April Round Development Details!

[Shadow]

Hey RWLers! We have yet another exciting round of changes and balances to add to the game. This reset, at long last, we add strategy diversity to RWL in the form of non-leader cashing and farming, as well as a host of small bug fixes, changes, and balances.


Theme

The theme for this round is Storehouse w/ Race Roulette. The storehouse theme has proven to be an enormously exciting round in the past, and we just had to make it more interesting! Thus we are adding in the theme from last round, Race Roulette. You will be able to change your race for free every three days, but there will be no restrictions (no longer be forced to change your race after 7 days or only change to a race you haven't tried before).

If you have never played a Storehouse round, here is how it works. Upon sign-up, you are automatically assigned to one of the four different clans. Each clan has a "storehouse", in which you can store armies and resources (as much as you want), and each day, whatever is in the storehouse will increase by 5%. It doesn't seem like a lot, but over time, it really adds up! A week before the reset, your clan storehouse will be divided amongst all the active players in the clan.

The secret to this round is good teamwork. So be sure to use your clan forum and talk strategy with your team.

If you didn't play the last Storehouse round, we have some new tracking features, like the Storehouse Log, and Storehouse Statistics, which make it easier to see who is contributing to your storehouse. And for the first time ever, you will be able to see the current total networth of the other clans' storehouses (only the networth, not the contents).


Farmer
We introduce a new race, called ferret, that is the new RWL farming race. This strategy is exceedingly simple, very newbie friendly, and quite competitive. Farming works by building foragers, getting food from them, and selling it on merceneries or the market for cash to buy armies. Since it is not a great leader race, ferret will not work for use in a resource hording strategy, but rather a method it excels at getting resources to build and feed an army.

Ferret's race spell, Rain Dance, has a few effects. When it is active, your foragers produce 5% extra food, and clanmates get 2% extra from their foragers. In addition, you have a 50*foragers/land % chance to heal one extra point per turn spent foraging. So if all your land is on foragers, you will have a 50% chance to heal extra while foraging. This is intended to make it a little easier to produce while attacking, since your forager output is based on your health.

In order to make this strategy competitive, the output of foragers has been increased by about 30%.

Casher
We introduce a second new race, called Magpie, that is the new RWL cashing race. This strategy can be quite complex, and is very micromangement intensive. It is based on taxing your workers, and getting cash from markets. During the attacking run, it is best to focus on markets, since market output, in addition to having been doubled this update, is not affected by health or tax, so they produce at full capacity even while you are attacking. During your production phase, building all tents is the best bet. Spend 5 turns with 5% tax to fill up your tents with workers, then switch over to 70% tax for 20-40 turns to tax the life out of them, and repeat.

Casher, like farmer, is strategy with overall poor leader defenses, so it is intended as a way to get cash to build an army rather than as a resource horder.
Magpie's race spell, Tax Evasion, makes it so that your max health is not affected by tax rate, so that you can full heal even at 70% tax. It also provides a 50*(markets+tents)/land % chance to heal extra while looting.

To make cashing competitive, the rate at which workers leave has been greatly slowed down, their output doubled, and the output of markets doubled.

Agri-Indy
As a by-product of extra forager output and $9 food selling on mercs, it is now possible to run the agri-indy strat, using lizard. This strategy is a hybrid farmer-indy strat where the cash to upkeep an army comes from selling food on mercs rather than selling your army directly.


Changes to race abilities
A few other races are getting makeovers as well. Rat and Lizard are both getting upgrades.

Rat "Battlefield Healers" now reduces losses when attacking by 20%, and provides immunity to fear losses - you can attack as high as you like without taking desertions. The hard net cap at which you cannot attack at all is still in place, however, and so are shame losses, so no beating up the newbies.

Lizard "Fortify Defenses" now reduces losses by 20% when defending, and increases the attacker's losses by 10%.

Rent Skiffs
In the aid section, if you are short on the skiffs you need to send, you can now tick the "rent skiffs" button to have the necessary skiffs automatically provided for you, at mercenery prices. The recipient of the aid will not get the skiffs that you rent, however.

Bank capacity
We have been experimenting with the bank a lot lately, and we have decided to make the capacity market dependent. The more markets you have, the more cash you can store in the bank. With 0 markets, it is still quite large however, and can be up to doubled if all of your land is on markets.

Standard attack
Standard attack now takes buildings, in random amounts, from the ones you take. Up to 90% of the buildings captured are added to yours directly, so on average  you will capture 45% of buildings intact. Non-standard attack types do not take buildings.

Chaos
Chaos now really does kill extra troops for your opponent (15% extra), but only yelds 80% of the usual land.

Secondary attack types
Since nobody uses them, flank and enslave have been removed from the attack options. Enslave also had potential for abuse with the new casher strategy, so we just got rid of it.

Battlefield Hills

This was an old theme from the beginning of RWL, and Shael's personal favorite theme from the old days. We've brought it back for your enjoyment. =)


Other changes

You may notice some minor changes through the game...we are just trying to clean up features that are never/rarely used and tighten up loose ends. If you are curious we can post a list of what we changed/removed.

There is also a new secret feature implemented in the game, let's see who finds it first! Hope it helps! :)



If you have any questions, or notice things that are not working as advertised, please let us know!

[Uiblis]

On the signup, you can't choose to start as the new races...

[Shadow]

Signups aren't quite ready yet, just hang on and we will post here then they are. Shael is just applying all of the above changes, which could take a little bit.

[Uiblis]

Oh, is that what this is

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[Twilight Shadow]

Well for this secret feature does it bring it advantage to us and if it does don't cheat to use it shadow lol. And is this round for determining how effective these new races are?

[Uiblis]

When will signups be open?

[Shadow]

You'll find the secret feature quickly, I'm sure ^_^

This round is for testing the new races, as well as testing a few tweaks to the balance we made over the course of the last round.

Signups will be open when Shael is done :P At a guess, half an hour to an hour.

[Uiblis]

Aw, too bad.

[Twilight Shadow]

I forget what storehouse is but are we forced into clans or create a clan to store? Because I always love being randomized into a clan to figure out how others play and newbs play.

[Shadow]

yea, the theme involves forced clans

[SiegeMaster]

do we have a choice in the clans???

[Uiblis]

Updates?
How's progress?

[Shadow]

very close :)

I strongly encourage everyone to try out cashing and farming at least once this round :)

[Uiblis]

EDIT: Never mind.

Guess I'll just sign up tomorrow instead of signing up today and getting reset every time the code's edited. :)

[Neobaron]

Divide by zero.

Obviously, Shael has just accidentally the whole universe.