Another game I sort of play and help design too... (in Links)

I'm the designated economy-guy over there, tentatively part of the dev. team, at least for the past two months and so far no sign of them being displeased with my contributions ;)
To be honest, I'm not THAT active, since I have other priorities and games I play, plus, of course, the actual job that pays the bills. But the good part is that I don't have any time-critical tasks as far as this game goes (only long-term planning and long-term balancing, plus shooting out ideas and so on), so it's not that bad as it might sound as far as my free time goes, hehe.

The game is still heavily under development.
That is to say, it's fully playable, has been fully playable for a while now, but radical new stuff (and radically improved stuff) is still added on a regular basis, and there are plans for quite a lot of extra stuff in the near and not-so-near future.

Forums : http://forum.illyriad.co.uk/

There's a link to login (or create a new game account) on the forums, and the forum account login is separate from the game account login.
That's because the game is a bit unusual in the fact that you are legally allowed to have TWO game accounts (not three or more, just two). I only play one myself.

I would STRONGLY suggest you read the help subforum first before deciding if you even want to give it a try, then it would be a good idea to also skim-read the announcements subforum (for all the new features added recently).
The help section is still under development, so it only has the most basic information available.


The plan is to end up having a permanent world, with no resets ever... but that might not be the case with this first server, which MIGHT eventually see some form of reset depending on how different the "persistent" version of the game will end up compared to the current version (they're trying to work around that though, and they're probably going to succeed).

Game itself is "free to play" but has some degree of pay-for bonuses, which are somewhat toned down compared to other similar games I have seen (the devs don't want to give paying players too much of an advantage).
I don't use any of those bonuses myself, even if they said as staff member I could get it all for free anyway. Why ? Because I want to feel the experience of a non-paying player...
...and it's not bad at all so far.


My ingame identity is not just different from my forum identity, but as a general policy, accounts which became known to belonging to staff members have to leave any form of even remotely competitive play and join the "dev alliance" ranks (which is "neutral to everybody" by default)... all of it to prevent issues of potential corruption.
Therefore, all the screenshots below have their locations and other personally identifiable information cropped out or masked out.

City view screen (click to expand):



Map view screen (max zoom out and show borders option enabled - click to expand):

I joined.
Womp still.

Hope you enjoy it ;)

I will certainly give it a try when I get back from my trip this weekend.

Where are the boobies? ;)

On a more serious note, Sick, what seperates this from Evony?

I never tried Evony, so I can't compare directly... but I have heard a lot about it, and not much of it good.
For starters, doesn't Evony require a standalone client as opposed to being a game played fully inside the web browser ? Also don't they pretty much make it mandatory to spend cash to get anywhere a bit later on in Evony ?

The only remotely similar game I ever played is Travian.
The very first version of the game was indeed somewhat similar to Travian, but the difference between Travian and the current look and feel of this game is (hyperbole warning) almost like the difference between Tic-Tac-Toe and Starcraft as far as complexity goes... and it's getting new features constantly (you just have to read the announcement section to see what I mean, both for what got done recently and near-future plans).

The long-term plans for this game are (to name but a few of the officially announced ones):
* create a viable persistent world (so in a lot of ways kind of like CB), if possible a _single_ big persistent world everybody would play in (right now it's a single server with a rather limited map size, so if the population size gets too high you'd either need to enlarge the map or add new servers, and have them linked somehow, maybe from the start, maybe later),
* have complex territorial control on top of just player cities (most of that is already in the game, the latest set of improvements, "Sovereignty")
* implement a realistic(-ish) economy - that's up next, with the first stop being a complete revamp of the trade system, and quite a lot more things coming up later... very few words for something that could radically alter gameplay from the ground up
* expand the tavern/quest system, right now only the first two tiers of quest types (L1 trade and L1 diplomatic) are in the game (and not many of them), but there are at least 15 different levels planned (5 for each trade, diplomatic and military), possibly up to 20 total (stuff like either epic arcs, mercenary contracts, player-issued missions)
* improve/expand the army leadership ranks with additional upgradeable stats, equippable items, spell usage and so on ; items would be fully player-crafted (combination of regular manufacture and maybe some magic, depends), and that's still something just on the drawing board, but slated to come in after the trade system revamp
...and a lot of other interesting things (at least from where I'm standing).

Basically, think of it as a MMO played in a web-browser, a hybrid of RTS and RPG... and you get to jump in almost from the very start of it all, and see it slowly evolve into (hopefully) the next big thing.

Sadly, I can't say much more about the plans they have without breaking the NDA I had to agree to, but suffice to say, if they manage to put in half of what they're planning to have long-term, it could be awesome beyond anything else I played so far in a browser (and I did play my fair share of browser games in my life).

Nah, Evony doesn't require that. It just advertised with scantily clad ladies, and 'suggestive' comments.

Which lead to the game chat being full of "where are the boobies!!"

You should try Evony, just to see how similar the two games are.

It's also like Wildguns!

Well, if anything, those other I don't have a hand in :P

http://forum.illyriad.co.uk/the-newness-18aug10_topic929.html

Tell me Evony or any other similar game has ANYTHING like this planned for any time soon :P