Due to my lack of time to formulate blogs, I will now release Monthlies, starting next weekend. These will be (hopefully) as good as the old weeklies and should hold us till summer, when the blog will hopefully expand again. I have been working on a large animation with a friend, so Adobe Flash has been cluttered with that among other things. My dayly schedule is thrown into chaos and I can’t find the four hours of straight work (or the focus) to formulate a good blog.

HOWEVER…

This does not mean i’m quitting, it just means i’m going to work at a gear that is more approachable with my wacky schedule. If someone with either skills in animation, time to gather information and resorces, or someone who is willing to take on a column for the blog approaches me, I may be able to produce bi-weeklies. Hopefully winter = more time on my hands, but you can never be too sure…

Over and out!

-Samulis

Hello fellow citizens of Tribalwarsland!

Well, it’s not the beginning of the end, it’s more of the end of the beginning of this war.  Now it will enter a more subtle phase, with scattered mass OPs and such spread throughout the durration. This is when the real test of strength and endurance begins and several world superpowers collide and come apart in a sort of dance of death.

Anyway, Flash practically drove me insane in the process of making this, so I will probably make a SECOND HALF of the film instead of just one part. Edit: I found the high-quality sound was making flash go crazy, so I changed it to high quality mp3 files, which flash LOVES. This week is John Williams week, featuring some of his most known compositions. If you can name all four pieces and/or which movies they are from and either mail the list to me or post it in the W9 Blog discussion forum, your name will be featured in next week’s blog. I also added some fun side-features and such so you don’t all get bored to death. The War Stats are MISSING. I will add them tomorrow. There are a few un-removable glitches that pop in and out, so don’t panic if it freezes on a blank page that says ‘nobling map’ in the top corner, just refresh the page.

http://fc02.deviantart.com/fs50/f/2009/257/4/6/blog_no__6_by_Lord_Samulis.swf

In other news:

Half-Priced coins are to be implemented in the upcomming weeks (according to King Wenseslesas Shugarpuff of Tribalwarsland in a recent mass message to the world).

[IB] has sprung back and holds a fair-sized harvest on the nobling map.

DNS is continuing to run over RAW, however, according to the numbers, ~DNS~ has mysteriously lost over half their points in the last several weeks.

———–

Roger, Roger!

-Samulis

Hello all you TWites.

I do hope that you are well, and haven’t been too disappointed in my late blog. Unfortunately it seems that as time ticks by slowly, this week there has been a distinct lack of news in w27, so much so that I can sum up the world in 3 bullet points!

- The ‘world war’ between Shadow and Most other tribes in the top 10 continues, with Shadow continuing to extend their impressive gain over the rest of the world.

- The Coalition remains leaderless, and seem to be adrift. Unless someone steps up to lead this fight they may be crushed sooner than later.

- REF have remained fairly silent, only having skirmishes with Shadow, with no real commitment being put in by either side (although REF still seem to have better stats against Shadow than some of the tribes that are at war with shadow).

Because there has been a lack of reportable news instead I decided to pen down my thoughts on the state of Tribal Wars. Recently I wrote an article on the state of faking within TW which was intended for this blog (despite getting an early publish in the TW27 weekly), so I hope you enjoy; any comments, criticisms or gripes will be happily taken on board (and mocked!)

The Death of the Fake

Over a couple of conversations over a number of worlds it’s come to my attention that many players no longer really understand what faking really is. A couple of recent attacks against my accounts and some that I sit have shown that faking seems to be almost a lost art.

I was recently asked when setting up a recent attack, why I didn’t just rely on fake scripts to send fakes. This question perplexed me for a while, as I’d never really thought about it seriously, however after a conversation with the player I was able to show him why scripts aren’t particularly great at the job that they are meant to do; it was my realisation with the advent of scripts that have the ability to save us allot of time, many players (especially the newer ones who have grown up exclusively using scripts) don’t really understand what faking players is really meant to do, and that just running a script a couple hundred times doesn’t really provide adequate cover if you are planning on attacking targets with a large amount of nobles and nukes.

The whole idea behind a fake attack is that they are meant to mask attacks that are being sent at a player in an attempt to significantly deter a player from supporting the villages that are the real targets of the planned attack, they do this by confusing a player and hopefully drawing support to other targets, which makes the real target more vulnerable than if the fakes had not been sent. Unfortunately fake scripts do not realistically have this effect. Fake scripts (or at least the ones that I have seen knocking around) choose a random village from a pre-selected set of villages and send a single ram (or whatever troop input that you’ve chosen), while this does up a players attack counter, there is very little else that the attack does; because the attack is an isolated attack and not part of a series, anybody with any amount of experience and nouce will recognise it and either move troops (in case it’s a random nuke) or worse ignore it. Now I’m not saying that fake scripts don’t have their uses, used in conjunction with effective faking, they can add pressure to players and significantly improve the chance of attacks being successful, however their use as the exclusive mode of faking is severely ineffective when it comes to fighting anyone of experience.

Now not all players will do this, newer players who haven’t had the dubious pleasure of being attacked often may panic purely at a swarm of attacks and scream for support to all of their villages purely by seeing a mass of attacks. However if there are experienced heads in the tribe they are often able to calm the player down and show them how to navigate these attacks, analyse what the attacks are, and diagnose what is actually getting attacked by nobles and what actually needs support and what can be ignored. While some players are impervious to this brand of common sense it does help many players see what is there and subsequently navigate the attacks and any subsequent attacks with minimum losses to their village count.

The crooks of the problem is that many players on offense do not really see the need to change the way they attack, often finding that in the early/mid game, that players are that inexperienced that fake scripts are successful, and it isn’t until they come up against someone with a bit of skill (or someone who’s being tutored by someone with a bit of experience) that this ceases to work. This leads to a situation which we have today, where many players no longer understand what faking really should be, because they simply haven’t had to rely on anything more than a fake script and will enough to press it a couple hundred times.

So the question is where does this leave us now? Will there be a situation where real faking slowly fades out as the older worlds wind down, or will this skill slowly permeate the newer worlds as players become more experienced after finding that fake scripts are inadequate? I guess only time will tell.

Hello Guys & Girls.

This isn’t anything to do with tribalwars, But my sister made this and it’s very sweet & lovely. Please watch, I know your going to flame me about it, But I dont care.

if the above/below doesnt work, please click  HERE

Thanks.

NML0089

Good’ay Boys and Girls. It’s time for this week’s rendition of the W27 weekly rag.

This week there have been two important changes within the world; this being the official declaration by the ‘coalition’ and formation of the Reformation tribe.

One For All, and All For One (the saga of a world at war):

As predicted in the last blog post the ‘coalition’ have officially declared war upon Shadow, the tribes Nstlk*, Dstlk*, [IRON], LA-G, TK and FURY have all banded together in an attempt to topple the number one tribe Shadow. This world war has been something which has been in the works for quite some time, and players such as myself called for it 2-3 months ago. Despite a not so professional declarion the tribes have all began a concerted effort to take on Shadow, and although you would expect the coalition to have a huge advantage here is the match up.

Nstlk* – Ranked 2nd – Top 40 = 14 million

TK – Ranked 3rd – Top 40 = 13 million

[IRON] – Ranked 4th – Top 40 = 12 million

LA-G – Ranked 5th – Top 40 = 9 million

FURY – Ranked 8th – Top 40 = 3 million

Dstlk* – Ranked 10th – Top 40 = 1 million

Total = 52 million (240 players)

Vs.

Shadow – Ranked 1st – Top 40 = 48 million

Although the coalition does have advantage in numbers, and points, its general points per player are much, much, much lower than Shadows. They will also have to deal with communication issues, not being able to support each other, being on the edge of Shadow (who dominates the core) and having no identifiable leader (at least at the moment). Certainly this is an interesting development as the world bands together to try and stop Shadow who look like if they aren’t beaten will easily run through the world unopposed. Now there remains only two tribes undeclared in the war *TKP* and SAM, with these tribes able to either add or relieve pressure on Shadow, they could be important players in the next few weeks political game of chess.

The Birth Of A Tribe:

The other event this week was the creation of the Reformation tribe by a few members of Nstlk* who were fed up with the tribes unwarlike attitude. And have created a small tribe who will fight on their own without the help of other tribes. Currently ranked 8th with the largest average points per player in the world, they have already declared that they will not be joining the coalition, and will be having most of their maps ‘red’. Whether they can make an impact remains to be seen, however one thing is certain, they can’t do worse than Nstlk* has done over the past month.

The World As It Stands:

Attack – Red

Coalition – Blue

REF – Orange

*TKP* – Green

SAM – Pink

Good day TWites

It seems that this may be the world war issue (if Dartship is to believed); with tribes possibly banding together to try and stop Shadow’s domination of the world. Although this hasn’t been the first suggestion that this should happen, it seems that 2-3 months into the Nstlk/Shadow war other tribes have finally seen that Shadows domination is a bad thing. Although the exact tribes who are entering the war is yet to be officially confirmed.

This will come as good news to the leaders of Nstlk who have been taking a panning over the past few months as they try to weather the storm which is Shadow.

Side 1:

Tribes: Nstlk*

Side 2:

Tribes: Shadow

Timeframe: Last week

Total conquers:

Side 1: 125

Side 2: 356

Difference: 231

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Total conquers against opposite side:

Side 1: 5

Side 2: 71

Difference: 66

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Recently in the General Forum there has been a running discussion about whether or not having an experienced leader (and experienced players) is the most important part of a tribe. And I would like to pen my own ideas on this topic.

My answer to this is no it isn’t the most important aspect to creating a successful tribe (although don’t get me wrong it certainly does improve the chances of success) or to even be a successful player. My suggestion would be that activity and continual willingness of the leaders/players to be active in the aid of the tribes goals is the most important attribute (as well as the ability not to get board over a long period of play). Experience is all well and good, and yes its undeniable that a player who is more experienced at the game will have an advantage when it comes to playing, you just need to look at the types of players who dominate early in almost every world, experience helps these players be more effective early in the game, and subsequently they are able to dominate, but ask yourself, how many of these players dominate in long term games? Many quit after a couple of months, as they don’t have the mentality to play long term often citing that they are bored (maybe at lack of competition) and subsequently quit. It’s often the case that the ‘best’ and ‘most experienced’ players aren’t the players who have an impact long term on the worlds its players who are willing to put the most time into the game.

To highlight this the Nstlk*/Shadow war is a perfect example, at the beginning of the war Nstlk were able to match Shadow blow for blow, however after a month or so they began to drop off, their players not willing to put in activity into the war, and subsequently having several leaders quit due to frustration that players wouldn’t fight for them; Shadow on the other hand have players who have continually put in the effort against Nstlk and have come out the stronger because of it. Although it could be suggested that many of the Dstlk/Nstlk players have been soft or easy targets, you can only ever beat what is put in front of you, and as long as the Shadow players are willing to put their activity into the tribes wars then they will continue to dominate until their opponents begin to match them.

Also I am running a little competition to try and create a banner for the w27 news (inspired by bl00dlust023’s w11 banner). All entries should be entered at the below link, good luck to anyone who enters.

http://forum.tribalwars.net/showthread.php?p=4016018#post4016018

Good day to all you people out in TW land.

Recently I’ve been having a number of conversations with various different people about why we (as individuals) play online games and more specifically tribal wars. Everyone here in TW plays for enjoyment, but not many of us really stop and think why exactly do we enjoy TW; what parts of the game do we enjoy, what parts we don’t…etc. Some players (especially the mods, community managers, and various tribal council members) put allot of their free time into the game, but one of the questions is why, what do we as players get out of TW in return for all of the hard spent hours slaving over keyboards?

With questions in hand I have created a thread in the forums (which will hopefully be moved to the general forum soon), in an attempt to let players talk about why we play, and try to answer some of these questions. Ultimately the aim of this little project is to give the community the chance to voice their own opinions on themselves and the game that they play, hopefully this will give us a better understanding of the game and what motivates us to play it which is useful for the various ‘powers that be’ who have created and run the game for us.

If you have the time I’d urge you to go on the link http://forum.tribalwars.net/showthread.php?t=151339 and take a few minutes to read the thread and contribute.

Ideally I would love to get a proper discussion flowing over the next couple of days, trying to move away from players just answering questions, and create some real dialogue. I’d be mightily appreciative of any and all replies.

Thanks in advance.

Macca

(Ps. If anyone is interested I have a number of websites and academic articles which are based around the topic I’d be happy to distribute them to you if you wish to further read into the topic).

Look… A Plug!

Since my last post, I’ve been made an admin for the wiki. With the help of Lizy, I’ve placed an advertisement to lure decent people to help as system operators. My main goal was stressing that each applicant should take an adequate amount of time to fill in their application in order to be considered. Otherwise they were just wasting everyone’s time. A couple of days have passed since the advert reached the frontpage news and farrrrrrrrrrrrr out there were a lot of quality applications submitted—more and more falling into the inbox every day. I’ve taken the time to sort through each application and moved them into the appropriate folders. My (currently) final collection of possible candidates is a huge ~20 people! Towards the end, I threw away anyone who:

• Didn’t set out their application in an easy-to-read fashing.
• Had shockingly poor grammar and/or spelling e.g., forgetting to capitalise “I”; not inserting apostrophes where they should be.
• Anyone who wrote their whole life story, as it implies they expect me to read it and think greater of them but basically, I will hate you more.

Unfortunately, choosing the final candidates will only be separated by a miniscule difference and will probably come down to something stupid like which applicants respond the quickest. Whether or not the people selected will stick around for a substantial amount of time, there’s no way to find out now. I also have the feeling that a number of the applicants are under the impression it is a paid job. Not true! I must stress that

the position of a Wiki System Operator is purely on a volunteer basis.

The next step in the recruitment process will be to have the in-game and forum accounts of the shortlisted candidates checked. After they’ve been deemed not to be idiots, the team will be complete and we can get to work.

Overall, this process of selecting applicants has taught me a lot. I haven’t done anything like this since the death of the OptusNet gaming network. It’s shown me the ideal number of lines for each question is roughly three to four and as always,

the less words you write, the better you will sound.

Since it’s a written application, keep the language formal and save the casual verbal chat for the phone or the face-to-face interview.

This weeks Blog Banner

As I said on the forum, I am using the second blog banner this week.  Tribes change their coats of arms frequently, so for next week, I will remake the banner to include the updated Coats of arms of the most prominent tribes on W18. If your not happy with your tribes current CoA, please have it changed by Friday.

Dynamics of our World

It has been about a week since the the shift in power that put Apocalypse: Death (Apoc-D) at the top of the world rankings. But the now second tribe in W18, the Mayhem Makers (-MM-) are close behind. In fact, there have been several changes lately in the placement of tribes in the rankings. Here is an updated top ten list. (24/5/09)

Apoc-D Vs. -MM-, A Cold War

The two superpowers of W18; Apocalypse: Death (Apoc-D) and The Mayhem Makers (-MM-) have been at odds with each other as enemies of their allies, but this seems to be a cold war of sorts, much like what was seen between The United States and the Soviet Union in the last century. There is a stockpile of nukes, but as both sides seem to be on separate sides of the map, neither side within striking distance of the other. It would be interesting if the tribal wars map could be spread like over a sphere, as in the real world. For instance, if an army traveled off the west side of the map on continent 50, they would arrive on the western edge of 59. Subsequently, an army traveling south off the edge of continent 95 would arrive on the northern edge of K5. But as this does not seem to be happening anytime soon, our two superpowers will have to bide their time until the geography becomes more favorable.

So just where am I going with this? Well it has been a week since the merge and formation of Apoc. Lets take a moment to examine how the new “strongest tribe on the block” stacks up against the previous title holder.

At this point in time, Apoc-D has 8 million more points in their top 40, however the total points are very close. Surprisingly, -MM- actually has control of over a hundred more villages than Apoc does. Both tribes stand even at 93 members, making the comparison all the more close.

Terminal Countdown

• 3072 Players down from 3229 last week
• 277 tribes down from 307 last week

A huge drop of players this week of 157 players and 30 tribes.

My thoughts… (yes, this really did just happen)

As I sit here writing my blog, I happen to see a mosquito silhouetted in front of my computer screen. Without hesitation,  I clapped the SoB between my hands. My aim was true, and its life was extinguished. I brought my hands together with such force that it made a very loud clapping sound. Why did I clap so hard? Was such brutal overkill necessary? I ponder on these thoughts as I sit at my computer, a hot muggy night in the month of may.

True enough these creatures are bloodsucking parisites, but was my over-enthusiastic endevor to take its life out of hate, or instinct? Answers to these questions are best left to someone wiser than myself, but since there is no such person around, I think i will go noble someone…

I wish I could dive into the trove of information and events that occur on this tiny world, but simply, nothing of notable occurance has happened in the last weeks. Thus, I will use this time to explain a bit about my position and about the common lives of the many small players of this world

It started almost a year ago, joining Hard Mage 77’s Gods Warriors, the same tribe that I am now Duke of. I found myself a capable diplomat, securing several relations and stopping two wars. The one thing I always hated was the guys that just came in and took your villages, just when you finally thought you were somthing. The ones who just sent catapults to ‘play’ with you were especially fun. I remember once holding off some noble trains, and by simply using the basic training I had gotten by then, it was a sucsess.

After Hard Mage left, we practically had a period of Anarchy. Many players know how it feels when the rest of the tribe doesn’t agree with you and you think someone will kick you out shortly just to become the leader… that’s how I felt. I took comfort in having some allies, notably Mana.k and Ash312, both also Barons and capable leaders. I soon found myself as Duke of the tribe, along with Mana and Ash. Working our bums off, we began to re-forge our tribe, which at this point, was down to 20 players. Mana had to leave for testing, so I began sitting his account too. For months, I struggled with the loss of Ash and the absence of Mana, promoting players to become equals and supporters, preparing diplomatic agreements, and on and off making huge players very, very angry at me for sending them complex and often very phillisophical replies to their attacks, often followed the strange disappearance of a noble chain.

As I said above, the one thing that really irks me is the complete dis-reguard of the term peace in this game. A simple concept really, that when not at war, tribes are at peace. Yet for some reason, about 80% of noblings happen between tribes not at war. I am sure most players say ‘all reds are far game, too bad’, but really, if you think about it, why not save the poor noob, mabye he could be useful. Once, I became friends with a large player (probabily had 2 mill or so). When another player began to noble his villages, I sent troops (yes, I actually had troops at 2000 points!) to help his strongholds and actually helped save it from a train. Although this was just a little player, think what could happen if I had more villages and mabye if he had more tiny allies, he could hold off many enemies.

Another thing that was brought up in a discussion with an ambassador from a very large tribe who was studying  (yes, studying) our tribe was the simple fact of activity and devotion. When a small player gets taken out, he gets more devoted to sucseeding, same with most other people. As humans, we don’t want to fail, and will do everything we can not to. He found it facinating how our little community could intergrate our defences so well and how we handled every little detail of our kingdom so practically. I also find it incredible to think of a tribe in the top 5 managing their government as well as we do, the simple complexity of it all and the fact that they have thousands of attacks and reports to file through every day.

Now our orginization will be put to the test. A stronger player (I will refrain from saying whom) has ‘declared war’ personally on our tribe (although that is legally impossible) and will try to kill us all. Working with allies, we will put co ordination and strategy to the test in this game, and hopefully I will be able to report a bit on this war, in the absence of any large action.

After all, a war in the top 30 is worth mentioning, right?

As a side note, if you are on world 9, I am looking for your own sucsess stories- How you came to be, and what advice you have on being a good player. Also, any wars you may be fighting would be interesting to look into.

Thanks everyone,

-Samulis