Groentje Players Manual Ch4

Groentje Players Manual Ch3

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INTERIOR

This section deals with the interior of your mage’s kingdom. The Reincarnations menus allow you to ‘Explore’ for new land, to ‘Build’ (and/or destroy) buildings on your land and to ‘Recruit’ (and/or disband) troops as part of your army, meanwhile managing your geld, population and magic power economy.

Exploring and Wilderness

In The Reincarnation, exploring is the safe way to gain more acres of land, in contrast to gaining land in battles with other kingdoms. Exploring is very efficient when you have little land, and becomes increasingly less efficient when you have gained more. You can specify the number of turns you want to spend exploring in the Explore screen. Exploring many turns at once does not give a land gain benefit above exploring turn-by-turn. Note that the rate at which land is explored also depends on the length of the game so far (late comers can explore faster) and is effected by enchantments. There are also items that give you extra land.

The amount of land determines a large part of your net power. Exploring a lot of land means you will quickly rise in ranks, defending new explored land and maintaining ranks is a different matter, and requires using the resources of your land. Newly explored land comes as barren wilderness. After exploring, you’ll need to build structures on these acres of wilderness to use and defend the land of your kingdom.

On some servers, the maximum amount of land to which one can explore is limited (e.g. to 3500 acres). There is no hard cap on exploring, but the Wilderness returns will just drop to about zero (apart from enchantment bonus). When a mage has reached the point where on-averge 0 acres per turn are generates, exploring 200 turns gives a few single acres and exploring without enchantment help is no longer practical.

Buildings and Resources

The Build screen, allows specifying what structures to build, on how many acres of wilderness (provided you have wilderness available). Building will cost turns. You can build several types of buildings in the same bunch of turns. Beware of building huge amounts of buildings using many turns - this is very costly and may force you into bankruptcy.

It is also possible to destroy buildings (this costs 1 turn), for example to avoid breaking your economy or to free up land for different buildings. Be careful, as once you destroy buildings you cannot undo your action.

Farmland and Population

Farmland produces food for your population. The amount of farmland affects what population can be supported (check ‘food production’ in the status report, and its relation to ‘max. population’). Note that units in your army need food too (how much is specified in the Encyclopedia’s Book of Units), and that they eat first!

Your population will grow by itself, up to the level that your country can support (by ~1.5% each turn). Certain enchantments, epidemics, items and war-actions may alter your population, its growth and food production. Furthermore, some army units and heroes draw upon your population during recruitment (barrack-troops) and for their upkeep (again: see the Book of Units).

Towns and Geld

Towns house population and generate you geld (money) each turn. The amount of towns affects what population can be supported (check ‘residential space’ in the status report, and its relation to ‘max population space’). You'll need both towns and farmland in a certain ratio to optimally balance your population and geld flow. Supporting players / guildmembers can use the Building Settings tool to set this ratio.

Geld is a valuable resource because in principle you can store it in unlimited quantities. Your buildings and armies require geld to build/recruit them and to maintain them (how much is specified in the Encyclopedia’s Book of Buildings and Book of Units).

Workshops and Building Rates

Workshops function very simply: the more workshops you have, the faster you can build buildings (with the exception of barriers). In other words: after you have built more workshops, building more takes less turns (-!-including building more workshops-!-). There is no limit to this effect. You can observe the effect of building more workshops on building rates in the building screen. 299 workshops will allow you to build 1 fort in one turn. Workshops require geld for their upkeep. Be careful when destroying workshops too rigorously, because this will set back your building efficiency hugely.

Barracks and Barrack Troops

Having barracks allows you to recruit barrack-troops. Barrack-troops can be a steady and relative cheap source of units for your army. Barracks require some geld for their upkeep, as do the troops that they produce. The more barracks you have, the faster you will be able to recruit the different types of barrack troops (see below: Recruiting). There is no limit in this effect.

Nodes and Magic Power

Nodes generate and store magic power (m.p.). Casting spells and the upkeep of enchantments draw upon magic power, and so do many army units and buildings (barriers). Clearly, magic power is a very important resource, and maintaining a tight budget on it is vital. Nodes will generate m.p. until your storage is full (check your main menu and/or status report, storage is 1000 m.p. per node). The more nodes you have, the more m.p. you will generate, but this relation is not linear: Individual nodes become increasingly less productive as you build them on more than 10% of your acres (more here). At very high percentages, this makes building even more nodes useless, as they will not generate you more m.p. than already gained with slightly less nodes. Some spells and enchantments influence the m.p. production by your nodes.

Mage-guilds and Items

Mage-guilds have two functions: they allow you to research spells in your spell book and develop skills faster; and they generate items (except in your first 150 turns). Generally: the more guilds you maintain, the more frequent items will be generated, and the less turns it take to research spells. Guilds have high geld upkeep, so it can be difficult to keep too many around.

Items can be stored unlimitedly. Many different types occur, some of them more frequently than others. See the Encyclopedia’s Book of Items for an overview. You can stock them up, choose to use them in battles, assign them to your defence, use them outside battles or sell them on the Black Market in return for some extra cash.

Fortresses and defence

Fortresses shelter your army and defend your kingdom in two ways. Firstly: when your last fort falls, you die in that last battle and it is game over: you have been defeated. You could always reincarnate of course, but you’ll have to build your kingdom all over again. Hence it is very dangerous to keep only 1 or only a few forts. Secondly, forts grant you a benefit when you defend an attack, provided that you keep a sufficient number (>0.67% of your land). The defence benefit is maximal when the number of fortresses is above a certain percentage of your land (>2.33%). Fortresses have very high geld upkeep and are generally slow to build. Forts contribute to your net power, so destroying some of your forts drops you in ranks.

Barriers and spell resistance

Barriers are your defence against incoming magic (spells and items) measured as barrier resistance percentage (see your status report). One exception: magic in-between allied mages always penetrates barriers (not yet implemented). Maintaining 2.5% of your land as barriers will grant your kingdom the maximum of 75% Barrier resistance, randomly blocking 75% of incoming spells and 75% of incoming items – but this will draw heavily upon your magic power budget. Developing the skills of your mage can modify these percentages.

Destroying Buildings

It is possible to rearrange your land use without increasing your total land, using the Destroy page. Here you can destroy earlier built buildings - their land use becomes Wilderness. Thereafter, rebuild the land using the Building page. You cannot destroy and rebuild in one action.

Building Settings (supporting player feature)

Supporting players and members of supporting guilds see extra options in their building page. They have access to the Building Settings pages, where one can set target numbers for each type of building. This may be a fixed amount, or a percentage-of-your-land. The idea is that each time after you gained land, your settings help you to determine quickly what number of buildings should be build.

They also have access to a 'maximize' buttons for each building on the building page, to help you quickly fill up 'unused' parts of your building turns. E.g.: Next to your so-wanted forts (which would take 2.4 turns), add 'a few workshops, barracks' (for max 0.6 turns) to use the 3 turns you are going to waste on fort building to the maximum. If you set a preferred farm/town ratio in the Building Settings page, the maximize buttons will add farms and towns at that ratio. Similar features are also present on the Destroy page.

See Supporting Guild Features for more details.

Gelding

Gelding allows you to spend turns specifically focussing on your geld-income. This increases amounts that towns would generate by spending turns normally. Gelding is a good way to obtain some quick money, provided that other parts of your economy (population, magic power) allow you to do so, and you don’t have anything better to do with your turns. A similar activity exists to boost your magic power income (see M.P. Charging).

Recruiting

Ways to create your army

In The Reincarnation, a mage needs an army to ward off invasions to his kingdom, and to make attacks to grab land more efficiently than by exploring. Also, the power of your army contributes significantly to your net power and your ranking. There are several sources of army units of many different qualities that a mage can combine to compose a well balanced army. If you have no troops at all, you are completely defenceless: anybody within range could attack you, butcher your citizens, and ravage your land. You must always make sure to have some kind of defence. The most powerful army units require casting spells (so-called 'summoning’, see Casting Spells) a selection of units can be obtained from the Black Market (not to mention heroes), and some can be obtained using items. The most basic source for your army however, is provided by your barracks, where you can recruit population to become troops.

Barrack troops

Any mage can recruit numbers of 5 basic barrack-troops: militia, phalanx, pikemen, archers and cavalry (for specifications: see Book of Units: Plain units). Most mages can further recruit units that are specific to their colour, but Phantasm mages are the exception. They have to make up for it by summoning (next chapter). A list of recruitable units is found here.

The Recruit screen allows you to specify what troops to recruit, and how many of them.

• Setting a recruit costs you NO turns.
  • Troops will be recruited over a (large) number of turns (providing that you do not go bankrupt or hit council protection earlier).
• You can only recruit one unit at a time.
  • You can cancel recruiting by setting recruit to ‘none’.
  • It is possible to maintain more than one stack of recruited units by alternating your recruit settings once every so often.
• There are some restrictions on the amount of units that can be recruited. The status report (earlier chapter) gives information on current and maximum troop upkeep.
  • Recruits require food and residence so (see Buildings and Resources) and can only stay when you provide this.
  • Recruits only arrive when mana and population income are positive.

Though barrack troops are generally not that powerful, they are relatively cheap to get, relative easy to replace, and they can come in huge numbers quickly. There are many strategies in which some stacks of barrack troops within your army play an essential role, in any phase of the game.

Limits to recruiting

Recruiting more units is impossible when:

• there is insufficient population space to house more recruited units
• you have negative m.p. income (on GUILD and SOLO; see next chapter)

Disbanding troops

For various reasons, you may want to disband parts of your army. Reasons could include: trouble in maintaining the units, need to adjust numbers of units to alter your army stacking. In the disband screen you can specify which units to disband (disbanding costs you NO turns). You can disband very small numbers but also complete stacks. Disbanding lowers your net power and is a way to drop ranks. Notice that in your Disband screen (and status report, and war screen) your units are shown in a particular sorting order, indicating how they will line up in battles (see “Clues to understand your battle report”). Each unit's relative contribution to the total army power is also indicated.

All barrack troops and many summoned units (particularly plain, verdancy, ascendant, and eradication units) can be disbanded. Army units that require population for their upkeep (many nether, and some phantasm and eradication units) cannot be disbanded (see Encyclopedia: Book of Units).

Failing to pay upkeep (geld, population, m.p.)

Your status report at all times informs you about your geld, population, and MP budgets, as does your main screen for each turn spent. When your incomes are positive, you'll have no problems upkeeping your units, and you are stocking up your storages. For periods of time, mages can maintain 'negative' incomes, provided that the storages are sufficient to overcome the deficits. Failing to pay the upkeep for your buildings, army units, enchantments and heroes, has dramatic effects to your country, and could ultimately kill your mage. Running out of items and running out of turns has no direct effect. When the stock of one of your resources (geld, m.p. and population) is depleted and your net income for that resource is negative, you will quickly lose the heroes, enchantments, army and buildings that demand these resources. It is entirely possible to have a positive geld and MP income but to still be in danger of running out of population, and vice versa. If you find you are running negative budgets to dangerous levels, you may destroy some buildings, dispel enchantments, dismiss heroes and change your army (see above: Disbanding troops) to attempt to stabilise your kingdoms economy. If this fails, you face the consequences:

Zero m.p.: In the case of fully depleting your magic power, complete stacks of m.p. consuming units may disband themselves (in random order: you may be able to keep supporting some of your smaller stacks); maintained enchantments may cancel themselves; and ultimately you may lose the barriers that you build.

Zero pop.: In the case of fully depleting your population, complete stacks of population consuming units may disband themselves (in random order: you may be able to keep supporting some of your smaller stacks). Also as a cascading effect, your geld income will approach zero for quite some turns.

Zero geld: In the case of fully depleting your geld, complete stacks of geld consuming units may disband themselves (in random order: you may be able to keep supporting some of your smaller stacks). More dangerous (and ultimately deadly) you may start losing buildings (guilds, workshops, barracks and ultimately forts). In the case of forts: you will lose half of your forts each turn you spend without geld (i.e. you will not die of bankruptcy the next turn, but very well could die within a couple of turns if you don’t take appropriate action).

Groentje Players Manual Ch5

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