DataSmugglers

Time Machines!

The new time machines allow you to travel back to 65 million years ago – to the late cretaceous period.

To build a time machine, you need an Inventor (1).  They build the Time Controller (2), which must be built on Grass or Swamp.

Next the Time Controller builds the Time Capacitor (3).  It stores the huge quantities of Electricity required to create the portal to the past.

Then the Time Capacitor builds the Prehistoric Time Gate (4).  The Time Gate needs to be built on Grass or Swamp.

Be careful with your placement of these buildings.  The pattern they follow is; Inventor > Grass > Hill > Grass.  Watch out for this, I don’t want you to waste resources building these in the wrong place!

When you enter the Time Gate, you go back in time, to a similar realm in the past.  You’ll notice there is lots of Swampy land, Volcanoes and those Wollemia Trees I talked about yesterday.

Every realm in the now has a matching similar realm in the past.  They are the same size and have similar terrain.  They have the same permissions, except private home realms are set to public (so safe like the trailblazer tunnels).

If you have a Castle in the now and you build a time machine inside it.  You’ll go back to a Castle shaped realm in the past.  Of course the castle hasn’t been built yet so there won’t be any Stone Floors or Stone Walls in the past.

An interesting thing happens when you build a Castle in the past, then make a time machine inside the castle.  You will go forwards in time and your Stone Floors and Stone Walls do exist in the now Castle.  And Castles made in the past are Policed and they also have a Whirlpool connecting them to an Ocean in the past.

Prehistoric Wollemia Trees

The Dinosaur and Time Machine Expansion is coming very soon. Possibly this week. There is so much stuff in the new update that I need to start telling you about some of the new features.

So, lets talk trees.

From wikipedia: “Wollemia is a genus of coniferous tree in the family Araucariaceae. Wollemia was only known through fossil records until the Australian species Wollemia nobilis was discovered in 1994 in a temperate rainforest wilderness area of the Wollemi National Park in New South Wales, 150 kilometres north-west of Sydney. The oldest fossil of the Wollemi tree has been dated to 200 million years ago.”

These new trees grow in 5 stages, Seedling, Sapling, Tree, Mature Tree and Ancient Tree.   Each stage provides more Wood, but takes longer to grow. These numbers are not final… but 14 days after it was planted, it will grow into a Mature Tree with 3000 wood. 42 days after it was planted, each Ancient Tree will hold 30,000 Wood.

Harvesting that much Wood will take a Woodcutter far too long.  So there are two Dinosaurs that can harvest wood, with auto-gather, one 12x as fast as a Woodcutter and another which will eat one of those Ancient Tree’s in 3 bites. These two dinosaurs also poop the Wollemia seeds, so they can plant new Wollemia Seedlings!  You will be able to plant a whole forest of tree’s and wait for them to mature, and harvest them when they hold 30,000 Wood EACH.

A forest with that much wood, better be well defended.

David, :)

Small changes and a Windmill

There are two new settings in the settings panel that you can disable if you want to:

• Sticky Movement Selection
• Show Alert Messages

Improved the alert you see when one of your units tries to enter someones private home valley.

When a unit goes through a gate, they won’t appear on the gate at the other end.

Roads and Bridges are no longer stupid

I’ve changed the way you build Roads and Bridges so that they actually make sense now.  :)

Also fixed setting a Rally point for multiple buildings, keeps all the buildings selected.

Few small fixes

Just a few small fixes today:

• Fixed not being able to move a unit onto blood or a shipwreck that is your own.
• Fixed when setting rally points for multiple buildings at once… it now keeps the unit you first clicked on selected.
• All your settings are now kept when after updates :)  (turns out that was actually really easy)
• Added a warning when a unit of yours tries to move into a realm its not allowed in.

Sticky movement and shift selection.

I think you’ll like today’s changes…

• Hold down the shift key to select and unselect units.
• Sticky movement, when you move a group of units, they stay selected.
• When you build units, you can keep clicking to build more.
• Land and sea unit selection are now separated.

And fixes:

• < in signs now work.
• And Madamelady’s scroll to negative y, change x, goes to 65000.

And behind the scenes there’s a bunch of tracking to try and detect bots and macros.

And here’s a dinosaur :)

Bots and Macros

Bots and macro’s are banned.
If you build or use bots or macros in Ironfell, you will be permanently banned.

If you’re already using bots for anything. Stop. It’ll get you and all your alts permanently banned.

There is a very long conversation about bots and macros in the forums here:
http://ironfell.freeforums.org/bots-and-macros-t288.html

I had hoped that Ironfell could be really open and allow people to mess with the client app, I’d rather have people making bots than grinding boring tasks.

Everyone’s feedback has made me change my mind. Bots and macros would ruin the game.  Key points from the forum discussion are:

• Worst case scenario, Grey Goo. A bot that spam fills all realms in the entire game with annoying units.
• Worst case scenario, A bot that gathers Wood and Iron in massive quantities devaluing them – ruining the economy.
• It will be too time consuming and confusing to say some bots are allowed, and others are not. So a blanket ban on all bot’s and macros is best.
• Half the people playing will be bots – ruining the community.
• New accounts will be made just to bot mine resources.
• It’s a strategy game, not a whos best at programming bots game :)

Vlonk has a really good point about features added to Ironfell benefit everyone evenly (like a new unit that builds roads easier), but bots benefit only the people who use bots.

Weskejak had another great point “this is fun, now i want a game that is designed around just using bots to be evil.” That is something I’d like to make :)  But it would be a completely different game from Ironfell.

So… If you’re already using bots for anything. Stop. It’ll get you and all your alts permanently banned.

I need to spend a few days working out ways to detect and prevent bots and macros. It’ll be a combination of behavior modeling and rewards for anyone who reports people using bots (I’ld rather be working on Dinosaurs).

David,

Few small changes

There are now 4 Large Iron Deposits in each Mountain realm – and yes that means EVERY old mountain realm too (gold rush!)

BUT you’re now blocked from entering those PVP mountain realms… unless it’s the one attached to your own home valley.  The starting lobbies and their attached large mountain realms are for new users.

New users get more Iron to start with (24k instead of 6k).

And a reminder… if you create accounts to get the new user Iron, or alts just to get the Iron from new Mountain realms… you will get banned, forever, without warning.

I’ve cleaned up lothars mess in these realms:
http://www.ironfell.com/play/51221/151/53
http://www.ironfell.com/play/68475/151/53

The servers are playing up a little bit.  I’m still trying to figure out why.  They’re okay if I restart them every so often :)

Tunnel Hubs

Okay, so tunnel hubs are breaking Ironfell.

Iron and wood are far to easy to get, people don’t fight for them, they just grind and harvest them. Grinding a tunnel hub to get millions of Iron you won’t spend is not fun.

And its really hurting the servers. All the work I’ve done this week has been on optimizing the servers… because people building hubs with 100′s or 1000′s of new tunnels, means 1000′s of new realms. And all those new realms are whats hurting the servers the most.

Ironfell earnt $16 this week. So I can’t afford to buy more servers for it.

The changes a few days ago that make it possible to break into tunnel hubs have helped. But there is still not enough incentive to fight like that. Its much easier to build your own hub than steal someone elses.

So for the good of Ironfell, I need to make some changes to try and reduce the amount of tunnel hubs being made.

So these are the changes I’ve just made…

Trailblazer tunnels can not be built. Use safe tunnels to steal wood from existing tunnel, or harvest wood in risky tunnels. All your existing Trailblazer tunnels are still there, just that miners cant build new ones.

Risky Tunnels now cost more. 5k Food, 5k Wood and 10k Iron.

Risky Tunnel realms can now randomly contain 0, 1, 2, 3 or 4 Iron Deposits. The chances of getting each number of mines is weighted, so that Risky Tunnels are still profitable – if you can keep all your mines for a week.

I’m sorry if this change upsets you. But Ironfell is supposed to be about strategy, not brute force grind farming.

These changes have to be made to make the game more fun – and more profitable.

And being realistic and totally honest with you – if I don’t make Ironfell more profitable I’ll have to shut it down.

david,

even more changes

Woodcutters now cut tree’s down in one hit.

Tunnel Hubs

I dont like they way people grind away making tunnel hubs, its not fun.  Its too easy to get iron.  And it discourages fighting over the large mines in the in the oceans.

So I am going to change the rules, so that tunnel hubs can be broken into.

If you build a conquest tunnel, and the realm connects to someones tunnel hub.  And you send 20 soldiers through the tunnel into the hub.  The soldiers will now land on Tunnels.  The time before they fall through tunnels has been greatly increased.  So you will have time to move your view through into the tunnel hub, and start your soldiers attacking.

Previously Woodcutters on auto-gather would not fall through tunnels.  To stop people using them to block tunnels… from now on Woodcutters, on auto-gather, will fall through tunnels if they are not adjacent to a Tree or Tree Stump.

Safe Lobby Realms
I have always let people go a bit crazy in the safe lobby realms, I’ld rather give people freedom that make restrictions.

Those safe lobby realms are the first place new users visit, and too often older experienced players break into them, and fill them with Colleges and Farms.  There’s a fix for that coming in the Dino updage – you’ll get Universities and a new Farm that cost 100x as much but produce 100x as much. So you won’t have to grind making massive fields of Colleges.

But as Lothar has shown in this realm:
http://www.ironfell.com/play/68475/195/43

There are other ways to mess up the safe lobbies… he mostly did that to prove to me that safe lobbys are broken as they currently work.  Now I agree with him.

So here’s the fix… from now on, your units are only able to enter the Safe Lobby attached to your Home Valley.

If you’re already in a different Safe Lobby, thats fine, your stuff stays there.  You just can’t move more units into a safe lobby.