been gone since year eleven, made a rather unfourtunate decision when setting the prices for delta (or perhaps it was intentional to funnel some of his huge amounts of invest back to his team) - the purchase price for ore was 4s,6d... four sheckles more than the sale price of iron ore.

we quickly started purchasing ore from our mines, along with VDZ's ore, which was for sale for 6d in team two village (thanks vdz), and cooking up a decent profit, along with purchasing tons of energy drinks and selling them to the supply house for massive profit. on occasion we'd buy some steel from puggy's delta up the hill, since it was cheaper than what we were selling our own ore for, thereby still keeping our profits mostly in hand.

meanwhile, team two had started a plasticorp plastifac, along with several new armament sites to work around the lunaga problem. they were getting wise to our looting here and there, and often took to turning off sales for periods of time. it's around this period of time i'd be most curious to hear from team two what the plan was. they were still on top - their dominance was near overwhelming due to their two delta houses to our none, but a seachange was underway - mainly at the loss of lunaga, and team one's gain of an extra "regular" type player who knew his way around the software.

the one thing that was giving us a massive headache however was the defense turret at the top of the eastern hill. from there, it had a vantage point tracking our every movement in the town, and often blowing us up mid-trade in the enemy town. something had to be done.

initially we would just go in groups and hope that would break up the fire long enough to get things done, but on one run, i noticed that you could perch your boat at the bottom of the east hill, and because of the trajectory and close proximity of your vehicle, the turret would fire uselessly at the ground in an attempt to reach you at the base of the mountain, thereby rendering the turret useless.

once team two's primary defense had been compromised, we went in teams, one person hacking into their defenses by way of tricking out the primary cannon, the other running into the town and looting all the pirate booty they could carry.

it was around this time that the previously mentioned lunaga armament got built. device made a comment about the model, and as i threw the camera into spec mode, my jaw dropped, seeing the completed armament at the top of the hill. at this point i knew the weapons were expensive and weak, but i was sure this was the end of team one, just as morale was picking back up. something had to happen before lunaga got online, or we were done. already team two was sneering and snickering and tossing taunts over the hill at what they were gonna do to us. the scene was gettin ugly.

and then, the lucky break which turned the tide. somewhere during... i think it was the evening of year 10 - barely any team two members came on. full of hubris and contentedly bored, they decided they could afford a little holiday and skip working on the plastics fac and remaining armaments.

and that's when team one began.to rise from it's slumber.

(to be continued)

[hedgehog]

up for a limited time due to size / bandwidth restrictions, download a video of the afterhours party / island destruction here, set to the tune of one of the RB-Radio tracks:

http://www.awayfromkeyboard.com/galaxy/thend.avi

[hedgehog]

[continued}

knowing that spider owned our still-unconstructed delta, blaze commissioned the building of a second one with cash he'd made on previous investments. we didn't want to get stuck with the same saiko style situation team two did, and this was probably the best route - constructing both near-simultaneously.

frantically through the night, i began transferring minerals from team two, and completed the team one deltas, which were already well on their way thanks to the rest of the team. leigon and a few others managed to show up and get some transfers done, and by morning we had over half the armaments ready. tom hopped in by morning, and with him finishing the rest of the load, we now had two deltas waiting price settings, and a fully owned, fully functional armament.

team two continued to work on their armaments, was manufacturing plastics, and even had portions of a aeronautics fac underway. by the day's end, spider's buildings had gone up for sale, and duke landed the delta. blaze came in to claim his, and we began to generate the large sums of cash required to seal team two's fate.

having a bit of cash left from the night before, i commissioned magicfinger to build a second level nautical factory, and soon with the rest of the team's help, we were owning nemesis droids, with their unlimited ammo.

around this time puggy and devi were around quite a bit, trying to make things difficult and simultaneously finish off their armaments i presume. it was the same point we were at a few days before, so at this part i think the team was starting to feel that they'd gained the upper hand.

with a few trusty grenades, tom disabled team two's primary defense cannon, and by then it was a total free-for-all. we began camping out in team two's town and tossing plasmas left and right, meanwhile leigon pulled an all-nighter and got us not only a plastics fac, which is one of the more expensive, hard to construct things in the whole game (and a big nod to devi for getting the first one up), as well as the beginnings of a plane factory.

at this point, tom showed team two no mercy, obliterating their buildings with merciless precision - eliciting rather amusing reactions from the players who hadn't put much time into their team.

i will say for team two - they were terribly good sports about it. the true vets of the game, puggy, henk, device, etc - all took the defeat in stride. they knew they'd done the best they could, and continued to put up one hell of a fight till the end. cheers to all.

the prologue to all this is one that most of you caught - after most of the players on either team began asking about the next island version, i took that as a sign, and redeified myself, opening up all vehicles and weapons to all. the video and screenshots two posts back depict this leisurely battle, where both teams got to have a bit of cathartic fun, blowing up all the stuff they'd worked so hard for two weeks to create. hopefully in the end everybody had a bit of fun.

well, that's that then...here's my list of winners from each team:

team one

tom
leigon
magicfinger
duke
blaze

team two

puggy
lunaga
device
henk
vdz


thanks to all for playing, and special note to the winners - if i see you in game, you'll get 100 free sheckles in rb-3.*





*(timing of which at my discretion, offer subject to change)