Groentje Players Manual Ch1

WHAT IS THE REINCARNATION

The Reincarnation is a massive multi-player turn-based game, played using your web browser and internet connection, on a The Reincarnation server. The game is ‘massive multi-player’ because 1000’s of players play their mages on a server simultaneously, constantly interacting (allying, warring) in month-long battles for land and power. The game is ‘turn-based’ as each action in the game costs turns. The game is designed for players who have day to day internet access. Players generally log in once/twice a day, to check their kingdoms status, and spend their accumulated turns. Some players are online for long periods of the day, just monitoring their kingdoms and hoping for the ideal opportunity to enlarge their power. Playing the game is entirely free. Players voluntary donate money to communally pay for server hosting only.

Turns and Time

Turns accumulate automatically as time passes by, whether you are online or not. Turns generate fastest on ‘blitz’ servers: 1 turn / 5 minutes, and slower on other servers: 1 turn / 10 or 15 minutes. A player can only stock up a maximum amount of turns though (Blitz-type servers: 200 turns; other servers: 150-300 turns). Players log in regularly (semi-daily) to be able to spend as much as possible of their accumulating turns.

The game has a strong real-time element too. You never know when another player decides to spend turns and what will happen to your kingdom. Also, you never know how many turns another player may have stocked up at a specific time. Therefore, the game records when battles took place. It lets you browse the record (‘chronicle’), so you can make educated guesses about the activities of other players. Timing your actions by login in and spending turns at the right time, is an essential part of the game and can be a real thrill. The game runs for a couple of months (real time), after which the server resets and The Reincarnation starts over again with a fresh competition. Scheduled server resets are announced by the developers. It is also possible that players themselves trigger an early reset of a server, when 7 of them successfully cast the awesome Armageddon spell.

Competition

Each player plays his/her own mage and manages its kingdom. Ultimately, only one mage will turn out the dominant mage on a server. However, players are encouraged to coordinate their actions (within some regulations) to group their kingdoms (so-called ‘guilds’) and support each other with battle power and strategy. The names of the 10 most powerful mages of the old world may be immortalised (in the Hall of Immortals), but all that rests the players is to hatch a new mage for The Reincarnation.

Mage specialities (colours)

The mages that rule the kingdoms in ‘The Reincarnation’ belong to one of five orders, each with its own speciality and colour. The strengths of the specialities are well balanced: there is no colour that dominates all other colours; it is possible to maintain high ranks with any colour. Any colour can win any battle against any colour, although in some cases this requires a lot of skill. Each speciality has its own qualities and associated strategies. For example, their magic differs (see: MAGIC) and the units they can recruit differ (see: INTERIOR). It is easy to learn the basics of each speciality, but it is very hard to master a speciality, and it is very-very-very hard to master all specialities.

Players choose their speciality when reincarnating, i.e. when starting the life of their mage on a server, or let the server pick a color at random. Afterwards, the speciality cannot be changed, unless the character is deleted and a new one is reincarnated. Mages can attack other mages of the same speciality just like they can attack mages of other specialities. Mages can ally and team up with any other mage, regardless of their specialities.