For now a few general comments on what happens after a battle:
1) This is the bit that needed the 'delicate development' i mentioned in news. Its not particularly complex, technically speaking, but theres lots of ways it can (and probably will) go wrong to cause immense amounts of grief to players
. Yay!2) There's a fair bit missing still, atm.. Right now, a single battle can change things radically, and theres limitations in what you can do once 'certain things' have happened. The plan for dealing with that involves an 'Honor' system and some new options in the client, some of which will be used to restrict some of the challenges and battle effects... I'll start on all that as soon as I've worked out exactly how its supposed to work ;]
3) Also missing is the stuff that will prevent people spoiling things by leaving at the wrong time or by not returning to the game for a long while. This sorta stuff will be addressed very soon, meantime i ask that players do their bit by playing with 'honor'
4) Note that the client or server itself does little in determining the effects of the battle.. thats 90% script, so if/when we find out the balance is way off (or some major key functionality is missing) be prepared for things to change fairly rapidly. The script nature of the system of course means that one day other world owners will be able to create similar things but do a much better job at the game balance. :]
5) Battles (and any bugs that come up from it) do have the implication that some people will lose the items they've invested so much in. Battles go in hand with the tech-tree changes mentioned elsewhere, with the aim of making it not too unpleasant to have to build up again. As per the battle stuff itself, the tech-tree is mostly script, so expect things to continue to be 'tweaked' there over the next few days and weeks.
As mentioned in the earlier post, this new system is going to be run for a lil while then be tweaked and reset, and we'll keep doing that until (hopefully) we've got a nicely balanced bit of gameplay that will lead to the selection of a genuine 'Great King'.
Oh and btw.. i've noticed a few times people suggesting that getting the selection of the great king over as soon as possible is the best way to advance back to space (and more importantly, player-run worlds). Thats not what this is about.. the more genuine play we get on this the better the systems will be for future users, and the quicker i'll be able to get things tidied up.
As per the thread on the members forum, the timing of when things happen throughout the history (including having player-run worlds, which is not connected with space) is pretty much set in advance - with it mostly dependent upon how long i think its going to take to develop and debug the new stuff. Theres two ways you can directly advance that - 1) playing (and therefore testing) the new game systems as much as you can.. submitting good bug reports etc.. 2) getting on the membership scheme (which, if nothing else, helps me justify spending time on the puter instead of all the other things i should be doing with my life ;] )
