Originally Posted by
Yadda9To5
The attitude in the topic is wrong. Yes the topic starter can "learn to play" by listening to all advice. But right now there is no way in hell a noob in a noob kingdom has any chance to compete, no matter how well a prov he builds he'll always be seen as easy land by a random bigger kingdom. Sure he might retal, and that kingdom moves one, but it's a guarantee another kingdom will try again. So how can a noob in a noob kingdom get any chance of achievement? He cant.
Maybe it's the price of utopia being a team game. But currently bad kingdoms make good players (in these kingdoms) bad. Yes, they can move to a better kingdom, etc etc. But it should be possible for new kingdoms to compete, somehow. I'm at a loss how though. More than a few things that need to be done. One is that everyone playing the game has easy access to all knowledge (the wiki isn't comprehensive, a true guide that holds new players and new kingdoms by the hand could help, maybe even go as far auto start wars (like the tournament server) between equal kingdoms). Another thing needed, much more harder to achieve, is to allow all kingdoms to at-least have a basic level of organisation, this means even marginally competent leadership is available to all kingdoms, and i honestly don't see a solution for that. (I've randomned in ghetto's where the monarch goes AFK for days, where the monarch declares wars the are a guaranteed loss, thereby killing moral, and maybe worst, and hardest to achieve, where monarchy holds little authority (half the players in the kingdom just do there own thing, follow their own agenda, and often the monarch is one of them)).
I really enjoy this game, but if i'd started this game in one of the many ghetto's where new players find themselves in nowadays, i wouldn't last a month and would simply quit. Anyone seriously thinking that this game is enjoyable to new players is smoking something real good. Yes, a few get themselves recruited, but I've also seen plenty gheto provs simply drop their activity to only forget about the game.
Ghetto's don't need to be top kingdoms, but they need to be given a goal. Maybe introduce achievements (say have 1 war in the next 3 weeks, grow all provinces to xxx networth, etc) with little rewards.
Lastly: target hunting sucks big time established kingdoms all have their set of targetfinders, but new players can do nothing but browse through kingdom after kingdom after kingdom after kingdom, often not even having a clue what to look for (and what to stay away from). If you ever wanted to implement one more controversial thing to the game: build in a targetfinder, or just give provs a daily list of 25 provinces their size and in more or less equal kingdoms to choose from. It'll make the hurdles to playing the game so much lower.
Maybe this is part of a bigger problem (again): nowadays, peoples span of attention when entertaining themselves on the pc is short, it's asking to much to have players spend say 15 minutes to browse through utopia. They want an awesome button. Click (attack), click (train), click (build) and see a big popup saying "my lord!!!! Your prov grew 5 inches!! Please come back to repeat tomorrow and collect your reward".
Speaking of hurdles: This game is ancient. Some of this adds to its charm, some of it is, quite frankly, unthinkable in this day and age. Having a very unprofessional looking design, hidden/unexplained mechanics that are to be discovered while playing (no one wants to spends months understanding the game before being able to fully play the game (think how much thieves to send, find out sos/surveys are exact, that learns give little give protection, the whole honor system, etc)), no way to push a player (achievements or tasks) just create an unpolished feel that is hard to look past these days. Look at erepublik (i don't think it can be considered a clone/competition i think it can be mentioned, besides, the clones are a bad example, they suffer the same unpolished feel as utopia) it is much more successful in engaging its players, it looks slicks, gives players tasks, and, unlike utopia, isn't very strategical and therefor boring to me. But it's successfull, and not because it's such an exiting game to play but because it's polished and userfriendly.
