Age 90 Virtual Kingdom

[StratOcastle]

Why I Stopped & Why You Should Keep Playing

I stopped playing Utopia because my personal idioms and motivations weren’t compatible with the vast majority of the remaining kingdoms. I love the game. I played a different style because I’m an old school gamer and enjoyed my glory before the internet reached the masses.

In my time, playing paper & pencil, success became secondary to challenge. Things were had easy and things were lost hard, but it became clear that the easiest victories were the least memorable. From snail mail gaming to hand drawn maps I played for years and, through needing to win, to maturing and embracing the challenge. But this is also a drug.

When I started playing Utopia I didn’t need to win, but I did need challenge.

This is a foreign concept to many younger players who have yet to know the confidence of winning. Knowing you’re in every fight isn’t something you believe unless you’ve been in the business of plan B for 40 years. - For those that don’t understand that reference, it’s that plan A never works, but you plan anyways. Plan B is Get’M!

When I started playing Utopia, fragmented wild kingdoms were abundant. I even found kingdoms with no monarch where players didn’t even care, they just reveled in violent chaos. My curiosity was in my effectiveness as a player at every level, so I inevitably migrated up to see the strategy and tactics of the best kingdoms.

After years of conventional gaming my experience taught me to opt for speed - avian tac - because speed puts you in mechanical situations in quick succession. Thus, you retain game specific fundamentals and already know the weakness of being slow by sympathetic virtue of your targets. I learned quickly simply through translation.

Skipping the history, the ordered kingdoms - warring, whoring - were too confining to enjoy and the ghettos were too frightened to love a good fight. Personally, I stopped using bots because they seemed more a distraction than an aid. I shunned advanced com systems because they render an advantage I find unnecessary. I stopped random attacking to increase the challenges, so that when someone randomed me they’d hit my whole army at home. I began to live off of retal vs the steepest challenges by preference. In other words, I would retal the most powerful kingdoms and prioritized my attention to the most likely to fight back.

When I occupied the more powerful kingdoms I found it impossible to motivate myself to hit down. In more casual kingdoms I’d nearly sit out wars where we vultured. In organized kingdoms I reluctantly hit down and would abandon province as soon as a replacement could be recruited.

I want you to understand that I don’t see others the way I see myself. Younger players may require validation and most players play by natures law. I have the luxury and the curse of victory to only enjoy challenge, but you may be able enjoy both. Utopia is a unique enough game that it caught my attention. It doesn’t need to be modernized but I’ll leave that to the community to decide.

You can take the virtual kingdom as snake oil, and that’s fine. My main objective is to be a muse. It doesn’t have to be my idea, but I want you to imagine what’s possible. Much of the strategy in the lower realm is cultural adhesion based in ideas born of good intentions. Nobody even knows why they do it, even with the advanced tools. You know exactly what you’re doing with a flawed vision and you never looked around. Look around and refresh your strategic mind.

When I went so far as to shun bots, com systems and retal the most powerful kingdoms hitting my army at home you’ve got to ask yourself about what winning is. Fortify yourself to know that feeling of reeling in the best gaming memories.

[StratOcastle]

Why Else?

Why segmenting waves have higher potential -

Sadly, in the business world, the same cultural blinders that effect work also effect play. People bring their work culture into gaming subconsciously as pawns and knowingly as meta monarchs. We see the model throughout the game and accept it as optimal, but it’s not.

You see, I’ve also learned in the real world and witnessed the amount of squandered potential and resources we go through daily. By and large people are subconscious slaves and go through their days offering nothing. They barely perform despite feeling a level of accomplishment in systemic claustrophobia. What I mean is, they will only accomplish the narrow goal and litter their surroundings with material waste and utter inefficiency. Then they pull on their belt and nod like that was “good”. It’s actually garbage. The fact that they require the input from apathetic managers basically proves their self enforced slavery. At no point do they ever innovate on their own behalf. They don’t even sense a glimmer of shared worth, or recognize their potential.

Segmented waves have a higher ceiling because they highlight micro. To understand this we have to get out of chain wave mentality and begin practicing personal excellence.

How this works is you are applying your abilities full throttle complimentary to your kingdom mates full throttling. In the process of learning teamwork you must develop the finesse to know when and where to unleash a certain ability. This means you don’t stumble into taking your kingdom mates max gains, you play off the theater. In this virtual kingdom we keep the numbers to 5 players to help define clarity.

An example is how a spearhead division approaches a target. Which offensive battery is the target most vulnerable to? If the orc strikes first will it compress the targets tpa/wpa? Perhaps the target should only be tripled by the attackers while the t/ms unleash general ops on the enemy core, like meteors and riots.

In a full wave situation these micro adjustments simply take too long with armies absorbing attacks with armies home. By reducing the team numbers and crystallizing divisional objectives we can increase the level of accomplishment by honing teamwork. Once the finesse is natural it can become intuitive and thus full throttle.