Couple of suggestions

Wuzzel wrote: The ranking page looks nice now SC :). Another suggestion: Maybe setup a page where you can see what you are producing ie Spears / Cows / Leather Armour etc. A production page to see all production?

Yup, that's in the pipeline too.  It'll also cover multiple towns as well etc.  Further down the priorities list though!

Next up:
a) filtering and sorting Trade Offers in the marketplace, and making each individual offer a bit more compact, followed by
b) Trade History,
c) Diplomatic History,
d) Military History pages

These history pages are so you can review, filter, and sort what you've done in that past and what you know about a particular town.  They'll also be accessible from the map view (so you can click on a town and see all your (eg) historic scouting reports etc).  Finally, members of an alliance will have all their data pooled - so that if Alliance Player 1 scouts a town, Alliance Player 2 will be able to retrieve that information.

Alliance members will also have a "real time" view of all the trade, diplomatic and military activities, inbound and outbound, for all members.  Unless, of course, the sneakier alliance members are using Covert Operations to hide their military movement from the alliance.  There will be 2 new technologies to hide trade and diplomacy actions from the alliance view (Black Marketeering and Stealth).

This should be going live today / tomorrow.

Wuzzel wrote: Would be neat if you could see eachother ranks in the alliance page.

Not a bad idea, though most players aren't in alliances atm, so I'm putting most of the alliance stuff (that isn't completely borked) further down the list than the stuff that effects globally (Alliance or non-alliance, such as History pages and marketplace filtering).

Here's a question, though. At the moment all the points you generate in each category (population, tech, attack, magic, quests, trade etc) feed into a common pool, and are applied pre-defined weightings to make the "Overall Score" (ie Attack, Defence, Population etc are weighted higher than eg trade or quest scores).

I'm dissatisfied with this, currently.  I think the overall score should be some kind of aggregate of all the other scores, but applied a weighting index on the *relative* total player base score for each category.

So, for example, if trade is something that isn't practiced by the majority of the player base, it should weigh less heavily relative to a score category that is practiced by the majority (eg Population or Technology, which every player - regardless of which game path they take - has rankings in).

This isn't a comment on the relative importance of trade or quests vs attack or defence or whatever - people who do lots of trade or quests will still rank very highly within their own category.

I just think the overall ranking should be an alpha of the relative weighting of *all* the categories, weighted by the individual's score (relative to the total score) in each category.  ie what "we" as Illyriad/GMS/devs etc think is important and should contribute to the overall score may *not* be what the playerbase thinks is important.  And the overall score should be weighted by what the playerbase does, in some formulaic way. <-- GM ThunderClap, sirrah, help me out mathematically with what I'm trying to say here. I know you can!

Thoughts?

My braing hurtz.

Actually, that looks reasonable to me, anyone want to poke holes in it?

And yes, Gryph - I try to avoid ThunderClap like the... er... what's the word..?

Hum, thinking further about it...

The points you get for each category are weighted themselves when they get calculated.

For example, attack and defence points are basically the sum of the unit gold upkeep that you killed during the engagement.

Or, as another example, the trade points you get are (arbitrarilty) weighted as:
Wood, Clay, Iron, Stone, Food = 1 point per unit traded
Gold, Horses, Livestock, Books, beer = 2 points per unit traded
Swords, Bows, Spears, Leather = 4 points per unit traded
Saddles, Chainmail etc = 8 points per unit traded

So a single successful trade might give you a heck of a lot of trade points, and you might leap up the trade rankings.  Whereas a single combat might only give you a small amount of combat points.

In your formula, you're assuming that single point in one category has the same relative weight as a single point in another category, which isn't the case.

I still think relatively "easy" (by which I mean, "relatively risk-free") ranking points like trade get over-emphasised in that formula.

Or I might just be being dense...

GM Stormcrow wrote: So a single successful trade might give you a heck of a lot of trade points, and you might leap up the trade rankings.  Whereas a single combat might only give you a small amount of combat points. In your formula, you're assuming that single point in one category has the same relative weight as a single point in another category, which isn't the case. I still think relatively "easy" (by which I mean, "relatively risk-free") ranking points like trade get over-emphasised in that formula. Or I might just be being dense...