Olympia - G4

[GrimFinger]

The Olympia Times - January 6, 2014 - Turn 1 - 82 Players

The Olympia Times - January 13, 2014 - Turn 2 - 106 Players (+24)

The Olympia Times - January 20, 2014 - Turn 3 - 122 Players (+16)

The Olympia Times - January 27, 2014 - Turn 4 - 125 Players (+3)

The Olympia Times - February 3, 2014 - Turn 5 - 133 Players (+8)

The Olympia Times - February 10, 2014 - Turn 6 - 136 Players (+3)

The Olympia Times - February 17, 2014 - Turn 7 - 137 Players (+1)

The Olympia Times - February 24, 2014 - Turn 8 - 139 Players (+2)

The Olympia Times - March 3, 2014 - Turn 9 - 142 Players (+3)

The Olympia Times - March 10, 2014 - Turn 10 - 138 Players (-4)

The Olympia Times - March 17, 2014 - Turn 11 - 138 Players (0)

The Olympia Times - March 24, 2014 - Turn 12 - 137 Players (-1)

The Olympia Times - March 31, 2014 - Turn 13 - 136 Players (-1)

The Olympia Times - April 7, 2014 - Turn 14 - 137 Players (+1)

The Olympia Times - April 14, 2014 - Turn 15 - 136 Players (-1)

The Olympia Times - April 21, 2014 - Turn 16 - 138 Players (+2)

The Olympia Times - April 28, 2014 - Turn 17 - 139 Players (+1)

The Olympia Times - May 5, 2014 - Turn 18 - 140 Players (+1)

The Olympia Times - May 12, 2014 - Turn 19 - 142 Players (+2)

The Olympia Times - May 19, 2014 - Turn 20 - 141 Players (-1)

The Olympia Times - May 26, 2014 - Turn 21 - 137 Players (-4)

The Olympia Times - June 2, 2014 - Turn 22 - 137 Players (0)

The Olympia Times - June 9, 2014 - Turn 23 - 137 Players (0)

The Olympia Times - June 16, 2014 - Turn 24 - 137 Players (0)

The Olympia Times - June 23, 2014 - Turn 25 - 137 Players (0)

The Olympia Times - June 23, 2014 - Turn 26 - 136 Players (-1)

The Olympia Times - June 23, 2014 - Turn 27 - 134 Players (-2)

The Olympia Times - June 23, 2014 - Turn 28 - 134 Players (0)

The Olympia Times - June 23, 2014 - Turn 29 - 132 Players (-2)

[SteveTheRed]

The link to the game's main page, where you can read the rules and sign up:

http://www.shadowlandgames.com/olympia/

Steve (Olympia G4 admin).

[SteveTheRed]

The turn 5 link there has the right number of players, but links to the turn 4 report. You can see all the turn reports online at http://www.shadowlandgames.com/olympia/times/ (although it is nice to see the player numbers at a glance here).

[GrimFinger]

Oops! That's because I copied and pasted, but forgot to change the last character in the link.

Thanks for the catch, Steve!

[ixnay]

Signed up for this game myself last week. Got my position via email yesterday, and sent in my first turn today.

This looks like a fun tribal "sandbox" game with a simple framework that sits over a fairly deep set of orders and actions. I followed the link they have on their site to the unofficial wiki, which had a "tutorial" for the first couple of turns. This was very helpful. Moderators take note! You will entice players to join if you give them an easy on-ramp.

So instead of wading through dozens of options, I read a few wiki articles. One ran through some of the possible "pure" positions a player could take (like focusing entirely on developing an arch-mage, or turtling inside immense castles), but ultimately recommended that for the best play experience, players should try multiple things in parallel. Set up a mage, develop him more slowly, and grow a trade business on the side, or spy on other players and sell the info, etc.

And the tutorial showed how to add a couple of nobles to your starting position and begin training them up on basic skills. Hopefully by next week I will have added 2 nobles (the key to doing anything in the game), begun their skills tracks, and trained half my starting peasantry into workers to begin some construction projects.

[NotQuiteANewbie]

I'm preparing to step outside my starting safe haven at the end of my 2nd turn. Hopefully I have invested enough in skills and soldiers to be safe for a brief foray into the countryside.

Nobody bothered to try to send recruiting offers to the new player when he appeared in the city, so I am going to try to put a notice in The Olympia Times announcing my intentions.

[ixnay]

Got my first turn back. My 2 new nobles are on-board, and all 3 nobles are getting trained up. I think I'm going to have to start burning some of the "fast train" days that every player is issued, just to speed things along.

Problem one is that while I gave one of the new nobles 100 gold to pay for training, he spent some of the rest of his time training workers, and he had no gold left to pay them. 3 of them deserted. Argh.

Problem two is that I didn't get my message to appear in the Olympia Times. Probably used the wrong command.

This turn: finish training my 3 nobles in their 3 basic skills, recruit some more people, figure out how to make a ship, and find a way to earn some cash money. People seem to be selling a lot of woven baskets and clay pots...

EDIT: fixed typos

[NotQuiteANewbie]

Stacked all of my nobles together and left the city, moving into the surrounding province with a mixture of peasants, workers, and soldiers. Then moved into next adjacent province and explored, discovering a cave. The province is controlled by a castle & garrison, so planning to move further inland to find somewhere with lower population density.

My post DID appear in The Olympia Times. I used the PRESS order so the name of my entity would appear. (The other option is RUMOR, which posts an unsigned post.)

Did miscalculate the days certain things would occur on, as forgot to account for the travel time of the units stacked under the stack leader (the unit that was issuing the movement orders). Will have to issue STOP orders first thing to clear queued orders for next turn.

Each of my nobles knows 2 "base skills" at this point, so will start on learning some subskills (don't have to be in a city to start studying those).

[NotQuiteANewbie]

Ooohhh ... I think I have figured out what to do with the Map Viewer program linked from the main Olympia page.

If I'm remembering what i just did:

1) Actions > Recently Used Map Files > templateG4.xml.
2) This gives an error as it is a template file and prompts you to save map under another name.
3) Open the new map copy.
4) Find an email with a game turn report. Select All > Copy > Paste into a .txt file.
5) Report Parser (one of the tabs near Province Info in upper left corner) > find and select the .txt file you just made.
6) Data is parsed and imported into the Map Viewer program!
7) Actions > File > Save Map File As (overwrite previous copy of map file).

I've done this to all 3 of my existing turn reports. Will be building up a map and sightings of other units as I go.

[ixnay]

I think I miscalculated the way days are spent, and that that's why my message to the newsletter failed. My next set of orders had some failures, too, in that I didn't provide money to a couple of leaders for advanced training. I checked, and they were granted money first and given training orders second, but the game processed the training first and the money-thing second. With no money to spend, their training orders failed.

If this is a case where the order can change, then I might start doing one-day commands in between orders that might process on the same day, to enforce my own sequence.