Hi All,
We've made some changes to a variety of things especially designed to make the new player experience more entertaining than it has been.
To explain what we mean, for example:
It's very possible to follow the tutorial and almost immediately hit the point where King Sigurd sends you caravans bearing goods. Due to the expanding distance in the game the caravans are going to take an hour and a half to get to you; during which time you cannot progress in the tutorial. The tutorial suggests that - if you don't want to wait for the caravans to arrive, "why don't you build a horse of your own in the paddock?"
At this point the new player discovers that upgrading his paddock to Level 1 will take 40 minutes on its own, and then he has to produce a horse as well. And, frankly, he might as well just wait for the caravan to arrive.
So we've made changes.
These changes are global changes and affect everyone; and those of you settling new cities will also benefit from them.
The main change is that Construction Times (NB that's TIME, not COST) has been lowered for the lower level buildings of all types.
So, completing low level buildings is now faster than it was before. Higher level building times remain largely the same (although we have taken this opportunity to round building times to a more sensible value than eg 12H 51M 37S); and beyond about level 6 or 7 buildings you won't notice much of a difference.
To illustrate the construction time differences before and after this change, here are some pretty pretties.
The total change in the overall time to construct a building is very small.
For example, to take a Lumberjack from L1 to L20 used to take 11 days, 5 hours, 13 minutes and 54 seconds. It now takes 11 days, 4 hours and 55 minutes; and that extra time saved is simply weighted up front to make new players have slightly more fun, faster.
We have also taken this opportunity to change some of the research times for the very basic skills needed ingame. Timekeeping, Haggling, Militia, Spearmaking, Tanning, Arcana & Negotiation have all been made faster to research to help get new players on their feet quicker.
The costs for these things (buildings and research) remains the same as it was.
Regards,
GM Stormcrow
Edited by GM Stormcrow - 01 Mar 2011 at 12:03