Portent

A couple of years ago I started playing Travian, a free browser game of expanding your village and attacking other players set in the time of Rome with you being one of three tribes (Romans, Gauls or Teutons). I got knocked out but eventually realised, I’d been playing blindfold with one arm tied behind my back.

So I’ve rejoined and things are progressing slightly better. One thing I’d missed out on were the quests. Click the Soldier on the right to get these as you can earn grain, iron etc and speed up your growth.

Anyway, more as I progress. I’m only at position 5622 in the table so room to improve. I’m playing on server 6 under the name Portent.org.

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I started playing this a few months ago and have played it for free (resisting the temptation to speed up building etc) and managed to get up to 13 cities before dropping because I lost interest.

Part of the problem is the alliance I am in, where my number of cities is about the same as the other 6 people added up together. But I still find it just too slow a pace. I’d log in and spend 15 minutes giving build and recruitment orders and ship resources so i could afford to get more Moonstones and thus more Barons and thus build more cities. But after a while that sort of gets very samey.

I think Travian had a better over all pace plus combat played a bigger part in that game. EA have done a very good job, it’s very well implemented but it needs a bit more balancing to give it pace. If that’s done (and an iPad/iPhone app that interfaced to it would be excellent!) I’d rejoin.

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Well Electronic Arts have stepped into the free browser game with Lord of Ultima which can be best described as bits of Travian (village and buildings) plus the magic and fantasy of Might and Magic (with quests as well) in a very well produced game.

The game is played in cities and regions. Its the typical start from scratch and build farms, quarries, woods etc. These are quick to upgrade but to L3 takes about 5 minutes. You have a week to build a stable economy and a good defence force. After that you are a in the cold hard world.

Add into this the region map where other cities can be found an attacked (and constructed). Graphically this is light years ahead of Travian but also in depth (magic, quests!) and breadth and the tutorial quick start where you get rewarded fr getting going (same as in Travian) works very well. Also there’s a shop where you can buy things to help you in the game. For now I’m not going to do that but it may be that its what is needed to do well.

There are currently 24,000 players on this server. Impressive though obviously all aren’t playing at the moment. More to come as i play this (if it doesn’t eat up too much of my time).

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I love playing simple wargames and this mini Command and Conquer clone is just 4KB in size. It’s part of a collection of games that are minuscule in size if not in intention. The source code was 32Kb in size (it’s on Google code), so you can play in your browser.

You will need Java if you wish to play it but it’s easily downloaded and installed.
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The universe is not just bigger than we can imagine, it’s fair to say that it’s bigger than we imagine we can imagine.

Scale of universe is like the old videos and films going from sub atomic sizes up to universe size in steps of 10. You can drag the bat to move from quantum foam at 10^-35 up to the estimated size of our universe about 10 ²⁶. It’s very nicely done and though you still won’t be able to grasp the full immensity of the scale, it gives a sense of it.