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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!

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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

Wow! Thanks to all the players who have already signed up for a Donation Subscription. It hasn't even been an hour yet! Your donations will be processed very soon. Thanks for your support and for your patience.

New Donation Option: While there are some parts of this that haven't been fully coded, enough is in to allow people a look at it and to start using it. The new Neveron Donation Subscription has been implemented. This exciting new option allows players to donate on a regular basis with the money being automatically taken from their Paypal accounts every month. But that's not all! Each donation on a subscription is cumulative towards a donation bonus. This means that if you donate $10 a month for 5 months you will get the 10 DP bonus as if you had donated $50 all at once.

And it keeps accumulating! Pass the $100 mark and we will treat your subscription as if you had sent it in all at once, thus getting an addition 30 DP bonus ($100 normally gets a 40 DP bonus but 10 was given at the $50 level). This keeps accumulating so long as that specific subscription is never cancelled.

There's more!! Players who use the donation subscription will receive special bonus offers not available to other players. This may include bonus DP, access to special units, or special deals available after donating for a certain length of time. These deal MAY require you to use your subscription DP to gain access, so please read details carefully.

Sign up special! Sign up for a subscription now at any level and after 3 real months get a Technology Center for 40 DP! (1 TC only and DP from any source may be used for this deal) New subscriptions at any level will also receive a bonus 5 DP after 3 real months.

If you have any questions please open a help ticket. Organizational changes to the new pages are forthcoming as well as a way to view your current subscriptions. Multiple subscriptions may be started at once but they do not accumulate their bonuses together. Donation Points from subscriptions can only be delivered to the login used when you donate. Once awarded these Donation Points may be used like any other.

To view Donation Subscription information click on the Donate tab and then click the link like you would to set up a Donaion Profile at the top of the page. There is a button on the next page labeled "Manage Subscriptions."

Added an auto-fix for certain problems with companies.

The Personal Multiplier donation option will now only affect 13 people and will affect ONLY active skills. Soldiers with no unit will have their mech skill mults affected. Made the page more efficient and update associated logging. Note that with either of the personal options (Skills/mult) it will only affect the number of people you ahve ACTIVELY CLAIMED!

6/30/05

WTF Happened Today!?!? Database maintenance in a major way. Cleaned up the database to keep from having those log full errors and tore out a bunch of seemingly uneeded indexes that were taking up tons of room. Overall shrunk the database by about 1/3 in size which should reap some performance rewards. Large empires may have noticed they were unable to load the research page without timing out. An index was replaced to speed that back up again and things should be smoother than ever. Thanks to everyone for being patient during our downtime!

6/28/05

The Personal Skill donation option will now only affect 13 people and will affect ONLY active skills. Soldiers with no unit will have their mech skills affected. Made the page more efficient and update associated logging.

Tore out the vehicle skull penalty code when scrapping or destroying a vehicle until vehicle creation tools can be implemented in the next couple days. This was done on Saturday afternoon but not posted.

6/27/05

Initial merc contract payments now properly display as counting toward the listed transfer limits on your history page.

Deleted the empire DarkCottage, level 9, for continual abuse of a vehicles bug which had been generating DP-only vehicles for him. There were over 3 battalions of commissioned uriels (to use but 1 example), countless billions in uriel sales, and many uriels in his armory. None of the uriels had been donated for, and he only notified us after we already were investigating his empire in connection to a similar case by redington (who was recently fined $10 billion for a similar abuse). I would hope that you are all honest enough to report these kinds of abuses if you ever discover a way to cheat. This guy obviously was not, and he has been deleted for it. The person who brought this to our attention has been awarded 20 DP per incident.

6/26/05

5-empire checking code will no longer run every single login, but rather only on a random sample. This will still catch all the cheaters eventually (1 in every 20 logins are checked) but greatly reduce a big source of lag.

Removed a major source of lag, primarily associated with battle and the FFA.

Vehicle crews will lose a point of skill from unit destruction or scrapping, as described in earlier updates.

Fixed some strange behavior where after moving unit groups your map would bet set to zone 0,0.

6/23/05

Added some checking on the mail pages to ensure that battleplayers cannot read or send mail from empires they are BPing for.

Added the total number of parts as the default setting when buying general parts off the market for easy shopping.

The general parts page will now properly ignore items that are on market hold when determining the lowest market price.

Made an auto-corrective process that will destroy mechs that were imporoperly destroyed an try to fire.

Fixed a primary key violation source on the FFA-entering process which should cut in half the error generated on that page.

Fixed a bug that was making it difficult to hot-drop on 0,0.

Fixed an issue with pirate empire access from various FFA events.

Pirates will no longer appear to be in zone 5002, 3001.

Fixed another problem with mechs making piloting checks inappropriately at the start of a battle.

6/22/05

Added the number of a particular item that has been sold in the past 30 Nevdays to the Breakeven page so that you can see the volume of sales at the current average price. This number excludes all faction and trade alliance sales. The idea is that if a small number of an item has sold in the past 30 Nevdays at the current average then you probably need to adjust the price downward to increase sales volume. It is also suspected that this will simulataneously promote war and 'kill' war completely, since we as Neveron admins have powers of conflicting omnipotence.

Ran a procudre to clean out unneeded terrain files to make several gigs more space in the database. This should alleviate problems like we had earlier of the database needing to expand to allow more terrain to be created.

Big Empires and Pirates: We hear from a lot of players of large empires that pirates are too much for them to handle on their own. To this we say 'Cheers!' Large empires (level 10+) were NEVER meant to be played by one person alone. Having a large empire is a big task and takes a lot of work. Mercs are one very useful tool for handling pirates in a large empire. The mercs are there dying for some action and typically they are happy to work for cheap simply to get the opportunity at skill downs, reputation and battle experience.

If you have a large empire and are not enjoying it, think about paring it down! Large empires are definitely not for everybody and the goal of the game is not solely to grow and grow in civpop and BV. You can always improve the QUALITY of your military instead of the sheer size. You can invest in consolidating your infrastructure to be more defensible and more efficient instead of just building more and more of it. If you don't like the logistics of a large empire think about taking on someone who does. There are loads of empire-building geeks on the planet and many of them are DYING to get a shot at planning and managing a big empire.

Cleaned up the Mercenaries page a bit as well as made parts of it option for viewing. This will allow more customization while viewing the page as well as save a lot on server load as you aren't loading every part of the page every view. Added some contract information to the open merc contracts list so that amount payed up front as well as per BV is displayed. Should make it easier for employers to hire mercs.

6/21/05

Added a warning when moving units that move at slower than speed 3 so that people will know to check for movement crits. And to bilk people out of their hard earned money.

It is no longer necessary to create terrain when attacking undefended zones. This will help save on server load as well as disk space but we are probably just doing it cause we are evil greedy bastards that do nothing good for the world and have all the integrity of retiree scam artists. Probably.

Oh...it will also hurt newbies.

Vehicle Crew Changes: Some folks wanted a little deeper explanation as to why this is happening. Vehicles are easy to get, easy to train and relatively cheap compared to mechs. They can do a lot of damage for comparatively small amounts of money and people, especially large empires, are happy to send them to their deaths as a way to avoid committing mech forces to the battlefield. This new change will make people use more skill and care when using vehicles, will help deter 'instant armies' from being stored in armouries and then created for immediate use on the battlefield and will also help bring mechs back into the limelight on the battlefield.

Fixed a rare bug when claiming zones.

Scrapped units now show in the destroyed units log.

All unit types must now be demobilized to be scrapped or disbanded. No more creating units, throwing them into battle and disbanding them to avoid mobilization fees.....suckahs!

Fixed a bug that was allowing level 2 warriors to move at DOUBLE normal land speeds instead of +50%.

Upcoming Change Factory runs are going to change substantially as well to address several issues at once. Factory runs will no longer be empire wide. They will be zone specific. Products will arrive in the same zone as the factories that produce them. Cancelling a zones production will return unused resources. You will only be able to create runs of 1 nevyear in length or less (i.e. no starting a run of 100 mechs in a single factory zone to hide your resources from storage fees). Capturing a zone will cancel their run, and the returned resources will go to the capturing empire (as well as a standard percentage of unused resources). Effectively it will be similar to the research facility system, except instead of setting each buildings research goal, production will be per-zone. If you want all your zones producing the same thing, you'll set it up as multiple production runs (one per zone). This will prevent people from having items delivered to non-factory zones, and will also prevent people from having absurd numbers of workers making a single item (i.e. assigning 250,000 workers to make a single gecko because you need it immediately in a zone that about to be attacked). It will add realism to the factory system in that factories will only produce locally and at a rate directly related to the number of workers in that zone. It will correct problems with losing factory zones not cancelling or affecting production runs. It will allow for recovering resources for stopped runs, and capturing resources from heavily producing zones. It will make factory zones into more lucrative targets as taking them will stop runs and capture items recently produced there. And, of course, it just makes sense!

Deleted 20 or so empires and fined the remaining empire 100 mil of a player who was far in excess of the 5 empire limit.

Upcoming Change There are going to be a few upcoming changes which taken collectively will make it more difficult to create instant armies of skilled vehicles. p> (1) Vehicle crews will lose a point of skill when their unit is destroyed. The logic here is that when they are put into a new vehicle, they will be less familiar with it than the old one, and less effective. While mech pilots only lose skill when moving into a new mech type, vehicles are assumed to be quirky enough that crews will not be as effective in any new vehicle, even if its the same variant. The skill loss is applied upon vehicle destruction rather than new vehicle assignment for simplicity.
(2) There will be an option for creating vehicles with unskilled crews or skilled crews. Creating with unskilled crews will be instant, just as vehicle creation is now.
(3) Creating vehicles with skilled crews will not be instant. A newly created vehicle with a skilled crew will be automatically placed into training for 1 training cycle (4 nevdays, adjusted for class levels). This represents a quick refresher course for the crew so that they can still be effective in their new vehicle, as well as any possible travel time from remote corners of your empire where they were on leave.

The reason for these changes is twofold. First, it will make it more difficult for players to create instant armies when they come under attack, and impossible to create skilled units immediately in newly taken areas. Secondly, it will ultimately reduce the dominance of vehicles over mechs as vehicle hordes will invariably become worse skilled in the largest empires as crews move to new vehicles.

Fixed a problem with hotdropping.

6/19/05

Fined someone $50 million for a rude help ticket.

Infantry units now take damage from mech explosions just as any other units.

Fixed an error in the FFA that was causing excessively long delays after attack phases in which infantry were destroyed.

Fixed an error that had resulted in some incorrect surrender values.

There was a problem with one of the first faction wars where SLDF-PG lost the same war multiple times due to a bug. Empires had paid their surrender payment anywhere from 2 to 5 times, while the winning FL got 4 times the expected income. We have corrected this on both ends, taking the undeserved money from the winning FL (leaving him the proper amount from a single payment) and returned it to those empires that had paid out more than they should have. Additionally, as the 10% kick-out chance was run 4 times, many empires including very large ones were removed improperly. We have given the FL of SLDF-PG additional money that covers 3/4 of the re-enlistment costs, as 3/4 should not have been kicked.

Fixed a problem in the FFA where if you were range 0 with an enemy unit but had no physical attack options available, it was not allowing you to commit your attack.

Fixed a problem that was preventing people from hot-dropping on level 0 empires.

Fixed yet another bug that was preventing some bets from being placed during the first few minutes of an IN PROGRESS duel.

6/18/05

Fixed some problems with the new betting code. Its possible we will be fining (or at least removing the winnings) from those of you who were abusing the fact that it wasn't working properly by creating $1 matching assault bets and throwing the fights to collect the NGC bonus.

6/17/05

Listed items delivered per Nevday on the Factories page.

Arena Update Two important changes have been made. First, you may now choose "NONE" as a betting length. This means that battles will move more or less instantly into battle after the 5 minute enrollment phase is up. Secondly you may see the betting length when an arena is in the enrollment phase so you can better choose whether or not to enter. Some players prefer longer betting periods so that the payout will be larger while other simply want to duel quickly and don't care about the prize. Third, and most importantly (ok three things, not two), you may continue to place bets after a duel has started! You may place bets for up to 15 minutes after a duel has entered the "IN PROGRESS" phase so long as neither contestant has fired. As soon as either combatant fires, betting is closed. This combination means you can start a duel with a betting length of "none" and begin fighting 5 minutes after the enemy enrolls (the mandatory wait time for more entrants to show up) and still give people a chance to place bets during the first few phases while the duelers have not fired. Less waiting and more dueling.

FFA Update The units you get in the FFA are now BV-limited by level. The formula is MaxBV = 500+200*level and MinBV = MaxBV / 10. This means two important things: first no one is going to get bad infantry and weaponless vehicles because they would not have enough BV. Secondly, higher level empires will have a greater chance of scoring well which is appropriate, given the high entrance fee they must pay.

New Features: You can now collect uncommissioned towers and uncommissioned vehicles like parts on the Armoury pages. All uncommissioned units from zones without flagged repair bays will be collected and put into transit to your active zone.

Fixed a rerouting error when moving companies that sent peopel back to the lances page.

Fixed a bug with units being untrainable via the unit readout if the active person was in training, transit or otherwise engaged.

Fixed a problem with empires in the N00B faction improperly showing faction prices on the marketplace. Empires in the N00B faction do NOT get faction discounts.

6/16/05

Fined many empires a lot of money, up to $40 billion in the case of a level 5 named "slan", for repeatedly abusing an arena bug that was occurring the past two days to generate tens of billions of dollars from thin air. Awarded two players DP for reporting details of this bug.

FFA rules Do not use multiple empires to enter the FFA simoultaneously. If this abuse is not stopped we will take steps to limit FFA access or remove the prize/TP. Its unfair to use multiple units when everyone else only has one.

Fixed a bug where some faction wars would not end when they should have if the declaring FL was surrendered.

Fixed a bug with faction war renewal.

6/13/05

Fixed a bug preventing people from accepting mercenary offers.

Zone attack constraints As you all know, ever since surrender has been around (well over a year) there has been an important restriction on attacking zones held by empires that have surrendered you. The obvious reason for this is that it would not be appropriate or fair if you were able to have a third party come in and retake everything you lost and hand it right back over to you. This would render surrender almost meaningless as lost cities could be reclaimed immediately. However, faction warfare trumps this restriction nicely. If you have declared faction war, you are unable to effectively reclaim those lost cities even from a third party because of the prohibitive costs of attacking cities without a declaration of war. The exception of course is if the third party is another member of your enemies faction that you are in a faction war against -- in which case you COULD cheaply retake them once your restriction period has expired assuming the faction war is ongoing. Because of this superceding effect of faction war, we are able to remove the check for prior zone ownership when determining whether or not a surrendered empire (post-restriction) may attack a zone only in cases where the attacking empire is in a faction that has declared faction war.

Why is this important? It prevents a well known and devious tactic used by alliances to attack enemies that are still surrendered to others. It was possible (and still is if you have not declared faction war) to use empires that had formerly surrendered their enemy to create unattackable drop zones to hand off to their allies. This has always been a problem, and we are glad the the faction war system allows us to eliminate this obscure restriction and simplify warfare.

6/10/05

Fixed an error on some contract details pages for accepted contracts.

Mercenary Level 2 Mercenary class level 2 has been added. Level 2 mercenaries can accept higher paying contracts, and contracts with up-front payments in addition to standard pay-per-BV-killed contracts. They may also offer their services to any empire as a standing offer to be accepted by employers as desired. Furthermore, they may accept defense contracts (see below).

Defense Contracts Defense contracts can be accepted by any empire not currently in a faction war. A merc can only have 1 contract at a time, but can merc for any level employer as a defense contractor. Mercs lose all DOWs when they accept a defense contract and cannot dow while under contract. However the benefit, of course, is that anyone who DOWs the employer is automatically DOWd upon by the merc. Any units killed by a merc of an empire that has DOWd the employer (even if before the merc was hired!) will pay the merc at the specified rate. Mercs under contract when the employers faction enters a faction war will remain under contract, and WILL receive DOWs on attackers who DOW the employer, just as if there were no faction war. The contract may be cancelled at any time by either party and both sides are advised to outline the length of the contract so there is no confusion. Mercs under contract are shown on the empire intel pages just as all other contracts so everyone will see who is protecting who without the need for all the public mails.

Fixed a problem with some messaging related to infantry units with bad characters in their names.

6/9/05

Added a new system for mercenaries (merc level 2+). You may now offer your services as a standing contract offer. You select the contract details, and anyone may accept it. Basically instead of looking at help wanted ads, you're posting your own offer to work, and letting empires accept if they so choose. Along with this are some new tools for viewing contract offer details (both merc and employer offers).

Made several additional updates to the form on the mercenaries page to make it easier to use.

6/8/05

Mercenary contracts which are too high level for you to accept are now disabled.

Mercenary Update You may now specify an initial payment to be made to the mercenary upon his acceptance of the contract. This is only available to level 2+ mercenary class empires. This payment may be of any size and is subject to ordinary transfer caps and limitations.

Fixed an error with sorting by the Total column on the new market log.

Getting Free Stuff: We often get asked by players if there are ways that they can get free Donation Points or Nevcash for offering services. The 2 best ways of helping us out and receiving free stuff are writing great help files and submitting them via the help system, or better yet, by recruiting and fostering new players who use your promo code. The bigger their empires get the more Nevcash you get every real month. Some empires are getting over $1 billion because they have fostered new players. Building these type of relationships also helps in the game, as everyone knows that you can never have too many allies.

Fixed a problem with accessing certain Donation options on the secondary web server.

Destroying factories now give plunder similar to commercial buildings.

New Feature!: There is now a market log section of the Finance page for your information and convenience. This feature is not 100% complete so please DO NOT OPEN BUG TICKETS REGARDING IT! It is done enough that people can start making use of it. The features it offers are explained on the page.

Fixed a problem with some products not showing properly on the Parts page.

Banner Ad Contest! We are happy to announce a new banner ad contest. Please see the forums for details. Click Here!

Corrected a problem with money transfers for empires with bad characters in their names.

Payment per BV destroyed for mercenary contracts is now a function of mercenary class level. You cannot accept the highest paying contracts as a level 1 mercenary. As you may have noticed, additional payment levels have been added allowing for extremely lucrative contracts for higher level mercs.

Changed the listed employer and mercenary scores on the empire intel page to be averages for the past year, not minimums.

Changed the tables on the mercenaries page for current contracts to match all the other ones.

Added information on the mercenary section of the empire intel page to show what mercenaries an empire has hired (with contract type and links) and what contracts a mercenary has (with type, employer, and link).

Changed the FFA prize slightly by having the full entrance fee added to the prize (formerly only 1/2) but having the prize decay slowly over time (approximately 10% per RL day).

Changed the largest city as shown on your empire intel page to be by population, not number of buildings.

6/7/05

Fixed a rare retreating bug.

Added a check for vehicles with non-optimal crew settings. Whenever you view lance details for a lance with a non-optimized vehicle crew, it will alert you on that page and include a link for optimizing the crew.

Sped up the loading of the lances page for large empires.

Units that defect will no longer take up space in their former lances.

Fixed a problem where empires were (under certain circumstances) receiving pilots from the FFA. All such pilots have been given 8/8/8/8/8 skills and may be kept and employed just as if they were normal volunteers.

6/6/05

Defectors will now be relocated to 9999,9999 where they can be airlifted to a friendly zone as normal.

The defection code has been tested and run successfully. It will still be run manually for a while, possibly always, so don't be surprised if defections occur a day or so after a faction war ends. They will NOT be immediate.

6/4/05

MPOGD Voting: Thanks to everyone who voted for Neveron in last month's contest at MPOGD.com! We spent the whole month in the top 5 meaning that all empires level 1+ got $15 million or 15 Nevdays of income, whichever is greater. Keep up the good work as we march into June!

Free Billions! Awarded income for promotional code use for new empires. Thank you everyone who encouraged people to sign up using their promotional code. Remember that anyone can create a promotional code on your Manage Logins page (in Empire Settings). If players sign up using your code, you can earn nevcash for up to 6 months. The more players you sign up the more you will earn. Empires must be at least level 2 to generate income for their promo code creator in this manner. Multiple players are getting in excess of $1 billion a month now for signing people up.

Order of the Black Dragon, level 10, was selected as the winner of the May 200 DP prize drawing. As always, the empire with the highest monthly war rating (as recorded on the 1st of the month) from each level is entered into a drawing, and this month the level 10 winner was selected. Congratulations Order of the Black Dragon and good luck to everyone in june!

Destroying buildings now works properly.

Changed the mercenary hiring layout substantially. While most new options are disabled, this is the expected interface for upcoming mercenary contract enhancements.

Some revisions to the impending defections change: the defection rate will not be a blanket 3% for all members of the losing faction. It will be variable based on performance and status. For empires that did not surrender, the base will be 2%, while for empires that did surrender, it will be 4%. This will be modified downward for surrendering enemies. The base rate is modified downward by L/(N*e) percentage points for each enemy you contributed to surredering where L is the enemy empire level and N is the number of friendly empires credited with forcing his surrender and e is your empire level. For example if your level 3 empire loses a faction war but singlehandedly surrendered two enemy level 3s and never yourself surrendered, no units will defect. As another example, if you lose a faction war and you were level 10, and you surrendered, but you surrendered a level 9 with (with the help of 2 other faction members), a level 6 (with one other faction member), and a level 4 (by yourself) you will lose 4 - (9/30) - (6/20) - (4/10) = 3% of units to defection. Basically, for the mathematically challenged, this means if you don't surrender you will lose from 0-2% to defections depending on your performance, and if you do surrender, from 0-4%. Finally, those empires who quit a faction (or are kicked out) while a faction war is going on (which will not save them from enemy DOWs, but will save them from surrender expenses!) will suffer a full 8% defection rate regardless of surrender status or performance. No one wants to stick around in such a cowardly empire!

It should be apparent that these rate changes mean, on average, less than 3% of a factions units will defect. So basically, we are lowering the overall rate while adding incentive to fight back, and not surrender.

Defections! We have finished the code for units defecting from the losing side of a faction war. Several revisions were made. Units will only defect to the winning faction, or to members of empires in higher ranked factions who appear on the monthly war rating list (empires that have fought in the past month). Most defectors will go to the winning factions members, with a higher percentage ending up in higher level empires. Likewise those empires who get defectors from their war rating rankings will see more defectors for higher rank as well as higher level.

Most importantly, defections will not occur immediately at the end of the faction war. We want to take extra care in overseeing the defection process the first few times it runs, so it will be run manually by an admin at some point after the conclusion of a faction war (presumably within a day or so). After it has become clear that everything is working flawlessly we will automate the process.

6/2/05

Added a permanent war record for every faction to the faction details page.

6/1/05