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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

Fixed a rare error on the Vehicle Creation Console.

Fixed a glitch where the DOW button was appearing even when your enemy had already declared on you.

Removed the minimum mobilization costs from the Map for unfactioned empires.

Fixed an error accepting merc contracts.

Fixed a short-lived error with the repair bay donation option.

Fixed an issue with surrendered empires not being able to claim zones.

Fixed an error with the Quest.

Rearranged the Move page a little in battle. Put the buttons in better spots, especially the Commit Move button which is in a similar spot to where it was originally so that all of us with several years of commit move muscle memory will have an easier time.

Fixed a rare problem starting new arenas.

FWAR contracts can now be ended manually when the FWAR is over and they didn't end automatically.

You may no longer build buildings in a zone that has come under attack in the last 30 Nevdays.

FWAR Surrenders: When you are in an FWAR your surrender is NOT based on change from peak but change from beginning of FWAR. Some people are not understanding this and so the Wars page has been changed to exclude change from peak when you are in an FWAR.

Losing empires in a faction war will now also be surrendered to mercs for the winning faction. This will also ensure that any remaning DOW's are cancelled.

5/31/2006

Fixed another error with hotdropping.

Fixed a rare exception on the Map.

Fixed a similar problem with leaving a faction.

Fixed an error that was sometimes preventing faction leaders from legitimately evicting faction members.

Fixed some old code with training unassigned soldiers that was improperly setting best skills in some cases.

Unassigned soldiers in training no longer count towards your 100 person maximum for unassigned people.

Fixed a problem with naming new vehicles sequentially with the Vehicle Creation Console.

New Feature: You can now select a specific skill name and number to view unassigned people on the Stored People page. Between sorting by skills (click the column headers to sort) and this new feature people should have no problem finding and rehiring stored people. Also added a select/deselect all option. Please remember! Fees for having unassigned people are coming!! Store your people now and your costs will be significantly reduced when the costs are implemented. It also greatly reduces lag! Click the Store People button on the Unassigned section of the People page.

Fixed an error with hotdropping.

Towers may now be scrapped while mobilized from the Active Zone section of the Units page.

5/30/2006

Fixed an error getting engines from zone salvage when your opponent surrenders mid-battle.

Fixed a problem viewing salvaged mechs.

Hot Dropping: Sped up some queries on the hot drop page though much more work can be done there. Most significantly, the formula for taking damage while hot dropping in a mech has been updated. Terrain now plays a role in how hard/easy it is to drop without taking damage, though it is not nearly important as skill. Skill had been playing a relatively small part and that has been greatly increased. Piloting skill 4 mechs will get damaged fairly often compared to skill 0 mechs and on average they will take more damage. This change will mean mechs will be damaged more often when dropping, but the damage they take will be typically much less than previously. As always, there is a chance that ANY mech, no matter the skill, will be damaged or destroyed. Also, the number of jump jets on the mech will also play a part in how easy it is to land the mech, with more jump jets allowing for a larger bonus.

Added a process to ensure that mercs in a faction war have all DOWs cancelled pertaining to that faction war.

Fixed a problem with empires in the Noob faction often not surrendering to other empires in the Noob faction.

Added a link from the Buildings page to add more buildable spaces in that zone. Will make life easier for big empires.

Made a couple cosmetic adjustments to the attack pages in battle.

Fixed a rare error ending mobilization from the Troops page.

Declaring FWAR will now cancel any FWAR contracts that mercenaries in your faction have outside the faction. This means that if your faction has a merc who is actively fighting in another FWAR and your faction declares Faction War then that mercenary will be withdrawn completely from that other faction war.

Fixded a problem with crits and heat from previous simulators carrying over to new simulators.

Added a button linking the subscription rewards page to the Donate page for when you have the Good/Excellent Gunner discount available to you.

You must now use the level 1 map to do all zone claiming.

5/29/2006

Autopilot Button: Many players are unable to see the Autopilot button in war. You can always set a unit to be on autopilot by unclaiming it. This is as easy as clicking the unit icon on the friendly unit list. If you have the unit claimed it will instantly be unclaimed and put on Autopilot.

Fixed a rare loop on the Wars page that was no doubt causing plenty lag, preventing certain players from viewing their Wars page and also not properly handling certain DOW cancellations.

Promo Code Advertising: This is mainly aimed at the clueless players that continue to spam the Noob mail and forums with their Promo Codes. Players who are already playing aren't going to use your Promo Code. The Promo Codes are there to attract NEW PLAYERS to the game. Get out on OTHER sites and OTHER forums and spread the word. Several players are already collecting Donation Points because they have attracted new players to the game who have donated. We are going to start fining your primary empires if you keep this up. We have no problem with people using their Promo Code as a signature after answering a real question or some such thing, but just pasting your Promo Code is obnoxious. Stop it.

New Feature: Trying out a color scheme on the Movement section of the battle pages. A little loud at first but we think people will get used to it. Will likely fiddle with it. Also added an Undo Last Move (Undo) button which will undo the last selected move that you chose. If you accidentally mess up and move one way instead of another, you can undo that move so long as you haven't committed the move yet.

Fixed a problem with logging in when your emperor was in enemy zone.

5/28/2006

Added an auto-correction to the Wars page that will cancel any DOW's that should have been cancelled when one empire or the other surrendered. Simply view the Wars page and any outstanding DOW's will be removed.

Cleaned up and sped up the wars page. There is now only one list of empires that you are currently at war with and the 'recently attacked' section was removed since you have to be at war to attack.

Because of recent AI instability the time that the AI is automatically checked for a restart has been shortened from 5 minutes to 20 seconds. If AI goes down it should be pulled right back up again. Problems with it will be addressed this week.

Empires may not be evicted, nor leave a faction while a faction war is active.

Mercenaries may no longer accept merc contracts while engaged in a faction war.

Closed a loophole that allowed empires to temporarily bypass garrison limits in a rare case.

5/27/2006

Map Refreshing Bug: With the very detailed help of Iso we were bale to fix the map refreshing bug. Everything should be working properly and all related help tickets are being closed. If you encounter this issue again (never-ending map refreshes) please reopen your ticket.

Added another layer of security to the transfer empire procedure to prevent the new player from evicting other players from the empire until 3 real days has expired.

Fixed a merc hiring bug.

Sped up a frequent timeout spot when loading a list of units to hotdrop.

Retreating: Fixed a bug with retreating.

Removed a process on the Empire Data page that was constantly checking to make sure your emperor was still alive, which is not needed. It was moved to another location that was already checking the same information and should reduce a source of lag and frequent timeouts on a high traffic page.

You may no longer hire or draft new people if you already have 100 unassigned people in your empire. You MAY still hire/draft soldiers if they are going to be immediately placed in a unit (such as with the vehicle creation console).

Sped up a porcess on the Arenas page.

You may no longer create or attack an arena, nor enter the FFA if you are currently in the Dueling Simulator. Please use the Forfeit button to clear your dueling sim before you take part.

Reciprocating DOW's: There have been a few tickets complaining about not being able to DOW someone back after they DOW you. This option was quite intentionally removed because you don't NEED to DOW them back under the current system. If someone DOW's you, you two have to fight it out until one of your surrenders. Only a surrender will cancel a DOW. DOWing them in return would simply waste your money.

Fixed a problem with rehiring infantry soldiers under the old condensed people option.

Fixed a visual error on the buildings page involving zones with training and/or recycling buildings in them.

5/26/2006

Map Clicking Loop: As was observed at the NevCon, there is still a rare bug that sends the map into an endless loop of refreshing in some specific zones. If anyone knows of such a zone or can otherwise recreate this problem, please open a help ticket immediately so that we can correct it. Thank you.

Help Tickets: As mentioned earlier in the week, we are swamped with help tickets because of a combination of admin leave and recent changes. We are working through them as quickly as possible and appreciate everyone's patience. Older tickets are getting higher priority overall, but tickets are not necessarily answered in chronological order. We will get to you as soon as we can.

Sped up the Troops page by making the mobilized troops list optional.

Significantly sped up the Battles section of the War Room, a significant source of lag. The different sections have been compartamentalized so that they don't load every time, thus saving on a number of slow processes

We have been getting a lot tickets concerning TP in the FFA. The TP awards are given randomly. The amount of kills and rep you earn in the FFA only affects your ranking and the amount of money you are making.

5/24/2006

Please be patient with your help tickets. Seth has been on vacation for the last two weeks and I just returned from the nevcon recently. I will get to all the help tickets as soon as I can. There is currently about 250 of them I am working on. Thank you. Bill

5/23/2006

The active person information was removed from the Empire Data frame. This is basically redundant information and active person is not nearly as important as it once was because of login permissions. Your active person is now denoted on the Empire page with a black background. This should eliminate a very significant source of lag.

Mobilization amnesty was done one really truly last time this morning. Units that mobilize from now on will stay mobilized for the requisite 30 Nevdays.

Help Tickets: Because of NevCon: Vegas we are basically unvailable this weekend to help with any problems that have ocurred. There are people in town who will be checking on the servers and we can call in the case of an emergency, but there will be no debugging or other tech support this weekend. We realize that because of the large and sweeping changes recently there are still a fair number of residual issues that still need cleaning up and they are our number one priority when we return next week. Large game changes are never fun and always difficult, and are also vital for the future survival and growth of the game. Thank you all for your patience with these changes.

5/19/06

Over 50,000 unassigned people have been moved into storage using the new feature on the unassigned people page with no problems yet. Only 650,000 more to go! Dislike lag? Store your people!

Added a "forfeit simulation" button to the arena simulation page. You may forfeit at any time by returning to this page. It will instantly delete the simulation and record a loss.

Max Garrison: Remember that SOI is dynamic. If you have a neighbor who builds a larger city or captures one closer to you, then SOI can change and force mobilization of your units. Just because you have a zone under max garrison today doesn't mean that it will be tomorrow. SOI stability can only be ensured in areas where you have a strong SOI presence.

The crawl now updates only every 5 minutes instead of every 3 minutes. The sheer repetition of the updates on this page cause it to account for a lot of process time.

NevCon Reserved Rooms: Players that have reserved rooms through Neveron can check in at the Stratosphere front desk under their own name. You WILL need a picture ID and a credit card (for security only, the rooms have been prepaid). If you have problems please call Hotels.com group center at 866-476-8771 xt. 116 and someone should be able to assist you. If you continue to have problems please leave a message at the front desk for "Neveron" and we will be checking in periodically to get these messages. Let us know where we can find/contact you and we will get ahold of you as quickly as possible.

We are really looking forward to this and hope you all are too!

5/18/06

Fixed an error with firing soldiers that was created earlier today.

Made a change to the crawl which will hopefully speed it way up. Even after yesterday's updates it was accounting for more cumulative server lag than anything else in the game.

Help Tickets: Many help tickets that would normally be answered very quickly are currently falling behind because one of our primary help admins, Seth, is on family leave. With all of the important changes in the game, performance enhancement, and NevCon preparations a lot of help tickets are falling behind very quickly. We are trying to keep up with them but we would appreciate some additional patience over these next few weeks. Thank you all.

Mobilization: Mobilization amnesty was given one last time for all empires not currently at war. Any mobilized units were demobed.

NevCon: Vegas!!!

NevCon: Vegas is upon us! We will be rolling into town in the mid-afternoon on Friday and mainly hanging around the hotel making sure that everyone is getting checked in properly. If you have any problems you can call Randy on his cell phone at 415-356-9833 and we will get you taken care of. Randy gets really poor reception though so please simply poke around the lobby for us! If that doesn't work for some reason, we will also be making frequent rounds of the main desk, so look for this guy:

Or you could also look out for Bill, who is, by contrast, still fresh and spritely:

Reserved Rooms: Anyone who paid for a room is good to go for Friday and Saturday night at the Stratosphere! If you aren't sure that if you are confirmed, simply view the Registration part of the NevCon page. If it says that your payment is confirmed then you are on the list!! We will be posting more information as we get it (such as what room the Admins will be staying in) so please stay tuned.

Friday Night Party: Chet is hosting a party in his room. I'm sure booze and games will be involved so it might not be age-appropriate for everyone:

Saturday: We will all gather in the Sierra Room of the Stratosphere for the official part of the NevCon weekend. A mech tournament will begin promptly at 9 and go until 1 pm. At 1 pm we will break for a 1 hour lunch (players are on their own) and then get back together at 2 pm when the admins will be giving a short presentation on the future of Neveron. This will be followed by a Q/A session and then the always popular Raffle!
Raffle: Tickets are $1 a piece and there will be 10 different prizes including huge mechs, TC's, massive amounts of Nevcash, upgrade kits galore and all kinds of other goodies.
Door Prizes: Everyone in attendence will get a free ticket to win a random doorprize. As usual, anyone in attendance will also receive a 2006 Convention Mech, the design of which has not yet been unveiled!
WiFi: Wireless internet will be available in the Sierra Room for anyone who wants to bring their laptop.
Donations: As always, any donation (cash, check or money order) handed to us at the NevCon will be doubled! Donate $5 and get 10 DP! It wasn't cheap for us to rent the room and the WiFi alone was $300 so please feel free to chip in!
5 PM: At 5 pm we are getting booted from the Sierra room and forced out onto the streets of Las Vegas and the official aspects of the Neveron gathering are completed. We are sure there will be lots of partying, gambling, eating and drinking and we encourage everyone to get to know each other and have a ton of fun, but also please be safe!!

Sunday: There is nothing structured planned for Sunday, but we expect to be organizing a group brunch somewhere for all who wish to attend. This will be the final opportunity for us all to be together as a group before the admins have to leave. Plans for this will be formalized on Saturday when we can address people personally.

Travel Plans: If you are not getting in until late on Friday and you have bookeda room through us, you may want to open a help ticket and let us know. I am sorry that I can't post more information at this time but our agent has not been the easiest to get ahold of. More information will be posted tomorrow (Thursday) so please keep checking.

Unassigned People Storage: The option to store your unassigned people was implemented today. This option supplies one button clicking to stash all of your unassigned people in a seperate table where it will significantly decrease server load. As previously stated, roughly 1/3 of all soldiers in the game are unassigned which is very unnecessarily taxing. Any soldiers you store can easily be viewed and rehired at will on a related page accessible from the Unassigned People page. All mults, skills, reputation and other important information is saved for future use. Everyone thank Klien for his essential help in testing this feature!

Greatly improved performance on the Research pages by excluding the list of research facilities at the bottom. You can still view them simply by clicking the button provided. Most people view their research page to check progress most of the time, and loading potentially hundreds of research buildings is unnecessary. However, these pages still load slowly and there is progress yet to be made here.

Reworked a query on the unassigned people page which should speed things up a bit.

The Faction Directory is now stored in a seperate table instead of created from scratch every page load. This will be updated once per real day and will save on server load and also allow us to sort the directory by almost any desireable manner. Sorting has not yet been coded.

Moved all AI to a new server that is doing nothing else except AI. This will not only speed up AI, but everything else that was running on the server that used to have AI also.

Updated all the parts, armoury and equipment purchasing pages to look only for FLAGGED repair bays when determining eligibility for moving or purchasing parts/equipment. This should significantly reduce server load.

Updated about 60 pages to use the buildings table more efficiently.

Added an autorefreshing elemnt to the Empire Data page so if a deadlock or timeout is encountered it will simply be logged and then automatically refresh that page. While it will not reduce errors it reduces errors seen by players but still allow us to track and fix them.

Automated clean up of the crawl table which should dramatically increase performance.

Sped up a query on the battle map that is the source of frequent timeouts.

Fixed an exception when a small empire buys a zone on or off of the Noob Island and cities are burned.

Fixed a bug with the demobilize all option that was causing it to think units could not be demobed when they actually could.

Sped up some queries on the template page that had been getting frequent timeouts.

5/17/06

Unassigned People: Due to people's reluctance to use the Condense People option, in part because of some problems that were corrected after the first day or two, the issue of unassigned people still pervades. There are 720,000 unassigned people of 2.3 million total people. That means roughly 30% of all soldiers in the game are not in use. This puts a large amount of strain on the servers that is totaly unnecessary and can easily be avoided. As such we are creating an alternate people table that will store all of the most important data about your unassigned people. Mults, skills, reputation, name, mech preference, everything. This is markedly different than the old 'condense' system that grouped soldiers together. The new system will allow you to store people and view them like you would any other soldier. You will then be able to rehire those soldiers at your discretion.

To ensure that people actually use this, which will speed up the game across the board, there will be a cap placed on the number of unassigned people. This will likely be between 50 and 100. If you exceed this cap you will be unable to hire new soldiers and there will likely be some sort of fee incurred per nevday.

To use the system will require only that you click a single button and wait for a couple minutes while it transfers the data from one table to another. Nothing will be lost or altered, including their best recorded skill. Rehiring the soldiers will be as easy as selecting them from a list and clicking a button and they will then be available to be placed in units. You will also be able to fire soldiers from the list.

Moved the list of units exempt from training due to recent battles to a seperate page. There is no reason it needed to be loaded every time the Training page was loaded. If you need to see the list, simply click the new link.

The economic stats on the Stats page only updates once every 12 real hours to save on lag.

Sped up part of the SOI updating procedure on the map.

Sped up a query on the empire intel page.

Removed the order by Space and Members options on the faction directory due to the obscene amount of lag they produced. We will try to fix these up so they are workable in the future.

Significantly sped up the Demobilize All option on the Troops page.

Removed a redundant and obviously laggy query from the log out procedure.

Performance: As is typical, enough changes have been made to the game where we need to focus strongly on performance again. We are running traces on the database that will help us track and eliminate particularly laggy queries and unnecessary queries. We have also purchased new operating systems for the database and new program platforms that should speed things up significantly. We will announce before those upgrades happen and will no doubt involve some planned downtime.

Corrected a problem with the auto update for factories on the Buildings page mentioned below.

Fixed a major problem with unclaiming/claiming units during larger simulator battles.

Re-enabled company and battalion simulator battles.

Added a lot of error-checking, correction, and information to the simulator.

Added an auto-correction for factories that works the same as the fix for Commercial buildings below.

Fixed a problem clicking a zone that has a unit of your in enemy zone when you are not currently at war with the zone owner.

Deleted over 80 improper simulation arenas that had not been auto-clearing. There are a few remaining simulator issues that we will be fixing later this afternoon. Currently, any simulation will automatically cancel and be recorded as a loss after 8 hours.

Created an auto-correction process for zones with commercial buildings that were not updating properly and not being counted correctly towards epire income. You can view the Buildings page in any zone and if needed, this correction will run.

Fixed a short-lived problem with claiming zones.

Fixed a problem with remnanets of arena simulations not allowing players to create actual arenas.

Fixed a problem with the sequnetial naming feature of the vehicle creation process.

Mobilized Units: Demobilized any units in empires that were not currently at war as a one time transition relief aid for the max garrison changes. Units will still remobilize if you are currently in violation of the max garrison rules, but this will help those who have moved their units since the changes yesterday.

5/16/06

Mech and vehicle pages now carry a small SP tag next to their maintenance cost so that you can know how much they count towards your OMT.

Zones that were given full credit burns can now decommission towers without a skill penalty but ONLY from the unit readout. Any other option will not work properly.

Due to lag and errors the arena simulator has been limited to the lance or unit options.

Sped up the battle orders and also fixed a reliability issue that was preventing people from being able to give orders in some instances. Thank you to Mezzo for his assistance in debugging.

Zone Unclaiming: Sped up the process and added an exception. You can not unclaim zones that have been attacked in the last 30 nevdays.

The vehicle creation process has been updated and is working properly.

OMT and Military Maintenance: While debugging some more OMT stuff, it was discovered that OMT was not being multiplied by the newest updates in military maintenance rates. OMT is currently being multiplied by HALF that rate. This means that the OMT figures on the OMT Calculator were off depending on your military maintenance setting. This has been corrected. Please note that we are NOT updating OMT to be multiplied by the new military maintenance rates (which would be double what it currently is).

Cleared all the simulator results since many were generated while AI was down, or under development. From now on your recorded results will be stored forever.

Set the simulator AI to auto-restart so when it crashes it won't be stay down, like it was this weekend.

Fixed a bug where simulator units were giving treasure points.

Fixed a redirect loop on the map.

Fixed a visual error on the OMT Calculator that had the default setting for the Low military maint rate as 1/2 what it should be.

Declarations of War: As previously announced, wars will last until one side or the other surenders. Once a surrender takes place all DOW's will automatically cancel. There is currently no cost to maintain a Declaration of War beyond the initial declaration fee.

Garrison Limits: As per previous announcements the Max Garrison limits based on SOI and zone ownership are in full effect. The declaration of war exception is also in effect. If you are at war with an enemy and they have zones that are in your SOI, you may count that as a contiguous zone for purposes of connecting other zones beyond it to your target zone. The enemy zone will NOT count towards your max garrison, it will only allow you to count other zones next to it that you both own and control towards your max garrison.

Example: Joey owns all 81 zones around his main city. Pancho the Heartless declares war and hot drops on the 4 zones immediately surrounding the city. Normally, Joey would only be able to keep 4 unmobilized units in that city (since he doesn't own any contiguous zones), but because he is at war with Pancho, the game ignores Pancho's zones. Joey still has 77 zones that count towards his max garrison.

5/15/06

OMT Calculator Update: You can now enter the number of support points directly into the left hand column as opposed to only being able to add/subtract a certain amount. The SP Value column will also show how many SP you would need to add or subtract in that category to achieve the entered number. Now that the SP column isn't greyed out it will also be easier to see on certain monitors.

Garrison Limits: Max garrison restrictions will be enforced beginning tomorrow.

Fixed a puzzling problem with vehicle creation. We will have a better solution figured out by tomorrow.

5/14/06

Fixed a very rare but frustrating problem with conquering zones that you had attacked in the past and had problems conquering.

There is a known problem with the declaration of war exemption in the SOI update listed below which will be corrected by Monday. Empires at war may not see the correct max garrison limits as a result of this, but since max garrisons are not being enforced its not an issue.

Declarations of War: The contiguous zone update listed below, as well as future updates that have not yet been finalized, require us to limit the cancellations of DOW's. Beginning Monday, any DOW declared will not cancel until one of the parties involved surrenders.

SOI Update: Max Garrison limits no use a continuity of zones check that ensures there is a path from your target zone to all the zones that it is counting towards your SOI. This will ensure that empires can't simply keep a ring of zones in the hands of an ally directly around their cities to force attackers to hotdrop but still keep a high garrison.

To prevent an attacker from simply being able to occupy the few zones directly around your city and force most of the unit in it to mobilize, any empire that you are currently at war with (or is at war with you) will NOT block zones from being counted as contiguous. This means that if an enemy declares war and then takes the 4 zones right around your city, you can still count any other zones within your 9x9 box that you own/control towards your max garrison. Attackers will need to occupy all of those other zones if they intend to force you to mobilize.

Currently the continuity check reaches several zones outside of the 9x9 box so that if you can connect zones via a circuitous path they will still count. This adds a significant number of checks to the process, and if it is deemed too slow it will be reduced to the normal 9x9 box meaning that you would need to trace a path within that 9x9 area to count zones. Hopefully that will not be necessary.

Added rep to simulator units for levels about "normal" to reduce high-rep player advantages.

Fixed building displays in the simulator, where the hex data frame was not recognizing the buildings.

In some cases battle orders were not working, if you had entered battle without the ranking officer claimed. This has been fixed. As long as you are moving an officer unit, you can issue orders as intended.

Mech Stabling: You can now stable any non-upgraded mech in your empire at any time. You can not have more than 50 mechs in the dueling stable.

You may re-enter an abandoned simulator battle at any point through the simulator page, however after 24 hours it will automatically clear and be recorded as a loss.

Added better logging of simulator results. Hopefully we can get some result reporting available so people can compare records. No one has beat the simulator at the "Ruthless" or "Suicidal" levels yet!

Added arena-auto-kickout features at the end of a simulator battle so you don't just sit there looking at an error in the timer window.

Sped up the simulator AI by about 300%.

Restarted the simulator AI which had crashed in the night.

The $10 million SOI water claiming period has expired. We let it go on for far longer than originally announced or intended.

Fixed some problems with the OMT for empires that don't have certain types of units.

5/13/06

OMT Calculator: The New Improved OMT Calculator is up and running on the Finance page. The base stats only update every so often based on your empire size to avoid unnecessarily taxing the servers. Twink away.

New Simulator and AI A new simulator has been created, to allow you to fight imaginary forces with your actual army. This is all imaginary, as there is no actual consequence to using the simulator. That is, no damage is done to your units, and no rep or skills are gained for your pilots. We have been debugging this feature all week and believe it to be working well. However, the simulator is still in beta testing so please do not send tickets about sim problems until after we have removed the disclaimer from the simulator page.

The new AI it is using is running on a separate server without much error correction, so be aware that the sim AI may stop moving units if it crashes. There are a lot of very advanced features in the new AI and not all of them are enabled, but you should see better pathfinding algorithms and move evaluation. Aggressiveness settings and other functionality will be enabled soon.

5/12/06

Primary logins logins can now claim people claimed by other logins on the unassigned people page.

Fixed a problem with moving units with a secondary login.

A button has been added to the Buildings page near the Display Buildings button that will manually update the populations of the buildings in the zone in question. There are some rare instances when population may not be set properly and this button will fix those issues in that zone. Buildings with less than their max CF will not be updated.

Hot drops now do not charge transportation fees. The other hot drop fees still apply.

Fixed a problem with flying units with negative money.

5/11/06

Claiming Zones: Due to recent SOi changes we can now allow surrendered empires to claim zones.

Landing Craft Costs: It is now free to use a Landing Craft to move units between zones.

New Feature: You can now view arenas and see the battle results as they happen. This should be much more of an entertaining experience for all arena spectators. Click on an In Progress arena and then click the View Arena button to watch!

Fixed an error with engaging units in enemy zone when you own the zone in question.

Mobilization costs for towers have been posted on tower readout pages.

Fixed an issue with the resurrection option that was creating a delay between when the soldier was resurrected and when they showed up on the unassigned people list.

5/10/06

Attack Bugs: Fixed multiple problems with attacking from enemy zone and hot dropping. Things appear to be working properly on all fronts with attacking zones. If you have an issue with attacking zones AFTER this update please open a new help ticket. Thanks.

Fixed an error when attacking from enemy zone.

Fixed an error with unclaiming people.

Fixed an issue with the tech center donation option.

Fixed a problem with the Quest stemming from changes made to the upcoming new and improved arena simulator. The quest works properly now. Sorry to those who had problems!

Retreating from Battle: Due to the new changes there are now some restrictions on retreating. You may only retreat into zones that you own, that an empire you are war with owns, or that you have owned in the last 30 Nevdays and were taken from you in battle.

War Testing: 7/4/3257 12:30:00 PM -- Kallon Industries of TLSR attacks 590, 307 of Demolay Compact Cavalry of CBS {BD}�� (attack in progress)

These attacks were admin testing and should be ignored. Nothing was spent and nothing was damaged.

Once an empire hits level 4 it may no longer build new buildings on the Noob Island.

Fixed a loophole that was allowing empires to attack onto or out of the Noob Island. You must move your empire to the noob island if you want to fight there or out of the island if you wish to fight in the rest of the game.

Fixed a bug with not being able to declare war on empires one level higher than you in some instances.

5/9/06

Merc DOWs: Mercs get an exception to the new DOW rules. If you are a lower level empire than your employer, you will be fighting empires in the level range of your employer. Thusly, if a level 6 merc is working for a level 9 empire, and a level 9 declares on the employer, the level 6 will automatically declare on the attacking level 9. Larger mercs will NOT get this exception, so as an attacking empire you will never be explosed to having a defensive merc more than 1 level larger getting a DOW on you.

Attack/DOW Restrictions: These have been put in place as described. You can not attack anyone with whom you are not currently at war and you may only DOW empires that are your level or one level above. DOW costs are also now based on your TARGET'S level, not yours, so if you are level 9 DOWing a level 10, you will need to pay as if you were a level 10 empire under the old system.

Additionally, you MAY attack any zone that you owned in the past 30 Nevdays that was lost to an attack (not an SOI purchase) regardless of who currently owns it now. Attacking a zone that you owned will NOT allow someone to declare war unless they are within your level range. They can, however, attack those zones back.

There may still be odd glitches with merc contracts or other obscure situations and we eagerly await any help tickets regarding these problems. Garrison restrictions will not be put into place until SOI transition help tickets are mostly cleared up. We are NOT taking new SOI transition requests.

Existing DOW's will continue until they expire or are cancelled.

New Feature: When you have units in enemy zone, the level 1 map will show a number listed on that zone in slightly larger font so it is easy to see. Now you won't have to click around the map looking for your units that are in enemy zone.

Fixed a glitch with the new OMT warning on the buy mechs option.

Fixed a rare error with claiming people.

Fixed a rare error with deleting buildings.

New Feature: When you are not at war (DOW declared by you or on you) you can move units that are in training as per normal rules. When they come out of transit they will still be listed as in training like normal.

Sped up the once a minute update that takes all units out of transit.

When purchasing mechs, the marketplace will warn you when you have OMT or when buying a mech might give you OMT. You will then have the option to cancel the purchase if you wish to avoid incurring the OMT.

Unit Cap The 20,000 unit cap has been implemented as discussed. This cap will be reduced to 19,000 in early June.

Fixed a bug with using Treasure Points.

5/8/06

OMT and Building Destruction: OMT exists as a means of preventing empires from having armies that are overpowered for their level. Battlevalue is one way that an army's effectiveness is measured, but it is not a perfect tool. You could have a skill 1/1 Nemesis and still be level 2 if things worked solely off of BV. OMT ensures that your units, particularly large mechs, are not oversized for your population. If you want a sweet company of heavy and assault mechs, you should not be level 5. OMT worked quite well until we introduced the ability to burn cities for increased amounts of money. This birthed a tactic of burning all your infra to artificially shrink your level and then attack some hapless fellow with little chance to defend himself. By closing this loophole and forcing empires to respect OMT for what it is, a way of preventing players from shrinking their empires to prey on those less powerful and able to fight back, we have helped to keep horibly mismatched empires from fighting each other, particularly at the low end of the level scale. We want to apologize to players who have been victim to this tactic. This loophole should have been taken more seriously a long time ago.

For empires who currently have OMT, you need to more civilians or trim your military, as was always intended. You can put mechs in dueling stables, scrap them, duel them off or simply build/capture more civilians to bring the rest of your empire up to speed with your army. Once you are up to a proper level you can easily burn infrastruture just like any other empire in the game can.

Additionally, you can still burn non-residential buildings for the same rewards as burning an entire city.

Level 0 empries can now use Treasure Points for .25 research points. instead of 0.

Fixed a bug where you could claim some zones near the quest area. Empires that had bought zones there had their buildings liquified and were reimbursed for claim costs.

5/7/06

You can no longer burn civpop if it would give you OMT or increase OMT. This should help reduce the ability of people shrink their empires down to pure military and then capture new infrastructure before they have to pay any of the high OMT costs.

Updated some procdures when deleting buidlings and burning cities that will update SOI power and city circles on the map better.

Added some info to the map. When you click on a zone that you own that is under the influence of another empire, you will now get some information about that empire and a link to their intel page.

Increased the SOI zone purchase profit to $500,000 from $200,000. They still cost $1 million to purchase.

Fixed an exception on the zone info part of the map for zones that had their control set to an empir that no longer existed.

Fixed a rare exception when claiming zones.

Corrected a rounding error with completing unfinished buildings that was preventing people from setting build rates on some buildings.

Instituted some logging to track any potential problems with ammo explosions after ammo is dumped.

Defectors no longer automove to your largest zone because of upcoming max garrison changes. You can move them from the Defector Haven to any of your zones via LC for free.

5/6/06

New Feature: There is now a cost per person/job display on the building creation page to more clearly display the cost increases in buildings. Hopefully this will help people to better manage their building construction and realize that building 150 CF level 4 buildings should be for long-term infrastructure that you plan on centering your whole empire around. Building big all the time is not efficient and players can seriously increase their profits by diversifying their building routines.

Other changes: No other changes are currently scheduled until we have time to code some things up and playtest them. They will include the previously announced cease fire options, reduced attack costs as well as adjustments to mobilization costs, war declarations and faction war. More will be announced when we are ready.

Sped up the login process a bit. Will mostly be noticeable during times of high lag.

Fixed a problem with putting unskilled soldiers in the old mechs when purchasing a new mech for an existing pilot.

Zone Garrison and DOW/Attack Limitations: These will go into full effect on Monday and Tuesday. The garrison limits are visible all over the game where they are applicable and most people should be pretty familiar with how they will work and look. If you are exceeding the garrison limit in any zone the game will automatically mobilize however many units it needs to bring you in line with the garrison limit. It always starts with the cheapest units in that zone and the standard 30 Nevday minimum mobilization time still applies. Towers will be "mobilized" if they are the cheapest units.

Determining Max Garrison: The maximum garrison for ANY zone is 216 units. You can have more units than that in the zone but they need to be mobilized. Mobilization costs will likely be increasing when the attack costs are decreased in coming weeks. To calculate your max garrison in any given zone, the game looks at how many zones you both own AND have SOI control of within a 9x9 box around that zone. Every zone adds 4 units to the max garrison. This means that you only need to own/control 54 of the possible 81 zones to get a full 216 units in that zone.

SOI Calculations: A Sphere of Influence (SOI) is exerted by ANY zone with at least one building in it. SOI has two distinct attributes, RANGE and POWER. The range of the SOI is 10 zones in every direction. A zone with one building in it surrounded by empty zones would control all zones with its range. The only thing that can negate this control is the SOI of another empire's cities, which is where power comes into play. The power of the SOI is determined by the size and number of buildings in the city. The more jobs/population a city has, the higher it's influence. This power diminishes significantly each zone farther from the city you go. Proximity is probably the single biggest factor in determining who controls what zone. The power of your SOI can be significantly increased by having more than one city in a small area. Three medium sized cities in close proximity may exert a stronger influence of the zones in their shared SOI than a single large one.

SOI Strategy: SOI rules encourage players to build in one main area since your SOI is strongest when you have large numbers of cities in a relatively small area. You CAN push out your neighbors by building cities near them, and then continuing to build closer and closer as your SOI permits you to purchase their land off of them. This will make it harder and harder for them to defend their land and thus not want to be in that area. On the flip side, land that you want to keep you will need to build cities on to ward of the influence of nearby empires. If you are worried about a neighbor encroaching on your land, the best thing you can do is to build near them. This will go a long way towards negating their ability to influence your land, but if they are able to build more than you are, you might find your land getting more and more exncroached on. At this point you have a few options.
You can:

A: Build your cities bigger and stronger to counteract their SOI.

B: Contact your neighbor and negotiate boundaries and city growth,

C: Attack the neighbor or hire a merc to attack them (this option coming soon) and then either keep or burn the offending cities or

D: either burn your own cities and build elsewhere or simply be content with having some underdefended cities (remember, your enemies probably won't be able to defend them either so it might not be very hard to get them back if they are lost in battle).

Some Other Details:
     -You can claim any unclaimed zone whether in your SOI or not. Just because a zone is in your
     SOI does NOT mean you have to claim it.
     -There are 400 zones that your SOI affects (10 zone radius from all cities) and if yours
     is the strongest on any particular zone then you will have control of it. This means that
     most empires at some point or another will have SOI control of zones that are not inside the
     4 zone radius that counts towards the max garrison of a city.
     -Once you claim or conquer a zone in your SOI you may NOT unclaim that zone.
     -You may not purchase a zone from someone you are currently at war with.
     -Surrendering cancels all DOW's and allows SOI zone purchasing to continue normally.
     -You can not purchase an SOI zone that has been attacked in the last 30 Nevdays.

Declarations of War and Attacks: You will only be allowed to attack empires that you have a declaration of war with. Additionally, you will only be able to declare war on someone who is your level or one level above. The one exception is that you can ALWAYS attack a zone that you owned in the last 30 nevdays and have lost in battle (does not apply to SOI purchases).

Fixed a very rare exception when creating new empires.

5/5/06

Added an auto-update to the map when clicking on a zone with the intent to SOI claim it that properly updates some entries regarding the number of buildings in that zone. Some information was not updating properly and preventing people from purchasing zones in rare cases.

You can not SOI purchase a zone that has been attacked in the last 30 nevdays.

Destroying buildings in a zone will salvage the same amount of money no matter what method you use. Previouly, burning a whole city salvaged significantly more money than destroying buildings in small amounts.

Fixed a problem with renaming empires that had no zones.

5/4/06

Fixed a visual bug claiming zones where it would say you were being charged $0 when it was properly charging $200,000.

Added the login name to the money transfer history page so that primary players can see who has been sending money out. Old transfers will not show since they were not logged in this manner.

5/3/06

Sped up the zone conquer program a bit.

SOI Transition Deadline: The last day we will take requests for SOI transition help is this Friday, May 6th. Requests received after that will simply be closed. Max Garrison limits and DOW/attack restrictions will likely be put into place next week. These are ONLY the limits on numbers of unmobilized units in each zone and the limitations on who you can attack and DOW mentioned in earlier updates and forum posts. The Cease Fire (mini-surrender), free attack costs

Added and tested some infrastructure for implementing garrison limits and made further progress evaluating and preparing for SOI transition assistance.

Removed some fairly laggy queries from an often used page that were unnecessary. Will hopefully have a subtle game-wide effect of relieving lag.

Fixed a problem with the tower creation program and it will be catching up for the rest of the day.

The minimum Max Garrison on the Noob Island is 20 units for a zone you own instead of the normal 4.

Moved the Noob repair bay to the Noob Island. If you are in the Noob faction your maximum repair transit time will be 20 nevhours.

Thank You! To Frozen Chosen and Brotherhood of Steel for scrapping well over 5,000 units each.

The SOI robots have worked through all of the level 14, 10 and 9 empires in the game and are currently working on level 13, 12 and 8 empires. All of the updates should be completed in the next 2 days and all zones will be fully updated. At that point SOI updates will only occurr manually by players clicking on the zones in question.

SOI Transition: We have begun working through the requests for SOI transition assistance. We would like to reiterate that our intent is to help players who have critical infrastructure that is put at significantly greater risk because of SOI changes. While many of the requests viewed so far have been legitimate, many have also been rediculous. This is NOT an opportunity to get the admins to consolidate your empire to a tiny core. Some of the cities we have been asked to review are single zones, with hundreds of unclaimed zones around them. Others have been largish cities near the borders of someone's main zones that have a garrison limit of nearly 200 units and with buildable space around them that could easily be used to further strengthen the SOI in that area. If you have other options then you will be expected to take those in-game options available to you. This means that if there are SOI zones you can claim then you should claim them, if you are surrounded by an ally who could easily give you zones to build in then you should negotiate with that ally, or if the zone is one that is not a significant portion of your empire then you simply need to decide handle it on your own.

Players that we HAVE helped so far have been ones who have infrastructure that was either gotten with donation bonuses or represents a very sginificant amount of infrastructre to the empire that is put at significant risk beacuse of SOI issues.

If there is something you do not understand about SOI, please open a help ticket! We are happy to explain it to you. We have answered tickets from some players who claim their empires is "screwed" by SOI changes when it has actually made it MORE defensible.

5/2/06

Fixed a problem with empires that had zones in certain areas being unable to properly move their empires to the Noob Island.

The Conquer Zone program was not running for the past hour or so and has been restarted.

All purchases made on the marketplace by empires on the Noob Island will now take 20 real minutes to arrive, no matter their distance from the seller.

Promo Money: Promo cash was handed out for players recruited under the old system.

MPOGD: Thanks to everyone who voted for Neveron last month at www.MPOGD.com! As an appreciation of your support we have sent out $15 million or 15 Nevdays of income, whichever is greater.

5/1/06