3.0: Coming to a Turbo Near You (here's an overview)

[Kilkenne]

Shadow, hard at work ruining RWL

RWL 3.0 Overview

As indicated previously here, the latest version of the Redwall: Warlords Online Rat Simulation Engine has been rather quickly developed, briefly tested, and has been deemed ready for mass consumption by you, the public. These changes are to be exhibited on the Turbo server in lead-up to a swap of the Regular server once it is deemed that the product is ready. There is no timeline on this other than we do know for sure that Turbo will be resetting on the 28th (Saturday) to the new version. This is why you are reading this post that I have posted.

Worker Changes

The most fundamental change of this "expansion" or what-have-you, will be the need for each and every warlord to have a population of workers. Workers will live in your various buildings, which will continue to function much as they do currently. The various types of buildings house different amounts of workers, and your leaders and soldiers will be recruited from the worker population. Gone are the days of instantly generated troops from nothing; Your soldiers are now conscripted from your work population.

Strategic-Economic Changes

Leader players shall gnash their teeth and scream horrible oaths upon me and my like when they log into RWL 3.0 to learn that the "feast", "loot", and similar leader missions have been removed from the game entirely. Gone are the days of a leader player building their land to 100% huts and endeavoring to pound one button to defend their networth. Food/Cash production is more cleverly tied to the amount of land that a Warlord has amassed as opposed to the amount of one type of building he or she has built.

There are also greater options under the "Manage Army" tab wherein a Warlord can, in addition to taxing his population, change the percentage of her workers that are devoted to the production of Food or Cash. These values are easily changed such that a Warlord that may be swimming in cash, but low on food can set their workers to 95% food production and 5% cash production to even out their economy. Foragers are still part of the "food" equation, but workers are required to work the farms.

Income itself is managed via taxing your population. While after 10% tax, a Warlord's health cannot return to 100%, it is still optimal around approximately 30% tax. Be advised, however, that at higher tax rates less workers will be willing to live upon your property, and this may have far reaching effects for your food production and troop recruitment. Food production is also tied to this so that players will be unable to produce mountains of food at 5% tax (Read: Food production is greatest around 30% tax, and lessens as the number goes down).

These changes are intended to make the game more interactive. The game itself, however, is still playable should you wish to leave your settings standard. However, you will not garner nearly the success of a Warlord that will manage these things with a fraction of the effort that forums user "cloud" puts into examining his shirtless body in front of the mirror each and every morning.

Military Changes

As has been mentioned previously, a Horde's troops are now recruited from its population. Upon building Barracks, they will recruit a number of troops from the Worker population. As always, these numbers can be adjusted in the "Manage Army" tab. (Pro tip: Instead of demolishing your barracks, sometimes it's actually best to set your training to 0% to let your worker population recover)

Leaders will operate similarly to the way that they operate now, except that they are also recruited from your worker population. The Leaders will fill your huts until there are 100 resident leaders per Hut, and will live in there should you destroy your Huts until there are 175 crammed into each unit like an early 20th century immigrant family.

As far as functional changes to the Military go: Leader missions are no longer standalone actions. They are used to "pump up" troop attacks. When attacking an enemy warlord with troops, a Warlord is given the option to send his or her Leaders with the troops to perform a variety of actions (Steal, Plunder, Murder, and others that are clearly labeled in the Warlord's Hut interface). These leaders will fight out their battle with the enemy leaders, and should they be successful, the attacker will have the extra attack effect added to his previous attack. Note that the success of leaders does not hinge upon the success of the troops, and can be used independently as before.

It is important to note, however, with these leader missions that go along with troops, that success with troops AND leaders will yield greater results than if a player is successful with one attack type alone.

Towers are now a more important aspect of the game. They will increase one's defense against all troop types. Should you wish to hold land that you have conquered (and trust me, you do, land flow should be significantly less), you will want to build towers to confound your enemies.

Interface/Turn Use Changes

Upon visiting the "Army Status" screen, a multitude of new fields should be available to each Warlord. Upon logging in, I suggest that you check this page out, as it will show the individual offense and defense statistics of each troop type, as well as the typical things expected of the page. I'll leave it to you all, however, to discover these wonders on your own. They are fairly self explanatory once you are here, but provide a much more comprehensive view of your online rat empire.

Instead of Loot/Forage turn use, now that Loot and Feast are destroyed, the "Buff Turns" (We are trying to think of a more elegant name for this, suggestions can be sent to Shadow via PM) option allows one to use turns augmented by the "Loyalty" stat to have a variety of extra benefits. One can increase production of food, decrease food consumption, increase worker gain rate, or increase the amount of troops that are produced per turn, just by selecting these things from a drop-down menu. Leaders are used to determine what percentage of an increase in production this will be per turn, and these amounts are conveniently listed on the "buff turns" page for your perusal.

Race Changes

Races at present have been stripped of their racial spells but will be receiving them again in the near future, in exciting new ways.

Races have been re-balanced to fill new niche roles. Additionally, a new statistic has been introduced, "Workers" which determines the rate at which Workers will join your Empire.

Closing Comments

The game will be changed significantly, and I encourage everyone to log in and try things out. No amount of my hurfing blurfs here will be able to fully explain the game in an appropriate manner. Please feel free to give feedback/criticism as it warrants. I assure that there is thick enough skin on this end to hear how we have ruined everything that was decent about RWL and that we hate freedom. However, baseless claims of "this is teribul b/c i dont get it" or ridiculous dork rage will be met with hostility from me, as I am not bound by staff restrictions like Shadow.

[Kilkenne]

Strategy guide: I suggest reading this as you need it, and playing around ingame rather than depending on this to be an absolute guide to anything. I could talk at your for ages and not accomplish much more than what you could teach yourself with 10 minutes of screwing around. If things are unclear, feel free to ask questions.

Workers

Buildings hold the following amounts of workers:

markets: 70
tents: 120
camps: 100
barracks: 100
huts: 50
foragers: 90
towers: 50
freeland: 50 (note that this means that the land farm is actually pretty good, and will be worth pillaging for resources)

Workers join you much like leaders used to: the closer you are to being full, the slower then join you. So if you just build some structures you will gain them quickly initially, and they will level off. Depending on your race's worker stat, you can expect it to take anywhere from 100-200 turns to fill up your worker capacity completely. The field "Workers per acre" in your army status page will tell you how close you are to full (more on this when we talk about troops).

Economics

There are two ways to get cash: markets, and taxing workers. Markets produce a certain amount of cash every turn independently of workers, and workers can be taxed. You will find that higher tax rates mean less workers, but that there is an equilibrium around 30% tax where you get the most cash from your workers despite having slightly fewer of them.

Both markets passive production and worker production are affected by your economic settings, so if you have set your cash production to zero, then don't build markets or you will be wasting that production!

Similarly, there are two ways to make food: foragers, and taxing workers. These work pretty much the same as cash, and so I won't comment further.

All in all, you should notice that your economy is much more flexible and can be tailored to your needs at the time even without redistributing your buildings in most cases, saving lots of turns and building micromanagement. Note in particular that there is no need for tax micro every 20 or so turns to be a successful casher.

Going to 70% tax will give you a short burst of output, but your workers will leave quickly and screw your economy over pretty badly for the next while, so only do this if you have no other choice.

Troops

As mentioned, troops come from workers, depending on how many barracks you have. Note that this is not linear - making 100% barracks won't give you that many more troops than 50% barracks, and indeed, making much more than 50% barracks is a waste - you would be better off using that land in tents to get more workers to turn into troops at that point, or using it for economic purposes.

An important point to make here is that having barracks, any amount at all, is going to reduce the number of workers you have, since they will stop your buildings from ever filling to capacity with workers. The reason for this is mathematically interesting, which means that it is boring for many of you so I won't explain it in detail, but suffice it to say that there will be a point, below max workers, where the workers turned into troops equals the amount you get every turn, and so you stop gaining workers.

The upshot of all this is that having a lot of barracks depress your economy. Looking in army management, you will be able to see the "workers per acre" field, which will tell you how many you have, and how many you could have, which will give you an idea of just how much your current amount of barracks is hurting your economy.

Because of this, the worker stat is pretty important for troop production: the rat, with +15% training and +20% workers, actually produces more troops per turn than the lizard, with +25% and +0%, respectively, so keep that in mind. What the training stat actually does now is determines the amount of workers that each troop costs - high training means that you get more troops for the same amount of leaders, so a good training stat means less economic depression at the same level of troop output.

Leaders

Leaders now come from workers as well. They will fill huts sort of like they used to, in that the more you have, the fewer you get. However, the important difference is that now, if you build a small amount of huts compared to your land, you can completely fill them in a small amount of turns, whereas if you try to build all huts, it will take you probably two full runs to fill them, and even then, your warlord will be terrible.

Note that each leader requires the death of 5 workers! So building a lot of huts is going to decimate your worker population early on, and it will return to normal only after your huts are mostly full. THink carefully before investing too heavily in a lot of huts, because it will be very costly to fill them.

Leaders now provide, in addition to defense and offense capabilities, turn buffs. These max out in power when you have 20% of your land on huts and full huts, so at 20 leaders/land (see army status, "Land Ratio" field), and can provide a variety of benefits. Building more than 20% huts is purely for offensive and defense, as will be discussed shortly.

On the economic side, you can increase food or cash income, or decrease food or cash spending, per turn you use them. Which one should you use? The rule of thumb is that is your income is green, increasing your income is the best bet, and if you are in the red, reducing consumption is best.

On the industry side, you can increase the rate of troop training, decrease the amount of workers used to make troops, or make workers join you faster. The end result of all of these is quite similar - more workers means more troops, but the difference is in their short term effects, and in particular, the worker join buff can be used to help you recover faster from particularly damaging attacks.

For those into the more indepth strategy, note that, for example, increasing your troop output means that more workers are used up, which means less workers, which means in turn less troops. Similar arguments apply to the other two industry buffs. So in the long term, these industry buffs become much less effective, and should never be used for more than 20 or 30 turns at a time, while switching to the worker join rate buff in between to replenish your workers.

Finally, there are so-called "warlord" buffs: you can make your huts fill to 120 leader/hut instead of the usual 100, or you can heal 2 health per turn. The heal buff can also be used to heal past the normal max dictated by high tax rates. The leader capacity buff speeds up recruitment of leaders significantly.

Attacking

Attacks now are all troop based (except espionage, which is the same as it always was, but probably will not be forever). However, you can add a leader component (a buff) to your attacks. The usual ones you are familiar with are unchanged (sack, capture, etc), but now there are several more, which have been mentioned already elsewhere.

Success in these buffs in based on "leader power", which is not much like the ratios of old RWL. While a high leader/land ratio will make your power higher, it is certainly not as big a deal as it used to be, and the most important component of leader missions is actually sheer numbers, as it should be. In addition, your power stops getting any stronger after 175 leaders/land, so even people on low land can be broken with leader buffs, and given enough land, a rat can easily take on a wolf in a leader battle. Your army status page has a field called leader power, which will give you an idea of the strength of your leaders, and in the future this will also likely be espionage information.

Most attack buffs simply require that your leader power beats an enemy's by between 5% and 25%, depending on the buff.

All attack buffs now work with standard attack.

If you have suggestions for more attack buffs, please post them by all means.

Finally, the hitlimit is 51 attacks (51!). However, there is a catch. When people have been hit a lot recently, their defenses will be ready for you, so your attacks will start to cost more turns, more health, and you will take more losses the closer someone is to being maxxed out. As a rule of thumb, you should probably limit your land grabs to 10 attacks per person unless you are really trying to do some serious damage. Clans at war are unaffected by this change.

Towers

Towers are actually pretty good in 3.0. They only provide 200 DP each, as opposed to the 500 they used to, but they now permit the sharing of defense between single unit attacks - in simple english, if you have towers and someone attacks you with rats, some of your weasels, stoats, and skiffs will also help in defending that attack. The effect is greater for lower defense units, so rats and stoats benefit greatly from tower defense, whereas weasels and skiffs don't as much. The more towers you have, the more if your troops will help defend, but there are diminishing returns so building much more than 50% towers is probably not really necessary.

When defending standard attacks, towers are just 200 DP each.

Because of this, you might find yourself in the unlikely position of being able to break with standard, but not with any of the single troop attacks!

Market

Merc sell prices are drastically decreased, which means that you can't get enough cash by selling troops to fund a run - at some point, you are going to have to have an economy in the green, or a friend who has said green economy. But, the amount you can sell on the public market has been greatly increased, and the potential for reselling troops there is not to be ignored. People playing primarily troops strategies will find that the public market is essential for funding their runs and allowing them to focus on troops.

Final Words

While this version of RWL is almost certainly not perfectly balanced, it is balanceable, unlike the old one. Getting ride of pure leader/pure indy strategies will make it possible so balance, and I hope that you will all help us in doing that.

Land is much more important to hold onto in this game than previously - because workers join slowly, losing a lot of your land can be very damaging to your output in all areas. Defense is important, so don't neglect it. That being said, without leader destruction missions of doom, troop attacks are going to be important for killing off net (aided by leader buffs, obviously), so standards away!

Because everyone is now net capped (long term storing of resources is pretty much not going to work), clan play will be quite important. I hope this will enhance the social aspect of the game as well.

[Kilkenne]

Simple Introductory Strategy

First of all, set your taxes to about 30%, give or take 5%. More tax means more economy but less troops, and vice versa.

I would suggest that you start by scouting as much land as possible, and then build, for every 1000 land:

200 markets
200 tents
200 barracks
200 huts
200 foragers

this will give you a reasonably rounded economy, maximum power leader buffs (once your huts are full, that is) and decent troop production.

Turns can be spent attacking people and using the turn buffs depending on the situation you find yourself in. Play with economic settings to tailor your output to your needs - most people who have tried this find that initially food is easy to come by but cash can be trickier, so setting your economy to 70% cash and 30% food if you get stuck might not be a bad idea.

Focus on filling up your huts initially, which means using the worker join rate buff and the leader capacity buff at the same time. The faster they are full, the quicker your economy will even out.

At the end of your run, I suggest demolishing 100 markets, 200 tents, 100 barracks, and 100 foragers, and building 500 towers (again, per 1000 land).

Of course, different races excel in different areas, but this would be a reasonable strategy breakdown for a painted one, and buildings can be specialized from there depending on your strengths and experimentation. Note that really no strategies have been developed for this version in the same way that they were for RWL<3.0, so it is yours to discover and play with! This little breakdown will give you a base to build from, but probably won't win any sets by itself.

[Sharptooh]

Awesome :) can't wait until the 28th!

[Briar]

tl;dr

Guess that means time for good ol trial and error

[Shadow]

I stole one of Kilks reserves for a good old fashioned text wall

[Kilkenne]

It's info-tastic.

[The Masked Wolf]

yes

[Wolf Snare]

I gotta figure out how to become rat king

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5wmParkppw

[cloud]

Ugh...now I have to remember how to Indy.

[Shadow]

Ugh...now I have to remember how to Indy.

Not really, indy in the current sense is pretty terrible in 3.0. It's all about the hybrid.

[Shadow]

I stole Kilk's third reserve for a basic strategy that people can use when they start out and are playing around.

[Raggon]

Yessss!!! So, after it resets I cann play 3.0?

[Shadow]

indeed :)

reset will probably take a little longer than usual, but fingers crossed for a smooth transition.

[The Masked Wolf]

so tomorrow we can join 3.0