Best,

SC

Illy is a game of patience - it takes time to do about anything in here. In relation to that- Whats the AoA game gonna be like as far as overall time it takes to build your fleet or empire? If I play everyday multiple times a day can i reach the equivalent of 10 cities in a month? a year? 

I dont want to leave illy as ive got alot of time vested in the game already- but theres only so many hours in a day

Has the idea of TBL been officially cancelled?  What about the 100% zoomable 3D map, that seemed complete.  What about progress on factions, is that over too?  You mention getting back to Illy "bugfixes" but what about the rest of the proposed changes?

I like the "one player = one pilot" style of EVE, but I do not like the way you get forced into associating with others to get anything done. It is fine the corporation-building is an option, but it is not OK that the "lone wolf" player or the loosely affiliated bunch of pilots do not have a chance to go beyond the strictly controlled empires.

Another thing i hate about most space games is the unrealistic physics. It is just silly to have spaceships maneuver and act like aircraft. Physics simulation is both possible and practical today. 

Technologies should follow a pattern and use of them should open the possibility of gradual refinement. There should not be any attempts at "play balancing" - the bane of most games. The players will do the balancing by choosing what works best and making innovations in use of what is available, the game needs to have mechanisms which allow that kind of innovation.

I'm kind of puzzled...

Sharks with friggen laser beams attached to their heads?!.........Shadow holds pinky finger to edge of mouth...

Wish you guys well with AoA but very disappointed by the drought here.

thank you.

what kind of thing you be able spend RL money on? 

That's like...the very definition of muskrats. Breeding and taking over. =)

Will pathfinding be in the game from the beginning or is AoA just an opportunity to wait eternally for pathfinding in two games simultaneously?

GM Luna

Ed. --  Let me alter that a bit..  perhaps hostility?  Think we will see an increase on the number of alliances at war with the Band of Devs....    and a steeper decline in prestige purchasing . . .

I really do get what you're saying here.  

The illy architecture is very unusual, and the codebase equally so - largely my fault - and for certain (broadly game agnostic) subsystems it makes a hell of a lot more sense to rewrite from scratch (without my kakky-fingered coding that no one understands, including me) than trying to patch.

And that includes new (promised) dev areas as well.  I think I understand the challenges of implementing pathfinding (and hence naval things for illy) and I've even made a pretty good stab at it.  But it's buggy as hell atm, and I'd be much more confident if we could hire someone who was an acknowledged expert in this area to write it from scratch.

There are some truths here about illy's current codebase and current scalability that really need to be addressed - just as much as the promises of shiny new stuff (in either game).

I hope that makes sense as a direction, and if it generates ill will in the short- to medium- term, I do understand why.

SC

I think I can say, as one of the Illy community, that I appreciate this answer a lot more than what we have (or have not been) receiving for some time. 

We all love this game. We hate it to at times, but that is indeed the community who makes us do it. If you can only get the technical thing going again. We'll love it as we did before. In the end. Illy is ours. But I thank you for giving it to us ;o) 

Shad

Edited for sneaking in an excuse to Kumomoto. (last thread was closed before I could apologise). Name calling and stuff I did was bad form. My apologies. 

GM Luna

Luna

questions 

2/you want all of us in on it because we like the style of play

3/is that true 

4/ will you spend the right amount of time on those who will not enjoy the new endeavor or just move on to the more profitable enterprise and I don't apportion blame I understand your ambition 

5/will we be left with a gutted Illy as at the moment due to the lack of tournament and new content an inevitable war is going on that has resulted in a change in the nature this game is being played 

We simply want to know if any of the last few years worth of good intentions are actually really in the pipeline or are we just being strung along with false promises whilst you develop a new game? AoA doesn't personally hold much interest for me, but Illy is something i did actually hope has a future.... or not (you know the answer at least be straight with us)

Yes, these things are in the pipeline.  

The amount of work that's gone into creating the map, topography and biomes of the Broken Lands last year - and the factions within BL, with their behaviours and backstories - represent a huge investment (certainly in our small indie game dev terms) of time, effort and money.  That's not being thrown away.

I don't want people to think that the sky is falling, because it isn't.  The illy codebase is no better or worse than it was last month, or three months ago (with the exception of last week's NULL bug, which - in all fairness to us - was not our fault, and which we're still trying to get patched by the db vendor).

Illy absolutely has a future.  There's a reason Age of Ascent is being released by a game studio called "Illyriad Games": we're extremely proud of illy and we want it to thrive and grow.  And illy's development future becomes ever brighter, more consistent and more robust with whatever we develop for AoA.

Best,

SC

Thanks for the response but I think you're alienating a huge number of current and by default future AoA players by not addressing the current problems in Illy. Simple question... When is broken lands happening? or many of the previously just around the corner upgrades.

Hi Daefis,

Think it would be helpful (possibly to you more than me) if you could mentally separate and practically catalog the "....current problems in Illy" from new things as-yet-unreleased such as the Broken Lands and upgrades.

These are very different things with very different priorities.

Best,

SC

Thanks Epi.

The illy codebase isn't perfect, as you all know.  But it's no better or worse than it was last month either, so I do hope people bear that in mind.

On your first question, absolutely.  The work that's been done on AoA - even on ostensibly unrelated systems - has been a bit of code epiphany for us in terms of writing scalable code, and that's going to directly help illy from today (or, in fact, 2 months ago) onwards.

On the alliance front; I'd love to get feedback on this from you guys.  Is there a big difference between having 6 alliances of 100 players, or 1 alliance of 600 players?  I understand that it might make communications a bit more difficult etc, but that seems like a kinda artificial constraint.  Is there a good reason why we shouldn't raise the cap on alliances (in AoA, or indeed in Illy).  I'd love to hear thoughts on this.

Best

SC

I get this, asasama, I truly do.

atm we're fixing things in illy, and working on AoA at the same time.  

If the funding comes through we can hire more people to work on AoA things (which are largely also illy things).  I don't think you should look at things linearly, however.  Whilst I'm extremely conscious of not wanting illy to become a "testing ground", if there's (eg) a proven, robust, scalable, cloud-based crafting system built for AoA that's ready to go, we can port the data across and it can go in illy before the rest of AoA is completed.

SC

Leading an alliance of 100 people already takes hard work and dedication, and can often lead to burnout.  Leading an alliance of 600 people would be a more than full-time job.  I think you'd see a much higher churn rate of the people who are usually your most dedicated players -- the folks who choose to lead alliances.

I would MUCH rather see multiple user-controlled chat rooms.  This would obviously require more programming work than just lifting the limit on alliance members, but would be a more useful and interesting change -- and could accomplish something similar for the mega-confederations if there were multiple people allowed in chats.

Out of the many recurring suggestions I've seen on the forum "let us make bigger alliances" has rarely or possibly never been among them.

It's just that there are competing goals and different priorities (on everything, even within illy, let alone AoA) and we have to assign resource where it's most effective.  The development of some systems, independently funded by AoA backing, that will massively benefit illy is, in my opinion, a good use of resource to benefit both games.  Others may disagree, and that's absolutely your prerogative to do so.

Best,

SC

Illy is what made AoA possible, am I correct in saying this? Illy is already established and has a nice steady cashflow for you, why jeopardise that, you may be passionate about AoA, though if you let illy fall into a state of disrepair your cashflow will dry up. People will only buy a product if they get a perceived benefit out of it. 

Why dont you do a kickstarter for illy, you have the stakeholders that play illy that want to see it flourish and develop. Get the income increased for illy where you can hire more people for illy and you can concentrate on AoA with oversight on the work undertaken/completed on illy.

Set goals for target funding, we reach the dollar goal, you hire someone or work on a specified update illustrated in the kickstarter goals. The rewards for assisting can be newly created special units or something else that could be better than that. If all you have to do is tell someone what is needed and then review their work and test it where ever you test things it should speed up the process significantly.  Get the community to work for you and to assist you, Illy is a great game it's slow pace is what has kept me playing and interested. 

Another solution to the PR issue that is happening is to further use the current players by stating that some of them can get early access to BL and to write about it in a forum where they can tell us their perspective their experiences, when it comes live everything is reset. In other words, exploit the player base to do some of the work for you not only will they love it and the other players will, it will also free up some time for you guys as well. 

The lack of communication has been increasingly frustrating, though from the comments made by SC it appears that the dev's are hopefully listening and steering the ship back on course.  

And that's my 2cents,

Malek

Having several alliances makes a more colourful political environment than one or two with just hundreds of players.

As for bugs or content....

BUGS. For a start, we need counterclaiming sov back. For another, the flaws in the sov system needs to be ironed out. The Devs know what's wrong better than I do, but I am in complete favour of fixing the bugs before the new content is released.

Having had a hand in running both Crow and nCrow at the same time (both 95+members then) I can say with absolute certainty, that with the current toolset (ie woeful mail and chat systems) it is already cumbersome beyond belief.  The simple lack of being able to do things like basic cc: in mailing, or split off into subchannels in chat, make things awkward beyond reason.  

It drives current alliances into using 3rd party software like Skype, and chatzy in order to struggle through. 

Larger alliances could well be possible, if the infrastructure was there . . .  but not under the current 1980's BBS technology....

Restricting the alliance size rather than increasing it would be better as it would discourage alliances from holding on to inactive or abandoned accounts thus freeing up space within Elgea.

Listening to accounts of other alliances, reducing the alliance size may also help reduce some of the apparent barriers between leadership and players and make leaders more answerable for their actions. As in business... the bigger the organisation, the harder it is to communicate.

Reducing numbers would also discourage players from having their alts in the same alliance as their main account. Whilst this would not prevent situations where you have alliance 1.1 and alliance 1.2, it might just encourage players to branch out maybe not into "enemy" alliances but at least have proper neutral alliances where players from both sides can mingle.

Plus, more alliances means more sources of conflict.

Plus we have seen over the last couple of years that 1. no one takes on the Crows because of their huge pop'n and that 2. to take on Harmless? we only needed 60%+ of the server which is just daft. Increasing alliance sizes is just going to exasperate the problem and I can think of no quicker way of turning us in to Evony than larger alliances. Smaller alliances will just be eaten up until we have two continental sized alliances.

(sorry for dropping the E-word, but I do feel that strongly on the matter)

Actually it's penalizing alliances at war too cause if we have to handle a war AND a tourney now there may be a challenge... :)