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  • Much thanks to Shadowmaster for his updates and what not these past couple months.
  • Donation Subscriptions: Active subscriptions from this month have been processed. I realize that there are many that are behind. Make sure you have ONE and only ONE recent ticket open about your subscription with "DP" in the subject and I will get to it as soon as I can (this week).
  • Kicked the training program back into action after an error and you should see all the results from any battles/training you've had or done.
  • Arena sim reported as down but appears to be working ok to me. Please report further problems.
  • Fixed a long standing but overlooked error with heat sinks being partially repaired.

    5/11/2009

  • Fixed a bug that was letting folks log in to NASI.
  • Fixed a bug associated with having 0 zones flagged and moving units.
  • Major War Change: retreating into adjacent ongoing battles, or attacking ongoing battles with third party empires, will no longer be possible. Once a fight has started, thats it. No reinforcements. If you retreat out, you end up in enemy zone if its not your zone. We are considering options for structured reinforcing of zones after battles have been ongoing for 6 real hours, but if such a feature is implemented it is still some ways off. The end of retreating into current battles will take effect tomorrow around the same time as the other war changes previously mentioned.
  • Fixed a nasty bug with infantry and ABR that would capture a zone even if you should not have.
  • Fixed a bug with taking vehicles off the market.
  • Fixed a bug with cancelling DOWs.
  • Building deletion, and the plunder associated with it, will now only happen every 30 Nevdays as previously announced.
  • Deleted a mostly out of game flame thread that had started in the public Nevmails. People who choose to continue this thread will be fined 1 week worth of income for each offense.
  • Changed the way that battle id's were created to eliminate crossover battles. Hopefully this will make crossovers a non-existant phenomenon. If you experince a crossover battle (that is, 2 non-related battles taking place in the same zone when they should be elsewhere) please open a help ticket. Thanks.
  • Unclaimed Donations: There are still several Paypal donations that lack login names. If you have made a Paypal donation in the past week and have not recevied your DP please open a Donation Realted help ticket with the Paypal Transaction ID and instructions on how to process the donation (login name and amounts). Thanks.

    8/31/2003

  • The Bug Policy has been reposted in a more obvious place. Everyone should please read it and be familiar with it. It is located under the Admin tab.
  • As a P.S. to the note below this: We don't care who you are, or why you passed a URL directly. If we catch you, the minimum penalty is a $1 billion fine to the guilty empire and/or your largest empire. Period. No explanation, no excuses, no tolerance. Expect many such fines to be handed out in the future, as early as this evening, many to some of the most respected names in the game. If you can't handle this policy, please go find another game to play.
  • Rules Update: There are a couple new rules added to the Rules page (found under the Admin tab) that everyone should be familiar with. The most important one deals with people who are attempting to hack the game by using 3rd party clients or passing information manually through their URL's. In the past we have simply worked hard to prevent things like this from succeeding, but now we are taking a more hardline stance against it. Abusing an existing system with means we provide is one thing, hacking the game to find flaws in the code and exploit them is another. Cheating of this manner is incredibly unbalancing to the game, and the people doing it are in fact not 'playing' the game at all and have no business being here. Our small Admin team works absurd amounts of hours to create a fun, exciting world for people to play in. When people stop playing in the world and instead pick at the fabric that creates that world, they undermine everything that we are trying to do. We will now be logging as much information as possible to find the culprits of this type of behavior.
  • Plunder Update: You now capture 20% of all uncommissioned vehicles and EV's when you capture a zone.
  • Fixed a bug on the crew page if you had 0 EV's in that zone.
  • There is a known bug with messages appearing in battle have nothing to do with your battle. Simply please ignore them and do not send us help tickets about them. This will probably not be looked into until we revamp the messaging system.
  • Battle will be unavailable periodically today and tomorrow. Too many people are cheating in war, and we are working to prevent some of the more exploitative abuses. This may result in large spells where war is unavailable. Feel free to ask around in chat who is to blame and destroy their empires accordingly!
  • Fixed a bug where battles which had been resolving with ABR in zones with routed infantry were in rare cases improperly declaring the routed infantry the winner and setting the other units to enemy zone.
  • Fixed a bug where routing infantry were not always going to enemy zone, and were sometimes winning battles.
  • Routing infantry now only lose 1/4th the morale and reputation they would lose if killed, instead of full value.

    8/30/2003

  • Upcoming Change: As of Monday, September 1st all DOW's will last a minimum of 30 Nevdays.
  • New Feature: You can now declare war on everyone who has attacked you in the past nevmonth at once. The cost is double a standard declaration of war, and can be made from the wars page. Declaring war in this manner is purely defensive, as it only affects empires that attacked you. Thus, your DOW will not count toward restricting those empires.
  • ABR Change: Infantry on ABR use their hit skill as their move skill as well. That is, 0/8 infantry use a moveskill 8 for ABR.
  • Wartime restrictions are intended to protect empires that are being overwhelmed by attackers, particularly while offline. They were not meant as a shield for empires who frequently attack to hide behind. Accordingly, empires who make attacks while restricted will have the value of their attack deducted from every empire's restriction value against it. That is, the more wars you have been in recently, the more quickly you will unrestrict if you continue to attack others while restricted.
  • Fixed a bug with dead units being logged twice.
  • To speed the login process empire reputation is now tallied from soldiers in actual units.
  • Fixed the front page to not show kills that were recorded improperly.
  • Unprocessed Paypal Donations: There are several Paypal Donations that did not include login names in their Paypal notes. If you have sent in a donation 24 or more hours ago but it has not been processed yet, please open a help ticket under Donation Related so that we can complete the transaction. Thank you.

    8/29/2003

  • Factions by Morale is now an option on the Top 100 lists.
  • Deleted a number of "skyscraper" cheat buildings that were not in nuked zones.
  • From now on zones nuked due to cheating will not create login messages. No need to clutter up your message windows with cheat nukes.
  • Nuclear weapons are a tremendous success. 13 zones of cheaters were successfully nuked. From now on, most minor cheating will be punishable by nuking the offenders cities (major cheats earn deletions and/or banning).
  • Fixed a bug that allowed people to create buildings with more than the proper number of levels. In some cases people had built hundreds of level 200 or level 500 buildings. The zones in question were referred to the NICC for nuclear testing.
  • Cheaters: There is no "statute of limitations" on cheating. If we have what we think is good evidence of bug abuse you WILL be punished. If you come forward and point out the problem we will handle it very differently. Cheaters of any kind get no love from us, and our punishments are often rash and harsh.
  • Warning! The Neveron Intelligence and Communication Corporation (NICC) has announced that it will begin testing its' nuclear weapons platform currently orbiting Neveron. The NICC wants to be sure that all of their systems are battle-ready.
  • Added "Most BV killed in last 24 hours" to login screen.

    8/28/2003

  • Fixed a bug on the conquer_market page.
  • Began better logging of vehicle and mech kills. This will help us solve some bug problems and track effects of certain changes.
  • Added most kills in past 24 hours to login screen.
  • Fixed an inconsistancy with the plunder functions that were sometimes awarding more resources than an empire had for plunder.
  • Rewrote the maintenance level descriptions on the Empire Settings pages, as the previous one was incomplete and incorrect.
  • Fixed a bug with the login page that was preventing people from accessing the game last night.
  • Fixed a bug that made it look like infra was vanishing from residential zones. Your pop will update at the next daychange.
  • Fixed a bug with creating new empires.

    8/27/2003

  • The Training page has been update to run a little faster, much faster for larger empires who were having problems even loading the page. More improvements will be made on this tomorrow. As it is I've been here for 10 hours so I'm out til then....
  • The Top 100 lists now show people, empires and factions by kills.
  • New Feature: Neveron is now logging numbers of kills. Infantry units count as 1/2 kills while all others count as full kills. This could be more complex but unit size is already factored into reputation, so while a person that destroys a light mech will get 1 kill as someone who destroys an assault would, the latter receives more reputation. This will be displayed on the Units page as well as Top 100 lists.
  • Did an gamewide empire reputation update.
  • New Feature: There is now a list of Factions by Income on the Top 100 lists. Note this lists *all* factions, not just the top 100.
  • New Feature: There is now a list of Factions by Reputation on the Top 100 lists. Note this lists *all* factions, not just the top 100.
  • Empire reputation now only updates on login. Most empires that were logged in during this change will find their rep at 0. Please do not panic. I know this is going to be hard for a lot of you. Instead, simply log out and back in again and you will find happiness.
  • War Level Information: Your War Level (WL), as printed on your stats frame, is going to be used for two things only. However these two things should accomplish all our goals of somewhat equalizing warfare. First, declarations of war (DOW). All DOWs will use WL instead of empire level. For example, if some uber LW empire has a WL of 10+, anyone may declare on it no matter how big (because anyone can declare on level 10+). Or, if you have an elite level 4 (WL = 7) you may only declare on other empires with a war level of 7. This includes, of course, all empires level 7+ but also includes other lower level empires with a WL of 7+. Secondly, WL will be used for restriction calculations. So your level 7 LW empire with WL of 10 will restrict as if it was level 10 (meaning, almost impossible to restrict it). This make it extremely difficult (and not worthwhile) to restrict their smaller empires which have high WLs. These changes will take effect next monday, unless we see fit to make additional alterations which force a delay of implementation.
  • Created an update that will correct "ghost cities." Sometimes the zones table is not updated properly and it thinks you have buildings where there are none. Going to the Buildings page for that zone should fix this.
  • Updated the active zone page to work with flags.
  • Fixed one last final bug on movement parts shipment.
  • Fixed a bug with the login page if no one was in battle.

    8/26/2003

  • Proposal status: you'll see "experimental war level" on your stats bar next time you log in. This states the propsed war level you will be fighting at. Explanations will be forthcoming tomorrow after we tweak the formulas and arrive at values we are happy with.
  • Proposal update. Thanks everyone who has written thus far. There is a strong call for incorporating total mech BV of the empire into the equation and not basing it exclusively on the best unit. We agree that this makes sense. The level 4 empire in the example below only has 2 mechs total (given, they are both very powerful mechs). It does not seem reasonable that it fight level 8 empires. However it should also not be fighting level 5 empires, which have a total mech BV in the same order. The example LW empire would probably be most fair fighting level 6 and 7 empire, and so we will devise a formula which incorporates max BV as well as total mech BV.
  • Terrain Creation is not working reliably at the moment. We are aware of the problem and are working to restore full performance to terrain creation.
  • Change Proposal: Please send all comments on the following system as a suggestions help ticket. Your input will be used when determining the final policy which will be implemented no sooner than 1 week from today. We are addressing the issue of "land war empires." These are relatively low level empires with relatively high-BV units in them. In war, they are nearly unstoppable when pitted against a balanced empire of the same level. We propose to give each empire a Warcost Multiplier (WM) based on its level and its highest BV unit.

    Lets look at an example. The average level 4 empire has a best-BV unit of 970. The Brotherhood of Steel is a level 4 empire with a pair of 1/1 MAD-4As, BV=2857 each. On average, you would expect a level 8 to have a unit of 2895 so this level 4 will pay effectively level 8 prices (just over actually, as its BV is just over the average). This is very fair, as it will effectively prevent it from attacking other empires of its own level.

    update Concurrently, we will introduce reduced attack costs (10% normal) for any zone you owned in the past nevmonth (3 days). This is to prevent a low level player who has good units from being a target for other "anti-LW empire" empires who would otherwise be able to take his cities without fear of retaliation.

  • Empires with quotation marks (") in their names have several problems on the map page including war declarations and tower placements. You may no longer use the quotation marks in empire names. If you currently have them, you may wish to change your name if you want to place towers, etc..
  • Nuclear Weapons! Nuclear weapons are available as the ultimate weapon of mass destruction. Nukes cost $50 billion and are available with the following strict limitations. Once paid for, the money is deducted from your total and the bomb will detonate approximately 12-36 hours later. There is no way to cancel a strike once requested and paid for. When the bomb goes off, every building in the zone recieves 150 points of damage, destroying everything except Technology Complexes. Every non-mech unit is destroyed, including defense towers. Mechs all suffer 100 points of damage divided into five 20-point hits. The max buildings in the zone and all zone doublers are unaffected by the blast. If you want to order a nulcear weapon you must fill out a donation help ticket specifying the zone you wish to nuke. If the money is on hand we will charge your empire and send a confirmation that the bomb is on its way. If you wish to pool money from different empires to pay for a nuclear strike, please send a help ticket from each of the empire's emperor logins.
  • The terrain server hard drive was filled, with over 25 gig of terrain created. More space was freed up, and creation errors should drop significantly.
  • Company donation lists now go in alphabetical order.

    8/25/2003

  • This update isn't about any change, just a status update. As many of you know the biggest war ever waged on Neveron is currently underway between Kizo and allied factions vs. HOC and allies. At many points during the last 24 hours well over 1 million BV has been engaged in battles, with up to 50 concurrent fights being fought. Losses have been significant on both sides and from most player accounts almost everyone is having a wonderful time. This "update" is firstly to report, happily, that our servers are having no trouble handling the massive load of these battles and are running more smoothly in the face of such a load than ever before. Errors and timeouts continue to be at all-time lows after the many improvements made last week. There are still many issues we are working on to facilitate these large-scale wars but all in all we are very pleased with the way the game is handling it. Secondly, and more importantly, we would like to thank you the players for making this game as good as it is. Your energy and actions have catapulted the Neveron world into a new era of fun and turmoil, allowing everyone from the biggest superpower to the smallest newcomer to participate in the battles that Neveron was designed for. Lastly, we wish to issue a special thanks to those who have donated so much to support this game financially. You have been very generous and we all owe you thanks for providing the means to grow Neveron to where it is today, and to carry it into the future. Everyone involved in working on the Neveron project is excited to continue improving all aspects of game and we will continue to work hard to bring you the best onling gaming experience we can. In the meantime, good luck to both sides of this truly epic war which may well shape the face of the planet for years to come!
  • Fixed the top 100 Empires by Research Points list.
  • Another top 100 list was added. Actually it isn't top 100, its a list of ALL factions sorted by wealth.
  • Top 100 change: the Top 100 by Money list now includes all money in the empire, including that stored on various characters. The list also shows an approximate amount.
  • Donation Change. It has become increasingly clear that the most idiot-proof way of fielding an all-purpose attacking army with DP is by buying exclusively MAD-4A mechs. Their versatility is unrivalled, and even though they are relatively easy to defeat in any given situation using creative tactics and cheaper units, the MAD-4A can fight quite effectively in every situation making them the only thing to get for those armies built primarily on DP. In an effort to balance things out, we are increasing their DP value again, this time to 30. Additional DP adjustments may be forthcoming in the next few days as we analyze our logs and ask players what they feel are undervalued and overvalued. The only other adjustment made right now is for the extremely effective scout and speedbump killing, DP-only mech: the Fury FR-1DB. Despite its effectiveness, it is apparent that 50 DP is too much for the specialized unit, and it will now be valued at 30 DP as well.
  • Fixed a bug caused by the plunder page not running properly. People were having problems flagging zones that had been conquered because their flag hadn't been deleted properly. You can now flag the zone, but zones that you already have flagged are no longer omitted from your list of flagable zones. When I get the plunder page working right I will go back to the old system.

    8/23/2003

  • Sped up the attack page a LOT for large empires.
  • Fixed a slow query which was causing timeouts with level 12+ empires making battalion attacks.
  • Fixed a major bug allowing pilot logins to claim any unclaimed people in the empire.
  • Deleted a level 1 empire and fined the player's main empire for vulgarity in public NevMail.
  • Fixed a couple bugs that were forcing people to skip the plunder page (which also does many other extremely important updates when taking a zone in war) This should solve many, many problems related to war.
  • New Feature: Added a new kind of plunder: Resources! After much debugging you can now scrape off a chunk of your target's resources by capturing their factories. The amount you capture is a direct % of how many CF of their factories you grab.
  • Fixed a bug which was not charging anyone for attacking enemy zones.
  • Fixed a bug on the Empire Data page which was generating errors if the viewed empire had no units.
  • Fixed a bug which was holding some companies in battalions not part of their empire, making them impossible to select for battalion creation.
  • Fixed a bug with the map not showing units that were waiting to go into transit properly.
  • Fixed a bug with arenas, where you had to refresh your map each move phase.
  • Fixed an error in the research tree for the Panther mech.
  • Adjusted the BVs of 8 mech types and 5 vehicle types which won or lost too many duels.
  • Sped up the daychange process yet again, which should hopefully eliminate (for now) the last of the daychange related timeout errors nevwide.

    8/22/2003

  • Fixed a problem with the ABR system which was causing it to stop working periodically. ABR may still encounter fatal errors from time to time, but we are monitoring it closely to ensure stability while the system is perfected.

    8/21/2003

  • Falcons (30 ton rare mech) were put on the market for $100 mil a piece. 1 Vortex was also dropped for $2 billion.
  • Rear armor was added to the mech readouts.
  • Neveron is fully operational again. (Posted 1:30 PM Arizona time)
  • Downtime: As you may be aware, Neveron was down for about 8 hours today. While the cause was unexpected and out of our control, we took advantage of the opportunity to rebuild our network and move the servers to a new location. Not everything is back online currently, but the game seems functional. We will keep working to bring everything online tonight. (Posted 1.30 AM Arizona time)

    8/20/2003

  • Here is a significant change for you warmongers out there. From now on, a city will lose 10% of the buildings when it changes hands at most once per nevmonth. This prevents abuse of the nevmonth window on free re-attacks, as people could have deleted cities relatively effectively now. But more importantly, it keeps the stakes high in heated wars where cities trade hands rapidly.
  • Tower maintenance costs are now properly displayed on the tower research page.
  • Unit maintenance costs are also displayed in the marketplace unit info pages.
  • Unit maintenance costs are now displayed on every unit data page.
  • Bonus! Towers no longer count toward oversized military tax for large empires.
  • Increased tower maintenance has been added. You may need to log in again to see the effects.
  • Fixed several errors on the relocate_movementparts.asp page.
  • Cut two steps out of the daychange for zone building verification and shifted them to verify a zone only when activated. This should eliminate approximately 80 timeout errors per day.
  • Fixed a bug which had been preventing people from attacking empires with multiple apostrophes at the end of their names.

    8/19/03

  • Warning: There will soon be some changes regarding smaller empires with oversized militaries or elite units (large mechs). There has been far too much abuse of small empires and we will be implementing some new rules that force empires with elite units to fight larger empires instead of hiking around smaller empires destroying at will.
  • Here is another pretty big change that should help big empires fight each other. Once you attack a zone, you will have a full nevmonth (approximately 3 real days) to make subsequent attacks on that zone. Thus, sending a scout into a large enemy city (which is a very expensive attack) is no longer a financial mistake. When you later (w/in a nevmonth) send your actual attacking force the attack will be free. Other tactics become worthwhile as well, such as sending wave after wave of attackers into a heavily defended city. These subsequent attacks also do not count toward restriction thresholds.
  • Fixed a bug for donating for 3 DP mechs.
  • Changes the unit movement confirmation page to match the Neveron color scheme.
  • Corrected a bug preventing the income page from displaying for empires with zero population.
  • The new waiting period as described below has been implemented. Due to the large number of pages affected by this change, it is probable that there will be unforseen errors in some aspect of the game. Please be sure to report all related problems as a bug report help ticket as soon as possible. Thank you.
  • LC movement will be broken sporadically for a large part of today while the following change is implemented. When you select to move units via Landing Craft (LC) the first 10 minutes of the 30 minute move represent the time it takes the LC to arrive and pick up your troops. Once this change is fully implemented, your units will be located as "Waiting" during this time. If you move the units during this 10 minute wait, the LC will be cancelled. While waiting, the units are still in-zone and eligible to be attacked. As always, an LC will never pick up units in a contested zone. What this means is that the annoying raiding empires who drop in with a small number of high-BV units will have a much harder time getting away alive as they can no loger airlift out at the first sign of resistance. If they don't bring the means to keep a landing zone secure, exiting the region may prove difficult at best. Again, this change is being worked on today and this update is primarily a warning that LC movement may not be functioning properly today.
  • Fixed two major bugs introduced yesterday. First, vehicle units can once again be viewed. Secondly, empires with no population can once again view their stats frame.

    8/18/03

  • Fixed some error messages that should have been showing in the vehicle armoury page.
  • Added an error message to scrap vehicles function clarifying why they do not scrap.
  • WARNING! Tower maintenance costs are going to be going up by a huge amount. Right now the most powerful and effective towers in the game cost barely 10% of the maintenance costs of a 100-ton mech. As has been demonstrated in numerous engagements, well designed and properly deployed towers can be much more powerful than any mech. We have not decided on how much to increase tower maintenance costs yet, but it could conceivably be by as much as 2000% in certain cases. Double and triple range towers will bear the brunt of the increases.
  • Zone Flags Update: Some folks aren't quite understanding the whole purpose of zone flags. The idea is to reduce the number of zones that are preloaded onto your pages in day to day use. Rarely do you need more than a few zones flagged at any one time, and those are the zones that you routinely ship items to or move units around on. During war, of course, you will need to flag many more zones but you can then easily unflag them when you are done. To help keep this table small and the preloaded lists small I have limited people's zone flags to 50 (which is still more than anyone should ever need) and I may limit them further unless someone can give me some good reasons. You do not NEED zones to be flagged to ship items there, as you can simply use the text boxes provided.
  • Banned one cheater.
  • Deleted 30 cheat empires.
  • Some aspects to the Rules page have been updated and clarified.
  • Policy Change: there has been an unwritten policy for some time of merging empires upon request if you have 1000 DP on hand and upon admin approval only. We have often in the past refused mergers when the resultant empire would become one of the largest in the game. We are formalizing this policy at this time by stating that from now on no empire shall be eligible for a merger if it exceeds level 10. In other words, the largest merger possible would be merging two level 10s together to create a single level 11.
  • Fun Facts: The average empire on Neveron has 17,131 BV and makes $850,830 per Nevday (including market sales and transfers).
  • Sped the zones page loading time for large empires substantially.
  • Any given person may only be ZCO of a single zone. If you assign a character to command a new zone, any old zone(s) he commanded will be revert to zone commander = (none).
  • Made a change to building construction completion which should eliminate about 250 seconds of timeout errors every daychange. If this fix causes other building related problems to occur we may be forced to return to the old system.
  • Population calculation corrections (see below) were also made to the finance page. The net result of the finance page changes today has been a reduction in load time for the largest empires from 30-90 seconds, to 1-4 seconds.
  • Fixed a bug in weapons shipment.
  • Improvements were made to the market logging system further increasing the finance page load speed for larger or older empires.
  • BUG FIX: land war battles were being assigned arena IDs after the introduction of ABR. This caused all sorts of problems, and has now been corrected.
  • Military supply costs are no longer recalculated upon loading your finance page, but as a regularly scheduled nev-wide event. While this is entirely meaningless to most people, the reduction in lag upon loading the income page for larger empires was phenomenal.
  • Your listed empire population was generated from the zones table, which often has incorrect data from destroyed buildings or old bugs. The correct values are now being used in presenting your civilian populations. A few, primarily larger empires, may note population drops which should in most cases be less than one percent. This reflects the elimination of ghost buildings from your population tally. A nice collateral effect of this correction is a significant speed increase when logging into the largest empires.
  • Fixed a bug with subjects not appearing properly on your Open Ticket lists if there was no proper subject.
  • New Donation Policy: Paypal donations that use the "e-check" system (which often take up to 7 days to clear your bank accounts) of amounts at $500 or greater will now be processed immediately instead of waiting for the check to clear. Paypal charges us significantly less for these types of transactions than credit based ones and thus I do not want to discourage them. Please note that e-checks that are cancelled or not cleared properly (bounced) will result in the complete forfeit of the empires involved.

    8/17/03

  • ABR ranges now always have a 10% chance of being range 0, to avoid people from stalling fights by setting all involved units ideal ranges to large numbers.
  • New Feature! Auto Battle Resolution (ABR) has been introduced. The system appears to be working properly although it will undergo live testing during the next 24 hours to ensure it is bug free. Any battle which has been idle for at least 5 nevhours (30 minutes) will be subjected to ABR. Idle battles are defined as battles in which the current phase was scheduled to end more than 30 minutes ago. In other words, if there are no players in the battle screen, the timer will not cycle phases, and as such in 30 minutes the battle will become subject to ABR.

    What is ABR? The name says it all. Our servers will run the fight for you. Technically, here is a quick outline. The battle is resolved as a series of attack phases. In each attack phase, every unit selects a random enemy unit to fire at. Range for the attack is determined by several factors, primarily the Ideal Range of both units involved. The attacker and target both make a piloting check (finally a reason to have good vehicle drivers!), modified by one half the difference in their movement rates. If they both make (or fail) their modified checks by equal amounts the attack range is an average of both units ideal ranges. If the attacker (or target) has a more successful roll by a small margin (1 to 3), the attack range is progressively closer to the winning units ideal range. If one unit makes their modified piloting roll by 4+ more than the other unit, their ideal range is used for the attack. Finally, modifiers are applied somewhat randomly to reflect terrain in the zone. All hits are applied to the front of the targets.

    Some simplifications were used. Most importantly, the locations of units are not considered. The two forces are simply pitted against one another in a firefight with ranges determined as described above. Ammo is not deducted for these attacks. This ensures that there will be an eventual victor. Likewise immobile units still get the piloting roll to use their ideal ranges, again simply to ensure one side or the other will win. Movement rates do not affect hit number adjustments, only the range determination (which is obviously critical). Heat is not applied or considered in hit determination.

    Whats it all mean? For starters, if you're attacking you can launch numerous attacks all along a front without the need for dozens of battle players or the patience to monitor them all. In the future I expect to reduce the 30 minute threshold to perhaps 10-15 minutes which will make this tactic even more effective. Secondly people will not be able to save themselves by creating battles in their own zones with friendly empires to stall indefinately. Once they close their battle window, its only a matter of time until the fight resolves itself. Same goes for self-fatigueing to lower your empire level. Its much harder now. ABR makes infantry much more effective as units will never rout or retreat during ABR. Perhaps more significantly, they have default movement skills of 0, meaning they will often get the chance to fire at their effective ranges before dying. Best yet regarding infantry: they will kick you-know-what in purely tower zones, since any infantry weapon hit delivers 100 points to a tower. If you're worried about ABR tower attacks you better put a good number of anti-infantry light vehicles in the zone as well to take care of them. And yes, I realize, this makes towers MUCH less effective which is a good thing given the way they are currently allowing the biggest players to create virtually invincable zones. As mentioned before, vehicle driver skills are now worthy of consideration. Maybe not much, but at least they matter. The best mechs for defending zones may change somewhat as well given that ABR ignores heat and ammo counting.

  • Several players have been found to have more than five empires. As you know, that is strictly against the rules. We are considering a policy of publically listing the names of all the offenders empires, and upon banning such players offering small rewards for the destruction of their empires. As always we give DP awards to anyone who reports a cheater which we can confirm and delete/ban. Report any infractions as a Cheater Report help ticket. We expect to delete several very large empires including regular donators who are in blatant violation of the 5 empire limit. Rules apply to everyone equally, and that means you.
  • Another level 1 map lag source was located and removed. Several likely remain.
  • Identified an extremely laggy query in verifying completed buildings on many different pages and fixed it. As more lag-causing queries are located and corrected throughout the day, expect brief though not infrequent periods of intense lag or freezing up of the game.
  • Deleted redundant code from attack resolution regarding building deletion which was causing about 30 timeouts a day.

    8/16/03

  • Fixed a major bug in training. Training should once again be appropriately random.
  • Fixed an error concerning zone flags which was being generated upon conquering certain zones.
  • Neveron is back up and the evil messages table has been vanquished (foul beast!). From 5.1 million entries we are now down to 10,680. I am also adding measures to prevent any future "Limbaugh" effects on this table. Performance on numerous pages shoudl be significantly better as a result and we freed up about 2.5 gigs of hard drive space.
  • Sped up the loading of the level 1 map page, most noticably during daychanges.
  • Sped the loading of stats.asp page rather significantly by streamlining the building completion checking code. This removes the largest single source of timout errors in the game.
  • Sped the messaging checks when you load your main page, eliminating a common source of timeouts on the stats.asp page.
  • Upon loading the battle screen popup messages will no longer appear. If messages are generated upon loading the battle screen they will appear in the battle message box, or if you are kicked out of battle, load as a popup from the main empire page. This reduces lag when loading battles during various game updates.
  • Downtime: Neveron will be going down at 1 pm Arizona time to fix a grossly oversized table. Total downtime should be no longer than 15 minutes.
  • Zones with repair facilities will now show in your flagged zones lists on the parts pages even if they have less than the required population.
  • Please remember that while parts can ship to a repair facility with less than the required population, vehicles can not.
  • Fixed some more bugs on the ammo and movement parts shipments. They should now be checking properly for the presence of a repair facility in a zone.
  • Flags are not a requirement for shipping things, they are simply a useful tool for creating the lists.
  • Added a button to the Flags page (Land/Build-> Flags) that will update the data on your Flagged Zones. To make the systems run faster, the game stores information on Flagged Zones seperately, and will not be updated unless you use this button. This only matters if you change the name of a zone or bring the zone's population above 500, as that is information the game uses to determine what should be in your proper lists.
  • Fixed a major problem which had been preventing 12 scheduled updates from running for the past 11 days. These updates include BV updates, empire rankings, unit skill validations, skill advances due to combat experience, fatigue, and several back-end integrity checks critical to game stability. Accordingly, several lag-intensive quick and dirty fixes to these problems which were often slow and or innacurate have been removed.
  • More clock stopping problems today so more server reboots. Sorry for the problems, we are working on it as hard as we can.

    8/15/03

  • Ran a massive set of queries that are deleting some of the junk in the messages table. THe messages table is used for pop-ups and arena battles and there were around 5.1 million of them backed up. I estimate there should probably be more like 20,000-50,000. So far nearly 2 million have been deleted but the queries are causing massive game problems. I will look at a way to do this more efficiently tomorrow. Gettign rid of these extra entries will dramatically increase performance on any query that uses that table which includes battles, market purchases and loading the stats page (the left hand frame of the main page).
  • Fixed a bug with flagged zones and war. Flags are now deleted if a zone is conquered.
  • Fixed numerous bugs with limbs and engine shipping that snuck in there (little buggers).
  • I have talked with Randy and he is on his way back from Canada and will be back in the office next week.
  • I discovered yesterday that the messages table is absurdly large and so I am working on deleting the unneeded portions. This is an extremely server intensive process and so the game may be a bit more laggy. Performance will be a top priority in the next couple weeks and hopefuly we can get things back to the way they were in May for quickly.
  • Did a gamewide update to fix some units that were not getting unfatigued properly. Also did a gamewide 0 pop fix.
  • There are currently some problems with proper job distribution in some empires that are being worked on.
  • Fixed a bug with renaming battalions.
  • The 10% NASI broker fee with TA's and Faction discounts is intentional.
  • Someone started a rumor that the 10% NASI fee being charged for trade/faction discounts is 10% of the full price and not the discounted price. This is untrue. Please do the math before making such claims.
  • The Colonel ranking system is not working properly, so if you are having problems with it please simply ignore it. We are working on a more comprehensive system that will work much better.
  • Power Outage: Power has been restored and Nev will not be going down in the forseeable future.
  • Market caps for vehicles have been adjusted to be significantly higher for non-light vehicles.
  • A reminder that many of the ranking update programs have been corrupted and are not running. This means that the figures on your stats page (the left hand side of the main screen with all the information on population, jobs, BV etc...) will not be correct. These programs should be back up and running in the next week or so.
  • Fixed a bug that was not allowing you to move towers to unpopulated zones unless you used the "move all" function.
  • Neveron is currently running on battery backup power due to a prolonged power outage. Current battery levels are still high, but if the outage continues I will need to power the servers down. I will give another warning prior to shutdown.

    Thank you to Neveron''s generous donators for providing us with the means to have the whole system on backup power. This is probably the 7th power outage in the past month (Arizona has a fierce monsoon season) and there has yet to be downtime due to any of them.

    8/14/03

  • Had to take Nev down for a bit to work through some firewall problems.
  • Deleted another 1000 empires today and will be looking into cheaters with a vengeance tomorrow. Players who have come forward and admitted their wrongdoings have been treated quite well. Empires I find on my own are given no love. Open a Cheater related Help Ticket if you or someone you know has been cheating.
  • All the Parts and Armoury pages now are fully functional and have the new flagging system implemented. Additionally, the movement process checks the target zone for the presence of a repair facility so that you may ship items to zones with repair facilities that do not have the required population. This allows for people who build cities of all one building type and also advance repair outposts. I am sorry for the hassle over this past weekend. When I left for my trip my tests had all run quite well but clearly something went wrong on several of the pages. My apologies.
  • Movement parts shipping is now working again.
  • Infantry weapons shipping is now working properly.
  • Limbs parts shipping is now working.
  • Fixed a problem with limbs not showing on your parts page if none were on the market. This should be the last fix for that problem.
  • Engine parts shipping is back up and running.
  • Parts shipping is temporarily down while I rework the system.
  • New empires now start with their first zone already flagged.
  • Fixed a bug that was preventing the increase buildings donation option from working correctly.

    8/13/03

  • Tower and Ammo movement has been fixed!!!! Still working on other movement pages.

    8/11/03

  • Parts Movement: I have reinstated rules on some pages regarding where you can purchase/ship parts to. Some of the code had been looped out in previous builds and I put it back in. When I return early next week I will be adding a way for zones to be flagged to show they have a repair facility present, but as is you need 200 civpop for ammunition and 500 civpop for all other parts.
  • I just realized that an important arena related update has been deleted somehow so I am reposting it. Arena prizes are handed out and the arenas reset at the end of every Nevyear. Prizes are awarded for the top 10 finishers in each category. The larger categories get larger prizes (all of which are morale). The coveted Hida Fushu award, usually given to Chet, is awarded to the person who loses the most in that Nevyear and consists of $150 million and a Mackie 'assault' mech (not that anything other than the pilot's pride has ever been successfully assaulted with one).
  • Madison Area Players: Some of us are planning on doing lunch in Madison sometime on Sunday. If you are interested please email me at gdematteo@oddpost.com and I will tell you where and when. I'll be checking it periodically this weekend.
  • The Companies and Battalions pages now use zone flags, however technical problems are preventing me from coding the manual inputs correctly. I need to leave for my trip and will not be back in the office until Tuesday. I will be monitoring the game while I am gone and Chad will be in the office or at least dropping by a few times a day. Randy is scheduled to return sometime late next week, but trips such as his by nature do not have definitive ends, so it may be longer (by days not weeks).
  • The Units page now uses zone flags.
  • The Marketplace now uses zone flags.
  • The Parts page now uses zone flags.
  • Fixed a bug where unnamed flagged zones wouldn't show in the list.

    8/7/03

  • Zone Flags are currently in use in the Armoury. If you do not have any zones flagged yet you will need to do so on the Land/Build page if you intend to move your items around. You may also manually enter coordinates into the text boxes provided.
  • Deleted another 1000 or so empires today.
  • Finished adding new link highlights on most pages.
  • Lag has been up significantly in the apst couple days due to my running a large number of EXTREMELY involved queries cleaning up the game. The bulk of this is now over and things should get steadily better from here.
  • Answered almost every Bugs related ticket in the box. Other boxes are being worked on and answered by Chelly. Do NOT PM him in chat about your help ticket.
  • Got the @$*@#$*@* clock working again.
  • Added a more obvious link to enter battle from if your active person is in combat.
  • People are asked to remember to cancel their help tickets if their issue has resolved. This saves a lot of admin time. Thank you.
  • Hackers: There have been several deliberate attempts to hack Neveron over the past couple weeks that have interefered with the ability for certain scheduled updates to run, mostly having to do with stats and ranks. Other updates have been rescheduled in a different manner that will be more laggy but are necessary for the game to operate properly. I have been updating computers as needed to attempt to secure them more completely, and backups of everything have been updated. We are pursuing all channels to locate the sources of the hack attacks and those found will be prosecuted. Any information leading to the positive identification of someone trying to hack the game will be rewarded.
  • Delete large unneeded sections of the arenas and market logs.
  • Cleaned out some invalid building complete messages.
  • Cleaned out a lot of 'junk' entries such as units with no crews, people in the units that belong to other empires, etc.
  • Reinstated several critical updates like fatigue reduction and bv calculation.
  • Fixed another bug that is preventing double kills from awarding arena prizes.

    8/6/03

  • As an afterthought I deleted another 1000+ empires. I am hoping that daychanges will be significantly improved by today's work.
  • Hopefully fixed the bug that would not let you claim double kill arenas by clicking on them on the Arenas page.
  • Fixed a bug on the arenas page that was keeping certain arenas from being being viewable.
  • Level 0 Empires: Not logged into after 7 days will be deleted. All other empires have 30 days of inactivity before deletion.
  • Deleted roughly 6000 (yes, really) empires for inactivity and cheating.
  • Cheaters: It is highly recommended that you open a Cheater related Help Ticket as soon as you can and spill your guts as I am liable to be much more leniant than when I catch you this week of my own accord.
  • The empire Steele was deleted for market cheating.
  • Empire Names: As per Neveron rules empire names are to have no other HTML formatting than bold and italics. Empires can also not have "junk" names or be named in long strings (Faktor 1, Faktor2, Faktor 3 etc...). I will be going through and cleaning out many improperly named empires in the next few days. Empires I find to have been violating the 5 empire rule in this time will be dealt with harshly (and as per below...swiftly).
  • Cheater: The empire Huron Warrior (level 5) was deleted for what can only be described as "Slord-like" levels of cheating. Please let me remind you all that marketplace transactions between empires you control, and the creation of empires for market abuse is strictly prohibited. Punishment is swift and harsh.
  • Mail Server Down: The Neveron mail server is still down and we are currently about 1 week behind on all bug tickets. Other Help Tickets are pretty much being handled. If you submit a bug to a different box it just gets bumped into the Bugs box so don't get any bright ideas.
  • Added a July Admin Updates link.
  • Abuse: I have been informed that certain people have been using new empires to hunt for mines and the like. This is an abuse of the system and I have begun to log when new mines are located and will be monitoring how they change hands, etc. If I find a case where I believe an empire was used solely for mine hunting I will severely punish all parties involved. Thank you.
  • New Feature: To further aid in the reduction of bandwidth use, server load and increase player convenience a project has begun to create flagged zones that will limit the loading of extensive dropdown lists. This will mainly be a boon to medium and larger empires with large amounts of land, btu should help most empires. The skinny: Only special 'flagged' zones will show on drop down lists that involve moving equipment around. To flag a zone go to the new Flags section of the Land/Build page and click on the New Flags link at the top. You will then be given a list of all the zones in your empires to choose from. It is self-explanatory from there. Once you have flagged a zone it will appear in all of your dropdown lists. I am also adding input boxes for people to manually insert coordinates if they do not wish to flag a zone, but need to send something to a zone anyway. Remember that there are population limits for moving certain types of equipment around, and these will be checked for. It is tedious work putting all the necessary changes in to support this, so it will be slow going, but the prototype page (Infantry section of the Armoury) has been implemented so most of the hard work has been done.
  • Updated server maintenance plan to hopefully take care of some trasnsaction log errors that were occurring.

    8/5/03

  • Unprocessed Paypal Donations: There are still several Paypal donations that do not have login names and have not yet been processed. All properly labeled donations have been processed. If you donated via Paypal more than 12 hours ago and have not yet received your Donation Points please open a help ticket with the Paypal Transaction ID so that we can move that along. Thank you.
  • Fixed a root problem with items not being shown properly on your armoury and parts pages.
  • Neveron was down for an unknown amount on time last night due to web server problems. The game is now back up and running fine.

    8/3/03

  • Gauss ammunition has been placed back on the market.
  • A mysterious bug on the resource purchasing page robbed numerous empires of income while allowing people to purchase items without paying for them. Some major culprits of abusising this bug were found and are being dealt with accordingly. If people have any information on other players who they know to have abused this bug, please open a Cheater related Help Ticket. There are rewards for turning in cheaters when we can find enough information to punish them. Unfortunately, there is no information on who lost income to this bug. Because of this bug as well as the civilian population bug from 2 months ago, I have decided to award 10 Nevadays worth of income to every empire with a positive income. This income will include any market sales typically made, and so will help to compensate for lost income from the market bug.

    8/2/03

  • Fixed a bug that was causing vehicles or parts not on the market to not show up properly in players' armouries.
  • 2 people have shown interest so far in getting a meal together in Madison. 1 of them is Rox...so if you like Rox and want to meet him this would be a good opportunity. If if you hate Rox and want to injure him this would be even a better opportunity. Either way, get in touch.
  • Madison Area Players: I (Wayward Son) will be in Madison, Wisconsin and available to get together with folks for a chat/bite to eat on Sunday, August 10th. If you are interested please send an e-mail to gdematteo@oddpost.com and I will try to work something out.

    8/1/03