Join the new world

Like many people before me, I have reached one year in this game. Taking into consideration that in a week or two I will most likely enter a 2-clicker cycle, at least during daytime, I decided this is the best time to write a series of articles about my time spent in the game.
I was never a congressman, a president, a battle hero. Sounds boring? Well, 90%+ of the people playing haven't been that either. This is why I will not concentrate only on my personal experiences, but rather the game seen through the eyes of a more or less active player.
While I will try to to stay as neutral as I can, most likely here and there knowing the happenings of an entity (alliance, country, etc.) while seeing the other entities from the outside will result in me seeing some things differently then others would.
I will write in English, as I would like any of my ingame friends to be able to read it if they want too.


First off, a little something about how I found the game, or better said, how the game found me.
The first time I heard about it was in a mass mail which I got from my buddies made while playing Travian. I don't remember the exact date, but it must have been somewhere in the beta phase. So yes, I could have been a beta giant, have I registered then 🙂
But I didn't. However, the game kept popping up again and again around me: RL friends and work colleges played it, people I met in other games played it. So during some boring winter days before Christmas, I said I will give it a shot as well.


As a Hungarian living in Romania in RL, I always had the option to play for both sides. Why did I choose Hungary over Romania while registering? Well actually, I didn't choose Hungary, at least not in the beginning.
Before entering the game, I did a little research using the wiki, forums, etc. Going through the players of Romania, among many familiar names, I came across, 3 stood out: KaosAD, RoLitoral, Felix-Focus. For me, these 3 names are synonymous with Travian, Hattrick and ManagerZone. To this day I don't know if the same people I used to know play/played these accounts, but I wanted, for once, to play on the other side.
That other side was not Hungary. That other side was Indonesia. I did register in Hungary because I thought language barriers would make it hard for me to adapt in Indonesia in the first days (from experiences in similar games, where moving/communicating is much harder). But after about 4-5 days I was off to my dream eCountry.


It was there where I started paying a little more attention to the game. I figured out that those questions popping up before i do anything are not just for fun, but they can be useful. Yep, I am talking about the good old Trivia.
For those who are young, gather around the fire and let uncle clawy tell you a story: long before the chicken, Lana and gold offers, the admins had another "great" idea about how to help newbies catch up. This was a pop up window with 5 questions, that you have to answer. If you did that in 5 seconds, you got a big bonus to your activity, if you did it in 20 seconds, you got a smaller one. I believe for fighting wrong answers also took away a fair share of wellness.
Do you know who Sukarno was? How many inhabitants Java has? How old you have to be to vote in Indonesia?
Well, I didn't at first either. With time, I learned some of the questions. It was still strange however that many people were able to answer all of them in 5 seconds. Soon, I found the secret: basically every country had it's each little decoder for them. When the window was loaded, you made a copy/paste of the source code, and the little decoder spit out the correct answers.
With respect to the admin's power to ban me if they want too, I will not comment if I used such a decoder or not 🙂


Indonesia was also the place where I had my first experiences with the war module. When I started playing, French Toast was during it's final days. France has regained the initiative, and was slowly pushing it's enemies out. I must say, looking back now, I am surprised about the lack of coordination Atlantis has shown. Today, if you are neighboring 2 countries, you are sure to end in a permanent block. Back then, 5 countries couldn't manage to do this, so France always had to win one battle with all it's active MPPs against one enemy.
One county spoiling the milk was however Argentina. Back then, if one of your regions was under attack, you couldn't fight through active MPPs, you had to fight in that region. They changed this pretty soon after, but while it was still active, Argentina kept attacking Indonesia's African regions to keep that damage out of France. Indonesia, in a daring move, attacked back, activating all of Argentina's MPPs, putting all of it's foreign regions at risk, including the Western Cape, where I was living 🙂
The war went however good for Indonesia and Brazil, they conquered 3 or 4 regions, eventually leading to Argentina leaving Atlantis because of their lack of help, and joining PEACE.
This little war also had the biggest battle to that date in it, the battle of Pampas, where Indonesia did a never before seen damage in a single battle against 6 MPPs (it was 500K if I remember right).


That's all for today. In the next issue I will try to write about Operation Burning Spirit, the war between Romania and Russia, the period where the war module was closed due to bugs, and the "bigger picture" of the night that eventually ended with the dawn of biggest baby-boom for months to come.