Current  |  Show All
January 07  February 07   March 07  April 07   May 07  June 07   July 07  August 07   September 07  October 07   November 07  December 07
January 06  February 06   March 06  April 06   May 06  June 06   July 06  August 06   September 06  October 06   November 06  December 06
January 05  February 05   March 05  April 05   May 05  June 05   July 05  August 05   September 05  October 05   November 05  December 05
January 04  February 04   March 04  April 04   May 04  June 04   July 04  August 04   September 04  October 04   November 04  December 04
January 03  February 03   March 03  April 03   May 03  June 03   July 03  August 03   September 03  October 03   November 03  December 03
January 02  February 02   March 02  April 02   May 02  June 02   July 02  August 02   September 02  October 02   November 02  December 02

Earn Donation Points!
By recruiting players to the game with your Promo Code, you can earn donation points based on their success and how much they donate! See the Promo page for details!

Join Neveron on Myspace!

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

Donation Scammer: Deleted the level 6 empire "Irish War Knights" for scamming his own grandmother out of over $1,200 in credit card funds and donating them to Neveron. The charges were reversed and any Donation Points that he transferred out are being recovered. His IP has also been banned.

Fixed a rare PK error with surrenders.

8/31/2006

Fixed a bug with faction applications.

8/30/2006

Fixed a rare error on the research page.

Upcoming Faction Recruitment Change: To help ease the transition for newer empires from getting off of the Noob Island and into a faction, faction leaders recruiting empires of of the Noob Island will be able to 'gift' the new empire an equal amount of CF worth of buildings as they own on the Noob Island. The new empire's old cities will be burned for cash like normal, and they will have their units mobilized and moved to the new cities. The new player will need to establish their SOI and get their garrison limits in order, which the cash from their old buildings will more than make up for, and their is no time limit on demobilization unless their units were already mobed. Empires that are currently at war can not be accepted into factions until they complete their current conflicts. Special buildings such as Repair Bays, TC's, Recycling Centers and Training Centers can not be transferred in this manner. This change should be debugged and put into place sometime on Thursday.

Sped up mobilizing and demobilizing units significantly by cleaning out the table which had a lot of dead entries in it.

Disabled the TC and Repair Bay donation options for the Noob Island.

Ordered the new Training Results logs by BV descending for easier referencing.

Fixed bug with retreating as the attacker during a raid that was making the game think you were always retreating outside of the raid area when you should really have been retreating to the next zone. Retreating during raids should work properly now, where you will retreat into the next zone unless you reatreat outside the 4 zone radius from your objective city. At that point your unit will be sent home.

Fixed a rare error on the timer when your session has expired.

Fixed a rare error with repairs.

Rebooted the zone conquering server which had crashed.

Fixed another error with ending merc contracts when a faction war ends and ended a faction war that should have stopped last night.

8/29/2006

Fixed a bug with declaring Faction War that was not cancelling DOW's properly.

If you are not currently at war and there are enemy units in your zones, viewing the war info on those zones will simply send the units home instead of giving you the option to attack.

Corrected a typo with the SOI Auto-Update program notification.

Prevent faction protection abuses, faction leaders may no longer accept new members if they are currently in faction protection. Applications may still be sent in, but the accepting will have to be done once the protection has been ended or opted-out of.

Fixed a bug with failed raids ending properly.

Fixed a bug with mercs on the losing side of a faction war not having their contracts cancelled properly. Also fixed a bug with faction wars not ending properly. Known bugs with the ending of faction wars have been fixed. If you encounter a new problem please open a help ticket so that we may address it. Faction wars will now end normally when anyone views the faction page of one of the involved factions.

8/28/2006

Raiding will now activate a surrender if your surrender rate has been surpassed during the raid.

Fixed a bug with turning off the newbie tutorial.

Faction War Completion Bugs: There are still some oddities that occur with the end of each faction war that are creating some issues that we have had to repeatedly deal with manually. As one would expect, the code for ending a faction war is quite complex, and so it is not suprising that some residual glitches exist. To help in debugging these problems we will be running the faction war ending procedures ourselves. When a faction war ends, all DOW's will be updated so that they still show as existing but will not allow for additional attacks. When this happens, both sides should consider the war 'over.' We are notified as soon as this happens and will run the procedures, debugging them as necessary at our earliest opportunity.

Fixed another problem with the new Enemy Zone link.

Fixed another loop on the buildings page that was happening in some rare, odd instances. Also capped construction times at 1 Nevyear. You must set a build rate on buildings that will complete them in 365 Nevdays or less.

8/24/2006

Massively sped up viewing unassigned people in training (Soldier Results) on the Training tab.

Raiding: The level limit for raiding has been upped from 3 to 5 to help protect those who can lose larger percentages of their empire so much more quickly. People should build their empires around the idea that raid will come. Raid protection is generous based on how much you lose, but the potential for loss is definitely there, and keeping all your eggs in one basket by building small numbers of large cities can be advantageous, but also dangerous.

Donation Benefit Update: The Soldier Multiplier Enhancement for claimed people has been introduced. This is a departure from the way that multiplier donation benefits have worked for the previous 6 years, and should be much clearer for everyone. Instead of doubling the natural multiplier of your soldier, it simply raises the mults to a set level. There are 4 levels, with the 4th being the 'max' multiplier. Previously, if a soldier had particularly bad mults it might take as many as 8 or 10 mults to max them out, while a typical soldier might do it in 5-6 times, and a naturally talented soldier in only 3. There was no real way to know who was who and the old method of keeping track of multipliers was very crude and not very informative. The new method makes a very clear distinction between each level, making it very simple for us to display the number of multipliers and for players to understand where their soliders are at.

Please realize that each multipler 'step' is a range. One soldier that displays 3 mults might only be slightly better than a soldier that shows 2 mults. This is particularly true with the current skill degradation system, where multipliers slowly degrade over long periods of time. The new mult system makes it easy for players to see this degradation.

To view the number of doination multipliers your soldiers have, simply go to any People related page and click the "Show Mults" link or button near the top of the page. You will see that the multipliers are displayed in yellow next to each skill. The old system of multipliers affected ONLY the active skills, so your soldiers may show 0 in some skills and 2 or 3 in others depending on what unit they were in when they had their multipliers doubled.

Furthermore, because this is a new scale of judging multipliers, you may have a soldier that you doubled their mults 3 times show up as step 2, or they may show up as step 4. Because the old system doubled the mult each time, instead of setting them at predesignated levels there was consistancy only in the averages. Now there is across the board uniformity.

Additional reasons that soldiers will appear to have different mults than you expect include: Lack of faction warring under the old system. Many empires never fought faction wars for many, many months and their soldiers suffered repeated drops in multipliers. Empires that fought a lot under that system will find the mults of their soldiers higher, even if they didn't donate. Some factions have been known to have soldiers with multipliers nearly maxed out without donating, because they fought so many factino wars.

The company sill down and multiplier options have been removed because they are no longer in line with any of the other donation options. The skilled, elite and perfect soldiers, as well as the person skill and multiplier options, all affect total soldier skills instead of active skills, allowing for much more versatility with the affected soldiers within your empire.

For those who are not clear on what a multiplier is, every soldier has a multiplier that represents their natural ability (or inability) to gain knowledge in a certain skill area. All soldiers are different. If you have good multipliers in certain skills, they will gain skills more easily in those skills than a soldier with poor multipliers. The only real way to know how good a soldier is is to put them in training. With the donation option, you can raise their multipliers well above what they naturally can get otherwise, thus allowing for rapid skill gain and even skills beyond what any normal soldier could hope to achieve.

Fixed another problem with the enemy zone link auto-correction process used when you click the status of a unit in Enemy Zone.

8/22/2006

Instituted an auto-update to keep lower leveled-empires at an accurate empire level. There have been some instances of empires apparently DOWing empires of a larger level when they should not be able to, and hopefully this was the cause.

Fixed another problem with raiding empires that have been raided recently.

8/21/2006

Arenas: There were reports of some arenas ending inappropriately (some said all arenas) but we have not been able to reproduce this problem and arenas appear to be working properly. There have been no changes to arenas so it seems likely that any problems would be specific to a unit or empire. If anyone can give us more information on how to reproduce this problem we will be happy to correct for it.

Set the default on the Units by Type page to nothing instead of to vehicles. People were not seeing that you can see all classes of units by type using the links at the top of the page.

Fixed a bug that was protecting empires against be raided even though the raid protection had expired.

Fixed a bug that was awarding far too much money for TC's in raids.

Cheating: The empire Nargothrond was found to have been abusing a loophole in the faction war protection log that allowed empires to declare war while still enjoying faction war protection. The empire was fined 6 Nevmonths of average level 5 income for each offense and had his most recent DOW ended as if the time limit ran out, resulting in a -1 skill penalty to the entire empire. We work very hard to create features and options that allow players to play the game in an enjoyable way, and abusing loopholes like this instead of reporting them creates a lot of extra work for us, and limits all options within the game. Easily 50% of the code in the game revolves around preventing cheating, and far too many game systems have failed because of abusive behavior such as this.

8/19/2006

Donation Benefit Updates: The "Personal Skill Reduction" option that has been often requested be reinstated over the past months has been updated to be more in line with other donation options. It also has been corrected so that it works reliably and accurately, which is why it was removed to begin with. The new option skills down ALL SKILLs of any CLAIMED people to a limit of skill 2. Each application costs 1 DP/Soldier and reduces their skills by 3 points (again, to a cap of 2). To use the feature, simply claim the people that you want to reduce the skills of (remember that vehicles typically have their DRIVER as the CO and you will want to claim the gunner, most likely. You can claim the gunner by clicking the gunner's name on the vehicle unit readout) and then go to the Donate page. You will see how many people you have claimed and how many DP it will cost. Simply click the button and you are all set! All units will have their skills updated and BV recalculated. Soldiers that are currently in battle will NOT be affected (nor will your DP be taken).

The Soldier Multiplier Enhancement (Claimed) option will be coded tomorrow.

Perfect Soldiers have had their DP cost raised from 5 DP to 6 DP per soldier.

Reduced the frequency of a procedure on the Empire Data frame (the left fram on the main screen) that was updating unit numbers. There is no need to be running that update so often and lag reduction should be significant.

Fixed an error with destroying partially destroyed infantry units in battle.

Sped up the login process for large empires most of the time.

Sped up a lot of unit related queries that were contributing a significant amount of lag to the game.

Fixed a visual bug with training units from the units pages that was showing training intervals unaffected by class levels.

The "Transfer DP" option with empire transfers between logins has been removed. It was meant as a temporary measure to ease the transition between the old and new login systems.

Temporarily made it so that level 4+ empires can have their infrastructure burned when they leave the Noob Island, allowing for an easy exodus.

Fixed a problem with some infantry weapons not being viewable on the Armoury.

Was able to clean out 75% of the infantry weapons table which was not being used and likely causing a lot of lag when dealing with viweing the Infantry Armoury or moving infantry weapons. Also set up a self-cleaning process so this won't happen again.

Fixed a bug with enemy zone unit correction when clicking the Enemy Zone status link from any of the units pages.

8/17/2006

Unit Caps The unit cap has been reduced to 15,000. This now includes all units on the marketplace (including infantry/28) as well as your armory.

Empires with 1,000 or more soldiers that have skilled down in the past 30 nevdays are now provided with a summary of the skilldown results. The method of listing them individually is simply too laggy for such large amounts of information.

Fixed a rare problem with surrenders that was preventing the end of a faction war.

Added a training button to the infantry details page.

Added training buttons to the company and battalion details pages.

Added a claim commanding officer button on the lances, companies, and battalions pages. This will make it much easier for players to get control of squads after commanders die in battle.

Fixed an issue with the training program that was causing it to choke on its own vomit due to the stresses of some very large faction wars ending. The backlog of training was so large that it was causing the program to be incredibly slow, due to the size of the tables that it was using which in turn were huge because of the massive number of units owned by the empires in question. The program was updated and is once again incredibly fast. Any backlog of training from last night was quickly worked through this morning and you can see any results on the appropriate pages under the Training tab.

8/16/2006

Empires on Noob Island! As of Tuesday, Aug 22, empires on the noob island will no longer be permittted to be in a faction other than the noob faction. Players affected by this will need to either move off the noob island, or leave their faction. Players who do not handle this on their own by tuesday will be subject to having a new zone claimed off the noob island at the admins' discretion. To move of the Noob Island, simply claim a zone not on the island and all of your infra will be burned and the cash awarded to you. Also, units will be moved from the Noob Island to this new zone.

Resolved an issue that was not properly awarding cash for destroyed buildings when moving either to or from the Noob Island. You will get the proper amount of money in all instances now.

ABR Rumors: We have gotten several reports and seen many more complaints that "ABR is screwed" and "a scorpion killed my mech lance on ABR." This is patently false. In each of these circumstances the units were destroyed by large numbers of infantry, which can be very effective on ABR even at a low BV. Simply because you can auto-resolve a battle does NOT mean that you will necessarily win. If you are going to commit vital forces (like mechs) to auto-resolution you should be absolutely sure of what is in the zone before you do so. In each of these cases the player made an assumption ("oh look a scorpion!") and completely ignored that there might be scarier units that they had not yet detected.

Revamped the enemy zone link from the various Units pages. If you are surrendered, in a cease fire or other similar circumstance and have units in enemy zone, simply click any of the "Enemy Zone" links found on the Status or Action columns of the Units pages. This should activate a procedure that moves any units home. There are some instances (such as if the unit is in enemy zone with an empire that you are not surrendered or have an active CF with OR that is in an enemy zone but its status is not updated properly) where units may not move home. You will need to police those units yourselves to ensure that they all get home safely.

DOW and OMT: As previously announced (and twice postponed) you can no longer declare war (or raid) if your empire is currently incurring an Oversized Military Tax (OMT). To trim your OMT you need to either increase your civilian population or reduce your military expenditures. A detailed tool (OMT Calculator) for how to go about this can be found on the Finance tab.

If you have no zones left in your empire you will now automaticaly surrender when someone views your empire data page (such as from the faction directory).

8/15/2006

Fixed a raid bug that falsely saw the target as being in a faction war and was not allowing the raid to start.

Added some better error handling for the arena simulator which will increase reliability and clarity when there is a problem with creation, which unfortunately happens frequently, especially with larger simulators. Also limited the availble Simulated Force options (unit, lance, company and battalion) to list only the option that are valid for your active person, which should help a lot.

Raids! Raiding has been implemented as described with the following change: Training checks earned in combat, as with a normal war, will be applied to the involved empires at the end of the raid IF the raid was successful. Failed raids will earn the normal training checks for units that destroy enemies in battle (which are significant), but not the empire-wide training checks.

An Overview of Raids: Raids are declared in a similar manner to DOWs, but for a fraction of the cost, time and scope. The raider picks a single city that will be their objective, and is the only city that they will be able to attack. They can also attack any non-city zones belonging to the target empire that are within a 4 zone radius of the target city. All attacks are free and unlimited in number (hot-dropping still requires the standard fees).

-Attacks may be made for up to 5 Nevdays (12 real hours) from the time of declaration.
-The defender may attack any non-city enemy zones in the 4 zone radius from the target city (though the defender will not be told what the target city is).
-If successful the raider will plunder the objective city, destroying up to 50% of the buildings inside and reaping huge monetary gains from the conquest. All zones will be turned back over to the defender and the raider's units will be sent home. All battles will be ended instantly.
-If successfully raided, the defender will be allowed a protected time period based on the amount of their empire that was destroyed during the raid. During this time they will be able to raid, but others will NOT be able to raid them. They can still declare war and be declared upon, though if war is declared the recent losses from the raid WILL carry over to war. This means that if you are raided and lose 10% of your BV/Civpop, and then declare war or are declared upon you will start the war at -10%. This may trigger an instant cease fire if the numbers work out correctly. -If not successful within the 5 Nevdays allowed, the raider will suffer a morale penalty, and the defender a morale boost. The raider will not be allowed to raid that target again for 30 Nevdays.
-Raiding is limited to empires level 3+, though in some rare instances a raider who drops to levlel 2 during or right after a raid will find themselves vulnerable to raid by the empire they just raided.
-When an empire is raided, they get the option to DOW or raid the empire that just raided them for a reduced (often free) cost if declared within 10 Nevdays from the beginning of the raid. If someone raids you, you CAN simply DOW them immediately, and the raid will be converted into a full-blown war with all of the normal rules and structure. Many players will find it advantageous to simply wage campaigns of raids instead of declaring war.
-You may raid while you are defending against a raid, though you can not raid the empire that is currently raiding you. You may, however, DOW them.

Raiding was a lot of coding work and required quite a bit of testing. We are confident that it is in and working properly, though there are inevitably overlooked problems or situations that we simply did not forsee. Any errors or problems with this system will of course be our priority this week, and so if you have any issues simply open a help ticket with "Raid" in the subject and it will be resolved promptly. Good luck and happy raiding!!

Fixed a visual bug where cease fire information was being displayed when an empire was no longer at war.

Fixed a table entry that was giving players an error when they tried to view the unit info on VND-FC mechs.

8/14/2006

Fixed a problem building infrastructure with an active quest.

Raid Update: We've spent most of the week reworking and debugging the raid code so that there will be as few issues as possible. Some changes include:
-Protection time after a raid is dependant on how much damage was actually done as a percentage of your empire. Losing 25,000 Bv and 250 buildings has a very different effect on a level 12 than a level 7, and as such they are protected for different lengths of time. Very large empires will find that they are afforded very little protection between raids at all, as large empires should be able to perpetrate nearly constant raids on each other if they wish. Smaller empires are given significantly longer periods of time to shore up their defenses and protect themselves, again depending on what they lose. Infrastructure losses are based on jobs, so losing a TC counts very little towards protection time. If you find yourself steadily losing infrastruture and/or BV, these protection times will naturally increase since the damage done will proportionately be a larger amount of your empire.
-If you choose to raid someone (and win), you are forfeiting your opportunity to DOW them until their raid protection has expired, though they can choose to raid/DOW you if they wish. If you fail your raid then you are barred from DOWing for 30 Nevdays.
-If you lose a raid and are DOW'd by another empire while your raid protection is still in effect, any losses taken from the raid WILL count towards your war surrender. This will prevent someone from perpetrating a particularly brutal raid, and then having another empire DOW the victim thus resulting in huge losses for the defender.
-If you raid an empire of a higher level (1 level higher as with war), that empire will have the option of raiding or DOWing you within 10 Nevdays from the beginning of the raid at a reduced cost.

Fixed some rounding errors with completing damaged buildings.

8/9/2006

Fixed a problem with declaring war on empires for a cost of $0 if you had negative funds.

8/8/2006

Raids (Upcoming New Feature): A new battle system will be implemented next Monday, August 14th which will allow for a more limited for of warfare: Raiding. Raids allow an attacker to pick a target city, pay a small fee and then attempt to capture that city within 5 Nevdays (12 real hours). If they are successful the city is plundered, resulting in cash for the attacker depending on the number and type of buildings in the zone. When the raid is over all attacking units are automatically sent home.

When a raid is begun, the attacker is allowed to hit any enemy non-city zones within a 4 zone radius of the target city, as well as the target city itself. The defender can also attack the enemy within this area in an attempt to defend the zones in question. If retreating out of a battle would put the attacker's units outside the 4 zone radius, the retreating units are assumed to be fleeing the raid completely and are sent home. If the 12 hour time limit elapses without the successful plundering of the target city, the defender is declared victorious, all battles are ended and enemy units sent home. The attacker will get a morale penalty while the defender gets a morale bonus.

Any time a raid is begun, the defender (and the defender's defense mercenaries) get the option to declare war on the raiding empire at a discounted cost for 10 Nevdays after the beginning of the raid.

Empires at war can not raid nor be raided, though if a raid is ongoing when war is declared the raid will continue.
Raids are only allowed for level 3+ empires.

Fixed a problem with some zone conquer issues that was likely awarding zones after a cease fire was declared when it should not have.

Fixed a bug with creating buildings while you have a quest ongoing.

Clicking an enemy zone with one of your units in "enemy zone" will no longer auto-redirect to an attack option since you now have the option to view your unit data as per an update a few weeks ago. You can still hit the Attack Zone button to contest the zone.

There will likely be some additional lag today as a backlog of post-war SOI updates are done.

Fixed a slow query on the infantry unit readout page.

8/7/2006

Fixed a problem with faction protection opt outs were carrying over to a different faction war if they were both won within a couple weeks of each other.

Fixed an error with skill checks that was preventing FWAR from ending properly.

8/4/2006

Fixed an error with FWARs ending and with the rewarding of training checks from uncompleted wars within the faction war.

Unit Caps: As of August 15th the unit caps will also include any infantry (divided by 28) on the markets as well.

Changed the top 100 empires by number of units to show total units, which includes those in the mech and vehicle armories and on the markets, and infantry in your armory (1 unit per 28 infantry weapons) but NOT on the markets (so if you're over with infantry, you can just list them for sale and you'll be fine). These values are not all updated yet and will automatically fill in over the next few days.

Added the new training options to the Units by Type pages.

Removed individual sldier information from the Units in Training section of the Training tab. It now just shows the units and the unit skills, as well as training time remaining. This greatly speeds up that page.

New Feature: You can now train units from the Active Zone section of the Units page. Results will show on a new Training Results section of the Training page. Results may take up to several minutes to be displayed, depending on server load.

Fixed a bug preventing 2006 CNV mechs from having their unit info viewed properly.

Unit Cap Reduction The unit cap has been reduced to 16,000 units. This cap now includes all units in your armories as well as units you have placed for sale on the market.

Fixed a bug that started a couple days ago which was ending battles during some CF's when it should not have.

Fixed a visual error on the Wars page that was incorrectly displaying time remaining for a war in some instances.

Declaring FWAR no longer cancels DOW's that you have with the target faction. Previously it was cancelling all DOW's regardless of who they were with and thus exposing empires to the risk of larger losses because of resetting CF levels and such.

Wars ended due to declaration of an FWAR award the empire that wasn't in the declaring faction with 100% of earned skill checks.

Wars that are ended due to the end of a FWAR award 100% of the skill checks instead of 50%.

8/3/2006

The battle training system now uses the 'best skill' system to train. Soldiers with a 'best skill' set are twice as likely to make skill improvements in that skill category.

2006 Convention Mechs have been awarded to NevCon Vegas participants, with one exception. Who is KLUSEEK? Send Seth a Ticket.

The instant move option on the active zone section of the Units page now works properly, though it will still only move 1 unit at a time. The option has also been added to the units by type page.

Mech salvage can no longer be commissioned if there isa battle ongoing in that zone.

Fixed a major problem with surrendering that was giving the illusion of DOW's being cancelled 'for no reason.' In fact the surrender process was running and doing most all parts of the surrender procedures with the exception of actually surrendering the loser.

8/2/2006

Training Change and Gamewide Skills: With the advent of degrading skills, which is something that should have been done a long time ago, we now have the option to make the whole game more strategic by lowering the overall average of gamewide skills. Because the current system of degrading skills affects all soldiers equally, all that needs to happen is for the ability to increase skills to change. By doing this, we raise the bar for player skill significantly. The higher the chances of a unit missing means the more skill the player can use to tweak the battle to their advantage. The better the chances of something hitting, the more battles turn into massive blast fests, where overwhelming firepower is typically the largest factor in determining the victor. The training page describes skill as thus: "Skill 6-7 is considered green, skill 4-5 is regular, skill 2-3 is veteran. Individuals with skills below 2 are elite." We would like to return to this standard of skills in the game.

Please note! It will still be possible to gain elite units through battle! The new battle training program has been using these new, harder skill thresholds since its inception and in the month that we have been logging skill gains 3 mechs have gone to a gunnery of -5, 7 to -4, 57 to -3 and 159 to -2. This is because while the odds are slimmer to skill down, we allow many, many more chances to do it.

Several players who prefer the 'empire building' aspects of the game to battle have written in asking about changes like these, and while the recent changes have gone far in militarizing Neveron, we have not in any way forgotten this aspect of the game. As a perpetual game, Neveron can not survive if there is not enough chaos to balance the order, enough destruction to counter the construction. Game systems have been shifting more and more to favor the active player in the long run, which is something that has been sorely needed. Still, players who are active and prepared to defend their empires, but do not wish to pursue aggressive military policies have a place in he game too. For this reason we are cutting the costs of training units and soldiers of all types to 25% of current training costs. We will also be implementing tools that will allow players to more easily train their units on a wide scale, thus ensuring that while a 'peaceful' empire will not have any elite units, they will have a ready supply of well-trained soldiers manning their towers and defensive garrisons.

This trend towards more moderate skills will be very gradual since skills degrade so slowly. Actively warring empires will find themselves little deterred by this at all, and will in fact likely see an overall improvement in their military, particularly the units that see the most action.

Battle Training Results: Soldiers that skill down (gain skills) due to war activity now show their results on the Battle section of the Training tab. All results for the last 30 Nevdays are displayed, though skill gains made before noon yesterday will NOT be shown.

Empires in War: Defend your civpop! Also spread your civpop out! Putting all of your civpop in only one or two cities leaves you indrecibly vulnerable to OMT issues post-war should you lose those cities. If you find yourself in this situation the first thing you should do when the war ends is build as many residentials as you can (or need) with your available funds. This means building small buildings which are cheap, build quickly and are very effective at eliminating OMT costs.

New Option: This should greatly alleviate problems with empires finding themselves with little to no civpop and getting close to a spiral of debt. You can now sell any market mechs back to NASI for 75% of current market prices. This will both reduce any looming OMT as well as give you an influx of cash to build civpop with.

Fixed a bug that was allowing mercenaries to take contracts and thus fight even though they were enjoying protection from a recent faction war.

Changed FDOW's to more accurately record the initial sizes of empires involved in the conflict. The system it was using was more efficient, but had the result of in advertantly shortchanging some small empires in rare instances and giving the illusion that surrenders were not working properly.

Fixed a problem for small empires where they were passing 3 CF levels in one go after a large city was taken but only two of the CF's would count. As soon as the CF expired the 3rd CF would go into effect immediately, thus delaying the war even further.

8/1/2006