Something Old, Something New

This week saw the introduction of a few new features, as well as the return of something old.  On the new front, I modified the "Quest" concept to be tasks which any class can undertake.  This includes the Bandits tutorial, searching for items, attacking the horde, or your signature troop.  Former quests for magical components and jousting were moved to Mage and Fighter tabs; jousting is now a fighter-only quest.  I retired quest riddle, which made more sense before the advent of Google.  Essentially, a riddle was shown to a player and if they guessed correctly they were rewarded with land and peasants.  Unfortunately, I cannot come up with original riddles and therein lies the issue.

A new Age started and I took the chance to modify some of the key metrics, namely the amount of land a structure needs and how many troops it can support.  Previously, all structures required 50 land and the amount of troops were based on your class.  Now, the amount of land varies between class (Fighters, Mages, and Clerics requiring more land than Barbarians, Rangers, and Vampires).  The goal here was to keep the number of troops and income the same, but decrease the number of structures in the game.  The reason for the change is the amount of loot you capture is based on the number of castles you have.  This will probably require further balancing as more testing is done.  On a related topic, players once again start with land (enough for 2 structures).

I added a new task to the tutorial, which shows how to locate other players in the game. The tutorial now covers (albeit briefly): traveling, markets, tavern visit, census, mystic visit, questing for magical items, using an item, spying, transferring troops, and attacking.   Finally, I added a new magical item to the game (Potion of Cure Disease), which will rid your kingdom of plague or sickness.

This week I'm focusing on the design contest I'm conducting at 99designs.com.  I'm looking for ways to cram all of the commands and features Conquest! has into an easy to use package.  I've done this in the Windows client I created by hiding certain commands and tabs so you aren't overwhelemed when you first login.  I've received a few screens so far, but the contest has another day.  It can be found here: http://99d.me/c/awv5

Until next week!