Monday, March 16, 2015

Alpha Smackdown 2 post-mortem

This past weekend's Alpha Smackdown I didn't play all that much.  Real Life prevented.

Pact of Gods - in this game world, 'Porn of Gordy' - was the winner by a landslide with 15365768 Total Damage Done, establishing itself as the alliance to beat going forward in Crown of the Gods.  2nd place The Hive (of which I was a part) had 5928361 Total Damage Done, and in 3rd place was The Wolf Pack with 5607795.

The URL for a screenshot with the full rankings is at http://i60.tinypic.com/jtw0fa.png

Game-play was as smooth as always with no game-breaking bugs or server problems or outages.  A great weekend was had by all.

+ + +

from https://www.crownofthegods.com/cotgforum/index.php/topic,198.0.html dated 14 March 2015

ALPHA SMACKDOWN - PART TWO!

Thanks to the hard work done by our testers this week, we’ve made lots of progress with combat calculations! To celebrate, we think it’s time for another competition! This time we’d like to try out a whole-alliance smackdown, with scoring based on highest overall building damage done after 48 hours.

The winning alliance will be the one that finishes with the greatest amount of building damage done at the end of the contest, and each member of the winning alliance will have $5 of in-game currency credited to their account. In-game currency will remain with accounts through resets and different worlds, and can be spent either during Beta testing or after launch.*

But beware! Building damage that you receive will count against you, and will be subtracted from your overall building damage tally!

Once you join an alliance you will NOT be able to leave it again for the duration of the competition, so choose wisely.

Again, ONCE YOU JOIN AN ALLIANCE YOU CANNOT LEAVE IT AGAIN.

The competition will begin tomorrow, 3/14/15 at 11AM EST, and end Monday 3/16/15 at 11AM EST. This contest will be open to all, so bring your friends along!

*Please note that prize money can only be spent once, so if you want to save it until launch you can. This prize will be in addition to the in-game currency attached to purchased Beta Key Packages, but separate to any currency given out during shop testing sessions.


Competition Parameters

Every city will be a castle
Resource accumulation, storage capacity, and cart numbers will all be X10
Troop movement times will all be X4
Siege ticks will be every 30 minutes
There are no limits to who you can reinforce
You will not be able to attack members of your own alliance
Enlistment speed will be normal
Items will not be enabled
We reserve the right at any time to discount the empire of anyone we confirm is using multi accounts, or bugs that give an unfair advantage.

Tuesday, March 10, 2015

Podcast Deorum Alpha Smackdown post-mortem

The following was going to be a podcast, but as my computer keeps getting more and more cantankerous and as it's too late to properly record and edit all this verbiage, and as all this verbiage stands to go stale very quickly, here it is in blog form.  Enjoy!

+ + +

It’s been a month since my last podcast episode and Crown of the Gods has come from a game barely playable through the course of an uptime of a few days to one where a competitive event has been able to be held for the first time.

We have this past weekend completed what will hopefully be the first of a number of Alpha Smackdowns.  This Alpha Smackdown was held from Noon server time on Friday 7 March 2015 to Noon server time on Monday 9 March 2015 and was a regular (non-Castles) server, with 10x resource accumulation, 10x building and recruitment speed, and 10x transport and storage capacity.

It was restricted to first Beta keyholders only, the winner being the one with, at the end of the 48 hours of the server, the highest empire score, it being the total number of levels of all one’s cities’ buildings combined.  For example: I build a level 3 building, and by doing so, my score increases by six - one point for the lvl 1 build, two for the upgrade to lvl 2, and another three for the upgrade to level 3.  Were I to upgrade to lvl 4, one’s score would increase by 4.  And so on.

Going into this weekend, I knew I would not have the time it would take to win.  My only goal was to finish in the top half of all accounts competing.  I played a little on Saturday afternoon, but was not really able to get into things until about 8 pm on Sunday evening, finding myself in about 110th place out of about 125.  At this point, 62nd place or better would do it for me.

However, I was at an impasse.  Having spent my Charisma on low-level construction time boosts, I now found myself with one city and little prospect of expanding to a second one.  However, I did have enough Charisma for three 1000-cost boosts.

I also noticed I had a lot of level 3 & 4 buildings, which immediately translated to me as gimme points.  I went on a building spree, which included the building up of my farms which were at level 2 still.  My food per hour was very low, and I was way behind on food for the first title-advance research.

I had to spend one Charisma boost on 10000 food.  This gained me a full hour.  But I was behind in my Temple upgrade.  It was still at level 6, and I had not been good in my afk time about upgrading this building.  I did not have a lot of good planning, and the only way to make top half was going to be a long all-nighter.

But the building spree was beginning to pay off.  The system would update scores, and I found myself in 105th place, then 100th, then 98th, and so on…

I used a second boost to get through an hour of temple building, which helped immensely.  I got the building to level 10, and had a choice of using my last Charisma to either speed up the enlistment of my Steward or to build more buildings faster.  I did not speed up the enlistment, opting in the end (I think) to boost building speed.  Time was short with, at this point, server downtime in less than twelve hours.

The Steward was enlisted at last, and ten minutes later, he got to a spot right next to my city, which thankfully was located in a somewhat-isolated part of the northeast of C22 (where everyone was).  The second city was a reality, and with it, my chance of getting the additional two-thousand or so points to make top-half.

Thanks to my substandard farm estate planning, I would not get a third city in time, but I could still do some damage.  It may have been at the point I used the last of my Charisma for that building speed-boost, but I’m not sure.  Now that I think about, what I did was use two Charisma items for getting the two hours of Temple building in my first city done quickly.

I turned the building councillor loose, upgrading everything in sight, making sure to upgrade cabins manually if necessary to speed up building time even more, though the time spent in building up cabins might not have been offset by time savings with other buildings…

I slowly climbed the ranks and was astonished to see myself getting to the 90s, then the 80s, and then the 70s!  Good grief, I could get top half before I get to bed!  There came a point where the guys in 64th and 65th places were tied in points, but were placed according to how their alliances were faring; their respective alliances were not tied in points.

I found myself at 68th place, needing 64th place by this time as the accounts playing had increased to 128.  And I quickly leapfrogged over the mid-sixties and at the next tick or two of the system score updation found myself in 64th!  At this point, I went to bed - a good night’s work done, but wondering how many people come sunrise would start working on their empires, knocking me down who-knows-how-many places!

I woke up in 68th place and got to it again.  My charisma build-up had allowed me two one-hour building boosts (or three??), and I used them accordingly.  There would be no third city for me.  My job simply was to in the short time I had left build as much as humanly-possible.  It was 10:00 am Central, and I had but an hour to make something happen.

And roll, I did!  I left the 60s behind and dumbfoundedly found myself in the 50s!  Could placing in the 40s be in the cards, perhaps?  Probably not - needed that third city for that, but press on, I did, and when the last few seconds of the Alpha Smackdown ticked away, the final score update had not yet ticked and I currently found myself in 54th place, but for a half-hour before that, I was pretty much assured I would finish well in the top half with much elation on my part.  Congrats to the winner were all over chat at this point along with the heady feeling of us all getting through this first-ever competitive event for Crown of the Gods with nary a server glitch or game-breaking difficulty.

In the end, a total of 129 accounts contested this Alpha Smackdown with the winner being hammrbone h-a-m-m-r-b-o-n-e of the OrganizedChaos alliance with 25966 points and six cities.  In second place was RapidRabbit of The HIVE with 23120 points and six cities.  And in third place was Davicof of Pact of Gods with 19574 points and six cities.

Damien69 of Wolfpack(GER) with 18506 points was fourth overall, but placed first of those with five cities.  A full listing of everyone who competed and how they placed can be found at www.crownofthegods.com

Monday morning, I had the presence of mind to found an alliance, Podcast Deorum, which finished 8th of the 10 or so  alliances which competed.  Pact of Gods finished first, I know for sure, but the Dev team has not posted a list of how Alliances have placed yet.

Of everyone who had two cities, majmajor of The Hive with 9663 points finished 1st and in 35th overall.  In 2nd place was Silk of AO Steel with 8256 points and 43rd place overall.  In third was informerator of Pact of Gods with 7555 points and 47th place overall.  In fifth was Want2Bme of The HIVE with 6734 points and 51st place overall.  And in sixth place of all those with two cities was yours truly with 6719 points and 52nd place overall.

Other notables were 9th place overall MiahTheZ of The Wolf Pack with 16658 points and three cities, 10th place Lord Soth of Pact of Gods with 16567 points and three cities, 15th place SmoothMonkey of The Wolf Pack with 12258 points and four cities.

GM Gordy came in 34th place with 9762 points, and joined no alliance, nor did he found one.  In 53rd place was Druss of Pact of Gods with 6638 points and 4 cities.  Adiera came in 73rd with 4435 points and 3 cities, GM Alakazzzam who was not in an alliance was in 89th with 3421 points and 2 cities, optical of The HIVE finished in 95th with 2968 points and 1 city, jketzl who was not in an alliance with 2630 points and 2 cities in 98th, Polgara of The HIVE finished in 99th place with 2477 points and 1 city, and of everyone who had more than the minimum three points possible was AusJonny who was not in an alliance.  This player had 26 points with 1 city.  With 3 points and 1 city, Capella was slotted by the game system into 125th place.  And in last place with 3 points and 1 city and in no alliance, the system put mmv1069.  Not sure how the system is resolving ties - LOL!

+ + +

hammerbone won by doing everything right.  He clearly had the time to put into 48 hours of intense gaming this weekend.  And he doubtless was using the old Lord of Ultima city optimzer at www.louopt.com.

He clearly had in his mind, I think, this was a two-day event and taking out a single resource node would use one forty-eighth of that time.  Using sleep and other away time to kill off resource nodes instead of having the building councillor auto-build was for me a huge mistake.

Equally-galling was my lack of real awareness at the Smackdown’s outset of the existence of the full panoply of Charisma-cost items such as one that boosts a particular city’s build speed by a certain amount of time.  The whole thing was a bit overwhelming to me, not the mention the particular mindset of actual Lord of Ultima-esque competition vs. building for building’s sake.  I wasted early on most of the 15000 Charisma with which I (and everyone else) began with half-hour construction-time boosts.  It was not until it was way too late that I realized I could have probably boosted my first city’s building with a minor build-basilica-to-level 5 or something like that.  I certainly could have used such a boost for my second city!

Not bearing in mind the precise costs of everything was something else I did not do: the 50 of each refined resource for the first title research - oh, I need to build up the Sorceror’s Tower.  And I need plenty of carts and 25k in food and iron, each plus 100k of wood and iron each.  I didn’t build up farms early on as I should have prior to going afk on Saturday night and Sunday morning-and-afternoon.  I was not too bad about forums, but I did not use Saturday night or away-time on Sunday to build up that Temple.

Flying by the seat of my pants until late Sunday night and just building for the sake of building, I failed to take up many opportunities to boost things here and there and optimize time and resources.  The only thing I did somewhat well was keep cognizant of forums and my need for 250 carts.  I was very good about building up enough carts for trading between my cities which helped greatly to build up the second city.

Lastly, I did not join an alliance.  I founded my own alliance, but I should have seen if Pact of Gods was recruiting.  Or The HIVE, maybe…  Who knows.

Had I had my brain turned on, I could have easily had at least four cities and finished in the thirties and maybe even got lucky enough to be in the top fifteen places who will receive a small something from Gaming Addict Studios for their good work.

Still, though, one learns from their mistakes, and while I was disapointed in myself, I still achieved my goal of finishing in the top half and came out of this grand experience knowing something.  I am very happy.

+ + +

Gordy, Alakazzzam, and all the Gaming Addict Studios team must be on cloud nine right now, and they should be.  The product of their last year of blood, sweat, and tears, Crown of the Gods, is not, I believe, by any means ready for a full game-world of beta testing, but it is playable to the point a simple two-day competitive event is able to be held with no server or database issues and no game-breaking problems.  While not beta-or-release-ready, Crown of the Gods is nevertheless operational.

I’m recording this on the evening of Tuesday 10 March 2015, about thirty-something hours past the end of the Smackdown and the taking down of the game server, and from this past weekend, I expect the team has learned more than it has before what works and what doesn’t and is in the throes of the most-intense week of detail-ridden bug-fixing the game has seen since the first week of game testing in late January.

With Gordy’s taking the server down at the end of the Smackdown on Monday at Noon server, we enter what promises to be more than a full week without Crown of the Gods’ being online for playtesting, but what we will see next week or so will be, I think, a far-better experience than even this weekend was.  I can’t wait for what is next in-store for us, and I can’t wait for the next Alpha Smackdown!

short url: http://bit.ly/1AeGuiL

Sunday, February 1, 2015

How immense this game really is

In the early part of today's Twitch.tv stream, Gordy goes into how much load there is on the database with a game like this.  On the surface, a cosmetic appraisal of games like Lord of Ultima and Crown of the Gods as well as Evonly, Grepolis, etc. seem pretty simple: city view, region, and world.

Under the hood is a very different story, and Gordy in today's stream went into this, which prompted me to crunch some numbers of my own.

Building buildings, according to Gordy, takes up more load than anything else in the game.  Bearing that in mind as well as each of the 36 continents in a World could hold up to 2000 cities each, we have a maximum of 72000 cities in a single world.  Given a build queue could be as many as sixteen things being built, we could see a situation in which there could be 1,152,000 buildings going up or in queue at any one time.  Crazy!!

This game in time will see multiple worlds going at once.  If we've twenty worlds going at once, we could have as many as 23,040,000 build requests going in all of Crown of the Gods at once and for a sustained time as people continue to build up cities.

Thursday, January 29, 2015

Tuesday, January 27, 2015

Thoughts & Screenshots: Alpha Tues. 27 Jan 2015

https://www.flickr.com/photos/28733790@N07/sets/72157650109122420/

This was the first day in which I was able to play since Saturday, and boy was it a far-more pleasant experience!  Everything ran smoother, and build times were displayed properly.  The jarring lag was mostly gone.

This game, though, is not ready for a beta test.  There are numerous graphical anomalies, and queuing up multiple buildings will ensure most of them will either disappear or not be built at all.  Lots of issues with the building queue.

Buildings already-built tend to vanish, which clearly indicates we are still very much in Alpha, but far away from the tortuous pre-alpha state we had Saturday.

Graphically, the game looks great with more of Serjio's graphics being implemented, though as beautiful as they are, there are some issues with various graphics looking too similar to other graphics.  An example is the Forester's Hut looking a lot like the Cabin.  Currently, ore nodes look way too much like iron mines.

A million little things to work on, but Gordy and company are getting it done.

Saturday, January 24, 2015

First Beta first-day thoughts! Podcast Deorum Ep 6: Sat 24 Jan 2015

https://soundcloud.com/jeffrags/first-day-of-beta-for-cotg-podcast-deorum-ep-6-sat-24-jan-2015

First-day pics, too!  Enjoy!!

Pics from first day of beta testing!

https://flic.kr/s/aHsk4pWkZg

Delayed by a few hours due to login issues, the first-ever playing of Crown of the Gods by people other than Gordy and Alekazzam took place this afternoon for about two hours ere Gordy had to take the server down for the day due to database issues causing lag such that building cues were showing building times of, literally, 450 million years.

So sorry I did not get more pictures.  Things were coming so fast and furious I could not get around my clunky screen capture setup.  I wish I could do like I can in World of Warcraft with the PrintScreen button giving me .jpg images already date-time stamped in the file name!

Disappointing to see this Beta really be an Alpha, but all things considered, and as someone in chat said, this game does work.  And for the shoestring budget with which Gordy and Co. have had to work from, this day was, indeed, a triumph.  Many congratulations to all!

I won't be able to play tomorrow, but I look forward to playing in the beta later this coming week...