Winds of Change.

Ok, the war that was progressing slightly negatively for us has now taken a turn for the worse. It actually has some of my tribemates jumping ship. We were taking on one of the top 4 or 5 tribes in the world and now another of the top tribes has joined on the other side. Needless to say this does not look good for us. lol. I am hoping that the morale thing plays a large part of this next part or we will be in big trouble.

Producing troops and supporting the frontline as always.

Expansion, Expansion, Expansion. . .

In Tribal Wars I am in the expanding business. I started out slowly but have increased the growth recently:

Date - - - - - - - - - # of Villages conquered
23rd March 2008 - 3
21st March 2008 - 2
13th March 2008 - 2
11th March 2008 - 2
06th March 2008 - 1
05th March 2008 - 1
04th March 2008 - 1
01st March 2008 - 1
29th February 2008 - 1
28th February 2008 - 1
27th February 2008 - 1
26th February 2008 - 1
20th February 2008 - 1
18th February 2008 - 2
10th February 2008 - 1
07th February 2008 - 1
05th February 2008 - 1
03rd February 2008 - 1
02nd February 2008 - 1
29th January 2008 - 1
25th January 2008 - 1
24th January 2008 - 2
21st January 2008 - 1
19th January 2008 - 1
16th January 2008 - 1
12th January 2008 - 1
11th January 2008 - 1
02nd January 2008 - 2

Ultimately, whoever controls all of the villages wins. Tribal Wars is different from Travian in that you do not win and have the server end and reset once someone controls a Wonder of the World long enough.

Telemarketer Call

My wife received a telemarketer call yesterday that was pretty funny. Here is the script of what happened:

Wife: Hello?

Telemarketer: Is the Owner there?

Wife: I'm the Owner.

Telemarketer: Hi I'm calling today to offer you a interest rate check.

Wife: I'm not interested.

Telemarketer: No I'm not selling anything. This is a simple interest rate check to see if you are paying to high on your credit cards.

Wife: That's okay I'm not interested.

Telemarketer: So you are okay with paying more in interest?

Wife: Actually I have a pretty good rate.

Telemarketer: Really? What is it?

Wife: 0%

Telemarketer: (disgusted) I don't believe you.

Wife: Sorry, I don't care if you don't believe me. It's true.

Telemarketer: I want you to fax it over to me and show me.

Wife: I'm not going to fax over my statement to a stranger. You called me.

Telemarketer: No no you can cross out all your information, I don't need to see that. I want to see the 0%.

Wife: I'm not going to take the time or the effort to fax over a statement so a telemarketer will believe me.

Telemarketer: Click.

"The Best Free Browser Games List"

Well, I have found another blog that deals with all free browser games. I liked what he had listed so thought I would add it to the links on the side. You can find it there or here.

Major War going on. . .

My Tribe in Tribal Wars is involved in a large scale war. Currently, the sides are my family of tribes which include 3 of the top 20 tribes against a top 5 tribe and needless to say we do not have the involvement needed to really sustain a good front.

I think we have lost about 40+ villages to the enemy and have gained around 5. Not a good balance there. Being in the second level of the family tribes a lot of the members of this 90+ person tribe seem to just be coasting along and not supporting the front line players.

I have 37(increasing all of the time) villages and points in the 290,000 range. Not huge but not small either. I am supporting 6 or so of the front line villages with anywhere from 16,000 troops up to 50,000 troops in each of those villages.

Now that to me sounds impressive, but it starts to pale in comparison when the attacking player has 1.2 million points and who knows how many troops at his disposal.

The good thing about the game is that the attackers are limited by the size of the village farms. The farm maxes out at level 30 giving that village a maximum number of troops and building points of 24,000. Technically, you could have 20,000 axemen in one village but the majority of villages that I have seen have 10,000 - 12,000 points and that limits the amount of axes or other attacking troops to around 12,000 to 16,000 if they have any type of token defense for the village.

This means that each attack can only have that many attackers and you can stack villages with as many defending troops as you would like. It all boils down to how active the defending tribes are. If they all support each other and beef up the attacked villages they loose very little troops while they wipe out the attacking armies no matter how large the attacker is.

Also playing into this equation is the Morale calculation. A member of our tribe wrote the following in our forum:

What is morale?
Morale is basically how much your troops want to fight a smaller target, they may feel sorry for them or whatever. If your attacking a larger target, your morale is always 100%. Morale is not like luck which is random but it is a definite calculable figure which your simulator will happily calculate for you.
Morale Figures
Enemy 20% of your points, you have 90% morale
Enemy 17.5% of your points, you have 82% morale
Enemy 15% of your points, you have 75% morale
Enemy 10% of your points, you have 60% morale
Enemy 5% of your points, you have 45% morale
Enemy 2.5% of your points, you have 38% morale

And what does this mean in practice?
If morale was 100%, your losses are at 100%

Morale is 90% => you lose 133% troops
With morale at 90%, you lose 1/3 more. If this tips the balance of the battle it of course gets a lot worse-

Morale is 80% => you lose 150% troops
Morale is 67% => you lose 200% troops
Morale is 50% => you lose 300% troops
Morale is 32% => you lose 600% troops (32% is lowest morale you can ever have)

And for the record. Morale is calculated on your total player points vs. total points of your target.

So, if our smaller players get their act in gear we can decimate the attacking forces due to our smaller sizes and then retaliate.

All in all this is going to be a very drawn out war and I hope that we start to turn it around or get a bit more active.

You have to support your Tribemates as if they were you since it will be you someday.

If I had a time machine . .

I was sitting at work and my building queue's were full when I started thinking about what I would do if I had a time machine. Now of course I would go back in time and give myself information to make me a billionaire but it is more fun if there are rules. Here they are:

1) You cannot interact with yourself in any way. "Back to the Future" style or you will destroy all of time.

2) The regular laws of the land apply so no killing, maiming, or running amok.

I figured that I would go back in time and just watch stuff happen. Popping in and out of ancient world would be fun as well as seeing the Roman empire in all of its glory. I would love to see the American continent before the white man arrived and watch the sermon on the mount. I would hide in the mountains and see the real story of the 300 Spartans.

I would go back to the slam dunk competition where Michael Jordan dunked from the free throw line and be court side for that, as well as at the Superbowl when the Dolphins had their perfect season.

What would you like to do?

Browser Gaming, MMORPG's, and MMOG's

Reflecting back on how my love (my wife would call it an obsession) with gaming started, I have to start with my memories of my brother, friends and I in a basement playing Dungeons and Dragons for hours on end.

My younger brother and I would go over to our friends house, Bryan and Greg who were our ages and we would order pizza and setup for an adventure.

Starting out, my friend Bryan was the Dungeon Master, and sure enough a rock would fly out of nowhere and kill his brother just for fun and to make Greg mad. Greg would then block the rock (even though he was supposedly already dead according to his brother the DM) with his somehow newly acquired +25 speed ultra sword which would then turn into a snake (according to the DM Bryan) and bite him and kill him. I just have to laugh, good times.

We got tired of that game for some reason, and started rolling characters in the TMNT universe. I think that I was a wolverine and we always somehow ended up with characters that were 10 times more powerful than they were supposed to be due to fudging our rolls.

My pages with all of our characters and weapons are probably around my office somewhere or in a box in the attic.

Gradually, we moved on to Palladium which stuck with me well into my college days and I proudly display the 8 or 9 compendiums and resource books that I own on the bookshelf in my office. I need to get my pewter skeletons and dragons out if I can find them as well.

It was getting harder and harder to find willing and able friends to go out and slay pencil and paper dragons, so I ended up looking online at the games that were available there. All of the MMOG's and MMORPG's are just pen and paper adventures with the DM being the programmer and the pen and paper being replaced by a keyboard and monitor.

I still miss the old paper and pencil nights around a table looking through a dungeon for some super powerful bad guy. However, then I remember why I enjoy the online versions after writing with a pencil and erasing it for 8 hours straight.


So there I was, in college and I heard about a game called Everquest. A friend of mine was on the game already and asked me to join in. I created Vron, a wood elf druid, and started grinding away.

Vron seemed to always be just below the highest level and would get to that point as a new expansion would come out and then I would have to start grinding again. I played that game off and on for a few years (5 - 6) and ultimately had to give it up due to never being able to accomplish anything. That truly was a never ending quest. By the end of the game I had 10+ characters with a few of them being the highest level and geared somewhat well. Nothing that the top players had but I was a casual player and liked exploring more than just sitting and gaining experience.


I tried the other games such as World of Warcraft and enjoyed them but they all present the same scenario. If you want to get to the top, you have to quit your job, divorce your wife and kids, and stop eating. It isn't that bad but when the group that you join requires you to play nightly for 4+ hours a night you run out of time for a lot of other things. Most of which are in reality more important that getting the upgraded weapon or piece of armor.

That is when I was shown online strategy, RPG, and adventure games and started into those. They seem to be the best of all of my worlds. I can do them at work during my down times, and they do not take a lot of time to do well.

I do miss those games though of Bryan and Greg and mysterious rocks and swords. Good times.

Grinding along. . .

Well, I just finished updating my Tribal Wars village queues and am waiting on resources in Travian. I am just grinding along making sure resources do not go to waste and my building and troops queues are full and producing. Cheers.

Other links

I was wondering what other sites were out there that dealt with browser gaming and came upon a few good ones:

Game2K - A website that has a very large amount of games that it states are browser games. I have not checked out the reliability of any of these. Let me know what you think.

Dark Galaxy - Space Based Browser game that goes for up to 3 months at a time.

Internet Strategy Games list on About.com - Again a good list of some of the games out there but I have not been able to check any of them on the list yet.

Wiki List - I found that Wiki has a great list of games though that site is a give or take depending on who is writing it.

Strategy Browser Gaming

Well, I have a job where my free time between actual work can be anywhere from a minute up to 30 minutes. Generally, it is closer to a minute but there is no rhyme or reason and some parts of the day I do not have any time at all. Due to this, I am unable to do anything that places a specific time demand on my actions.

Now I like to read through the news and every once in a while I will look up popular YouTube videos, however those are pretty boring and get old after a while. So, some of my coworkers and I found out about online browser games.

I think it started with Tribal Wars and then branched into others but the beauty of these types of games is that you can log into them for 5 hours or more straight (not recommended if you want to have a life outside of them) or just for 20 seconds. I have a list of the current games that I am playing as well as the games that I have tried out.