DUEL! Challenge Arena

[Atuan]

This game has been created:

Maximus Elves vs. Atuan's Lizards

Yes, and very promptly created, I might add.

I have also e-mailed to to you, Rick, a list of first impressions and feedback.

NOTE TO ATUAN: In playing around with the interface of the Alamaze Online Order System, I clicked on the Ready button. Apparently, it cannot be unclicked. No orders have actually been issued, yet. If you click on the Ready button, the turn will process, but my kingdom will just sit there like a knot on a log. Just a heads up to you, in case you visit this forum, again, BEFORE you click the Ready button for your turn.

NOTE TO ANYONE ELSE: Is there no map in the interface? Am I just overlooking it?

Just post here when you are ready and I will at that point hit ready. If you want a poorly colored excel map. I created one for use in my games that I would be happy to share. I will say it's been a bit so the terrain might have changed or I could have made a mistake but the order tracker will inform you when you have used more movement points than you have.

Good luck and ask frequent questions if you are unsure about anything


Atuan

[unclemike]

This game has been created:

Maximus Elves vs. Atuan's Lizards

Yes, and very promptly created, I might add.

I have also e-mailed to to you, Rick, a list of first impressions and feedback.

NOTE TO ATUAN: In playing around with the interface of the Alamaze Online Order System, I clicked on the Ready button. Apparently, it cannot be unclicked. No orders have actually been issued, yet. If you click on the Ready button, the turn will process, but my kingdom will just sit there like a knot on a log. Just a heads up to you, in case you visit this forum, again, BEFORE you click the Ready button for your turn.

NOTE TO ANYONE ELSE: Is there no map in the interface? Am I just overlooking it?

I asked Ry Vor to remove those forum pages with attachments since several people have mentioned that they have problems downloading the files. Refer to the Help Guides page instead which has the map and other materials that new players may need to play the game: http://fallofromegame.com/alamazeorders/...Cycle.html

[admin]

Much appreciated!

The map, itself, doesn't state the correct / desired / preferred way of determining coordinates for a specific square / location on the map. It also uses letters for both the x-axis and for the y-axis. Is the x-axis the vertical axis on this map, or is it the y-axis. The reason that I ask is this - Where new players to the game are concerned, nothing should simply be assumed. Is Pelenor on this may located at map coordinate HE or EH? The more that is left to new players to figure out for themselves, the more likely that early dropouts may occur. I look at this map, and I don't automatically, instinctively know 100% which system the game uses.

Of course, one could simply say, "Read the rulebook." If you have to read the rulebook, then it isn't intuitive. The primary reason that I don't play more games? Rulebooks. Some games I've tried, reading the rulebook multiple times didn't help. Fall of Rome and Centurion utilized a different approach to incorporation of the map than Alamaze.

[Atuan]

HE is the city in question. I hope that helps with the longitude and latitude of the map. As I said I am willing to go as slow as needed. Make sure you use order #11 this turn. One should be for influence. Likely the other for a governor. and the third for something else needed.. Then again you might choose the defense option due to us going to war from turn 1. In a regular game influence and governor are almost always 2 of the 3 choices.

[Jumpingfist]

This game has been created:

Maximus Elves vs. Atuan's Lizards

Yes, and very promptly created, I might add.

I have also e-mailed to to you, Rick, a list of first impressions and feedback.

NOTE TO ATUAN: In playing around with the interface of the Alamaze Online Order System, I clicked on the Ready button. Apparently, it cannot be unclicked. No orders have actually been issued, yet. If you click on the Ready button, the turn will process, but my kingdom will just sit there like a knot on a log. Just a heads up to you, in case you visit this forum, again, BEFORE you click the Ready button for your turn.

NOTE TO ANYONE ELSE: Is there no map in the interface? Am I just overlooking it?

I asked Ry Vor to remove those forum pages with attachments since several people have mentioned that they have problems downloading the files. Refer to the Help Guides page instead which has the map and other materials that new players may need to play the game: http://fallofromegame.com/alamazeorders/...Cycle.html

May be good to create a forum specifically for new players.   With links to the most import stuff they need to know.   This would also help guide visitors to a new player section to allow them to preview the game a bit.  Currently it is not all that easy to figure out what is going on when you first visit the sight.  As seen above he did not even know what map to use.

[Ry Vor]

Much appreciated!

The map, itself, doesn't state the correct / desired / preferred way of determining coordinates for a specific square / location on the map. It also uses letters for both the x-axis and for the y-axis. Is the x-axis the vertical axis on this map, or is it the y-axis. The reason that I ask is this - Where new players to the game are concerned, nothing should simply be assumed. Is Pelenor on this may located at map coordinate HE or EH? The more that is left to new players to figure out for themselves, the more likely that early dropouts may occur. I look at this map, and I don't automatically, instinctively know 100% which system the game uses.

Of course, one could simply say, "Read the rulebook." If you have to read the rulebook, then it isn't intuitive. The primary reason that I don't play more games? Rulebooks. Some games I've tried, reading the rulebook multiple times didn't help. Fall of Rome and Centurion utilized a different approach to incorporation of the map than Alamaze.

The map and all rules are strangely enough, found on the forum Alamaze Rules and Resources.  http://kingdomsofarcania.net/forum/showt...?tid=10513

The description of how to use the map, (ie, coordinates etc.) is about as early as it possibly could be in the General Rules.

"There are two maps active for current Alamaze games, used for different game formats.  The Resurgent map is used for all game formats of 4 to 12 players, and has 10 regions and 676 areas and is described below.  The Centauria map is for the Tutorial (single player) and Duel (two player) games.  It is a much smaller map with 2 regions, but the description below applies as well, other than the map size.

The map portrays the "active" regions of Alamaze, wherein all game actions take place. The map is divided into 26 rows and columns labeled "A" - "Z", for a total of 676 squares called "Areas". (Each square is an area.) An area is identified by cross-indexing the label from each axis, placing the vertical axis label first.  Thus, "AA" identifies the upper left most area - the northwest corner.  Similarly, "AZ" is the northeastern most area and "ZA" is the southwestern most area.

The map (and all the Rules and player aids) can be viewed and downloaded on the Online Order Entry website at: http://fallofromegame.com/alamazeorders/login.php and click on “Help Guides”, then on “Resurgent Map with Borders”.  For Centauria, click on the Centauria link."


This doesn't seem obscure.  Alamaze is not a shooter.  There's no good way to learn the game without reading the rules.  We have made the task less onerous by having the general components of play in a descriptive sense in The General Rules.  Then, when specificity is required, players refer to The Commands. Beyond that are other texts, such as a summary Kingdom Dossier to get a feel for each kingdom, Spell Lists of the maybe 100 spells, other documents as well as the famous Valhalla, where all the exploits of all players and kingdoms since The Resurgence in 2013 are recorded and immortalized.

So, there is no getting around reading the rules, but it can be digested in bits and as skill advances, more nuance can be learned.

In general: never miss a turn.  Then, within each turn, you almost always should be issuing the maximum possible number of commands possible, usually with quite a bit of difficulty on which to choose and how to spend or squirrel away.  Enamor in your capital region through Ruler action is advised.  Customize your kingdom on turn 1.  Recon the areas you move your nobles to.  Use patrols to scout areas.  Consider sending up to your top three emissaries to the city in your capital region.  Get a level 3 agent or fanatic to L4, where they have more abilities.  Get Adepts to Power 1.  Title a Governor to Baron.  Activate your 4th group with a Centurion and patrol about.  Sell excess food on the open market.  If you are in a diplomatic game, send introductions to as many as  you like.

[admin]

The map and all rules are strangely enough, found on the forum Alamaze Rules and Resources.  http://kingdomsofarcania.net/forum/showt...?tid=10513

The description of how to use the map, (ie, coordinates etc.) is about as early as it possibly could be in the General Rules.

"There are two maps active for current Alamaze games, used for different game formats.  The Resurgent map is used for all game formats of 4 to 12 players, and has 10 regions and 676 areas and is described below.  The Centauria map is for the Tutorial (single player) and Duel (two player) games.  It is a much smaller map with 2 regions, but the description below applies as well, other than the map size.

The map portrays the "active" regions of Alamaze, wherein all game actions take place. The map is divided into 26 rows and columns labeled "A" - "Z", for a total of 676 squares called "Areas". (Each square is an area.) An area is identified by cross-indexing the label from each axis, placing the vertical axis label first.  Thus, "AA" identifies the upper left most area - the northwest corner.  Similarly, "AZ" is the northeastern most area and "ZA" is the southwestern most area.

The map (and all the Rules and player aids) can be viewed and downloaded on the Online Order Entry website at: http://fallofromegame.com/alamazeorders/login.php and click on “Help Guides”, then on “Resurgent Map with Borders”.  For Centauria, click on the Centauria link."


This doesn't seem obscure.  Alamaze is not a shooter.  There's no good way to learn the game without reading the rules.  We have made the task less onerous by having the general components of play in a descriptive sense in The General Rules.  Then, when specificity is required, players refer to The Commands. Beyond that are other texts, such as a summary Kingdom Dossier to get a feel for each kingdom, Spell Lists of the maybe 100 spells, other documents as well as the famous Valhalla, where all the exploits of all players and kingdoms since The Resurgence in 2013 are recorded and immortalized.

So, there is no getting around reading the rules, but it can be digested in bits and as skill advances, more nuance can be learned.

In general: never miss a turn.  Then, within each turn, you almost always should be issuing the maximum possible number of commands possible, usually with quite a bit of difficulty on which to choose and how to spend or squirrel away.  Enamor in your capital region through Ruler action is advised.  Customize your kingdom on turn 1.  Recon the areas you move your nobles to.  Use patrols to scout areas.  Consider sending up to your top three emissaries to the city in your capital region.  Get a level 3 agent or fanatic to L4, where they have more abilities.  Get Adepts to Power 1.  Title a Governor to Baron.  Activate your 4th group with a Centurion and patrol about.  Sell excess food on the open market.  If you are in a diplomatic game, send introductions to as many as  you like.

From the Alamaze Online Order System page, I quote:

Welcome to our new order entry website. Please have a look around. Any feedback is much appreciated.


The whole reason that I give you feedback, whether this bit about the map, here, or the twenty point list that I e-mailed you last night, is to enable you to IMPROVE your game and your system beyond where it is, when I encounter it. Lots of things are always contained within the pages of rulebooks. This was the case, also, when you were trying to persuade people to play fall of Rome, and when you were trying to figure out how to retain players for that game.

The point of the feedback is not for me to have to not ever read the rulebook. When you needed a forum set up, I could just have easily told you that you could just read a manual or an instruction book. In my considered opinion, based upon my experience accumulated down through the years, one should NOT have to read rulebook, in order to discern the desired way to read coordinates on a map.

If reading a rulebook is the answer, then voila! No feedback is needed.

Strangely enough, to borrow your phraseology of choice, when I actually tried to download the rulebook, prior to signing up for a game, I clicked on that Rulebook link at the top of the Alamaze forum index page - the one that someone didn't keep up to date, and which didn't actually work.

What you are taking for granted is your own familiarity with where everything on your website is located. Not everyone who comes across your game will possess that advantage. Human beings can - and will - miss things. They'll overlook things. That's true, even when they read a rulebook, also.

If everything that I need is in the rulebook, then I'll just forego the feedback installments that I mentioned to you, previously. I can just apply the time saved elsewhere. I am currently trying to learn how to play three different games, simultaneously - Alamaze, Dark Age II, and Takamo. In all of the years that I've played games of different sorts, I've never once encountered a rulebook for any game that was better than the game and its supporting mechanisms being intuitive and intuitively laid out, to begin with.

When you talk about having made a task less onerous, you seem oblivious to the maze that you have created, here. The maze is the very first thing that my eyes take note of, when I visit here. What was the purpose of having a dead link to the Rulebook displayed prominently at the top of the forum index page - as well as at the top of every forum page on the site, here> Is that part of your less onerous approach, Rick?

What was that company that helped you set up your Fall of Rome site, originally? Was it 352, or something like that? What year was that, anyway? I feel like I've stepped back in time.

One final comment, and then I'll focus on playing the game. There's never been such a thing as a game or an interface that is too intuitive in their layout and design.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got some lizards to kill.

[admin]

Just post here when you are ready and I will at that point hit ready.  If you want a poorly colored excel map.  I created one for use in my games that I would be happy to share.  I will say it's been a bit so the terrain might have changed or I could have made a mistake but the order tracker will inform you when you have used more movement points than you have.

Good luck and ask frequent questions if you are unsure about anything


Atuan

Thanks! I appreciate it. I'll try to issue orders sometime later, tonight, or tomorrow, sometime.

[Ry Vor]

The map and all rules are strangely enough, found on the forum Alamaze Rules and Resources.  http://kingdomsofarcania.net/forum/showt...?tid=10513

The description of how to use the map, (ie, coordinates etc.) is about as early as it possibly could be in the General Rules.

"There are two maps active for current Alamaze games, used for different game formats.  The Resurgent map is used for all game formats of 4 to 12 players, and has 10 regions and 676 areas and is described below.  The Centauria map is for the Tutorial (single player) and Duel (two player) games.  It is a much smaller map with 2 regions, but the description below applies as well, other than the map size.

The map portrays the "active" regions of Alamaze, wherein all game actions take place. The map is divided into 26 rows and columns labeled "A" - "Z", for a total of 676 squares called "Areas". (Each square is an area.) An area is identified by cross-indexing the label from each axis, placing the vertical axis label first.  Thus, "AA" identifies the upper left most area - the northwest corner.  Similarly, "AZ" is the northeastern most area and "ZA" is the southwestern most area.

The map (and all the Rules and player aids) can be viewed and downloaded on the Online Order Entry website at: http://fallofromegame.com/alamazeorders/login.php and click on “Help Guides”, then on “Resurgent Map with Borders”.  For Centauria, click on the Centauria link."


This doesn't seem obscure.  Alamaze is not a shooter.  There's no good way to learn the game without reading the rules.  We have made the task less onerous by having the general components of play in a descriptive sense in The General Rules.  Then, when specificity is required, players refer to The Commands. Beyond that are other texts, such as a summary Kingdom Dossier to get a feel for each kingdom, Spell Lists of the maybe 100 spells, other documents as well as the famous Valhalla, where all the exploits of all players and kingdoms since The Resurgence in 2013 are recorded and immortalized.

So, there is no getting around reading the rules, but it can be digested in bits and as skill advances, more nuance can be learned.

In general: never miss a turn.  Then, within each turn, you almost always should be issuing the maximum possible number of commands possible, usually with quite a bit of difficulty on which to choose and how to spend or squirrel away.  Enamor in your capital region through Ruler action is advised.  Customize your kingdom on turn 1.  Recon the areas you move your nobles to.  Use patrols to scout areas.  Consider sending up to your top three emissaries to the city in your capital region.  Get a level 3 agent or fanatic to L4, where they have more abilities.  Get Adepts to Power 1.  Title a Governor to Baron.  Activate your 4th group with a Centurion and patrol about.  Sell excess food on the open market.  If you are in a diplomatic game, send introductions to as many as  you like.

From the Alamaze Online Order System page, I quote:

Welcome to our new order entry website. Please have a look around. Any feedback is much appreciated.


The whole reason that I give you feedback, whether this bit about the map, here, or the twenty point list that I e-mailed you last night, is to enable you to IMPROVE your game and your system beyond where it is, when I encounter it. Lots of things are always contained within the pages of rulebooks. This was the case, also, when you were trying to persuade people to play fall of Rome, and when you were trying to figure out how to retain players for that game.

The point of the feedback is not for me to have to not ever read the rulebook. When you needed a forum set up, I could just have easily told you that you could just read a manual or an instruction book. In my considered opinion, based upon my experience accumulated down through the years, one should NOT have to read rulebook, in order to discern the desired way to read coordinates on a map.

If reading a rulebook is the answer, then voila! No feedback is needed.

Strangely enough, to borrow your phraseology of choice, when I actually tried to download the rulebook, prior to signing up for a game, I clicked on that Rulebook link at the top of the Alamaze forum index page - the one that someone didn't keep up to date, and which didn't actually work.

What you are taking for granted is your own familiarity with where everything on your website is located. Not everyone who comes across your game will possess that advantage. Human beings can - and will - miss things. They'll overlook things. That's true, even when they read a rulebook, also.

If everything that I need is in the rulebook, then I'll just forego the feedback installments that I mentioned to you, previously. I can just apply the time saved elsewhere. I am currently trying to learn how to play three different games, simultaneously - Alamaze, Dark Age II, and Takamo. In all of the years that I've played games of different sorts, I've never once encountered a rulebook for any game that was better than the game and its supporting mechanisms being intuitive and intuitively laid out, to begin with.

When you talk about having made a task less onerous, you seem oblivious to the maze that you have created, here. The maze is the very first thing that my eyes take note of, when I visit here. What was the purpose of having a dead link to the Rulebook displayed prominently at the top of the forum index page - as well as at the top of every forum page on the site, here> Is that part of your less onerous approach, Rick?

What was that company that helped you set up your Fall of Rome site, originally? Was it 352, or something like that? What year was that, anyway? I feel like I've stepped back in time.

One final comment, and then I'll focus on playing the game. There's never been such a thing as a game or an interface that is too intuitive in their layout and design.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got some lizards to kill.

I missed your email on the suggestions, I don't really use that personal email address. We see everything sent to support@alamaze.co very promptly. Thanks for taking the time to make the suggestions.

[unclemike]

The whole reason that I give you feedback, whether this bit about the map, here, or the twenty point list that I e-mailed you last night, is to enable you to IMPROVE your game and your system beyond where it is, when I encounter it. ...

I very much welcome your feedback whether it's positive or negative. I designed the order entry website to make it easier on all players both old and new so feel free to say whatever you wish and I'll investigate the matter if it can be made better.

Now onto the map situation. That concern will actually become worse in the future as Ry Vor creates new maps for the game. I think two more are planned for the upcoming Maelstrom release which would make a total of FIVE maps: Classic, Resurgent, Centauria, Maelstrom, and the other-new-map. How will a player know what's up?

To clear the matter, I'll state which map is being used for the game with the initial turn 0 files emailed to the player when a game starts (e.g., kingdom setup and kingdom turn 0 report). I'll also include links to the Help Guides page and other explanations if necessary to ensure that new players have a pleasant and enjoyable start to Alamaze.

So keep those comments flowing. They are helpful to me at least and I appreciate your feedback. BTW, can you send Support@Alamaze.co your list of 20 items that would improve the game? I didn't get a copy unless you email Support or attach it to a private message to me on this forum.