Hints and Tips to help you and keep me sane.
Just some pet peeves of mine, really. That, and I hate seeing costly mistakes.
These are just hints for you. See the full Miscellaneous rules page.
- Building Cities: please provide me with the NAMES of the cities that you are building. If you do not, earthquakes, fires or the plague will consume them.
- Leader Names: any leader that you have not named doesn't move and suffers a -1 modifier if they are engaged. Just name those leaders, huh?
- Renumbering leaders: Don't renumber your leaders - use the leader number given on the stat sheet.
- Gold Bonus: The stepped system for bonuses. The actual number of dice thrown to figure out the bonus that will be applied to the Op or Action is [Integer(CubeRoot(Gold)) ]. The first 9 steps are 1, 8, 27, 64, 125, 217, 344, 513, and 730. At each step a additional die (d10) is thrown. If the die is even the bonus is +1, odd its + 0, and on a 10 add -1 to the bonus. Example: Russia spends 126gp for a bribe in his diplomacy on Muscovy. That will give him 6 dice to figure the bonus. 3(+0) 6(+1) 4(+1) 9(+0) 7(+0) 0(-1) for a total of +1. Negatives?!? Yes, Bribes can backfire. Power corrupts. This is Lords of the Earth, not Gold of the Earth.
- +1 Bonus?: If you provide a Flag (100 pixel wide), an image of your King or best leader (for the fax), and a web site for your nation (which must include very obvious linkage to Lords 10 and lots of search engine grabbing verbage), I'll give you a +1 bonus for one of your leader's action rolls. You must specify which action CLEARLY in his orders.
- Assistance: If a leader is assisting another, please make a note of this in the assisted leader's orders. Several of you didn't do this, so lost whatever assistance bonus you may have gotten otherwise.
- Open Positions: If you're dropping, let me know ASAP. Most open positions are available First Come/First Served.
- Grudge Positions: I try not to allow players to play positions directly next to positions they just lost, except in the case of an SE set up in the nation they just lost. In other words, Grudge and Bloc play is discouraged.
- Multiple Actions: I don't know of any action that will succeed work better if you try it a second (or more) times in the same turn. Examples: DP + 5ap in Sussex, DP + 5ap in Sussex... or CA on King and CA on King.
- Insufficient Gold: If you don’t have enough GP to pay for everything on your orders, I will make up the shortfall by reducing your Saved, and then working up your expenses from the bottom (investments) to the top (builds).
- Transferring Gold, Agro and NFP: Sending resources to another nation by Leader or Trade Route takes a turn to effect and goes into the other nation’s reserves. Essentially, you can only spend what is on your stat sheet at the beginning of the turn, plus Bank Loans.
- Famines and Importing Grain: Importing grain doesn't change the fact that you'll suffer through the effects on the CURRENT turn. It will go into your reserves for the next turn, hopefully to stop a famine condition in the future. Best to work on salvaging what you have this turn.
- Combining Intel/Assassin operations: If you attempt to get something done with more than one Intel or Assassin op, then the results of all those ops combine to a final Success Effect number. So if you tried, for example, six Terrorist Attack ops against the same target and got some successes and some failures, all those plusses and minuses would be totaled to get your final effect number. Which might be less than if you just pitched in one Op with lots of bonus points behind it. Focus is usually a good thing.
- Intel Orders: When listing Intel and Assassin actions, put them together, Intel first, then Assassin.
- Riverine Traffic: Only “light” class ships can move up Rivers, not heavy. This does not include MSP assigned to inter-nation or inter-city trade.
- Action Effects: Lords X uses the Action module in the GM’s program, which calculates many modifiers, rolls the dice to do actions and automatically implements the results. As part of that, if you fail badly at a Status-creation action (diplomacy, creating a cultic site, etc.) your previous status in that location may degrade. There's even the chance that your leader will be wounded or die.
- Action AP Bonuses: A supplementary note to the new Action module. You get bonuses for spending extra AP in groups of 5 AP at a time. So spending 4 AP extra does not get you a bonus. You must explicitly note how many AP (and I check the math) your leader is spending as a bonus to an action.
- Playing Under An Alias: The GM has no problem with you playing under an alias. Alias email accounts, in fact, can be provided on the throneworld.com server, but you are not allowed to misrepresent yourself to the GM! If you do, you will lose your position, be ejected from the game and all GMs will know. Credit will be refunded. End of story.
- Projects: When listing Projects, put them in Project ID order.
- Submitting Turns: Hide (do NOT delete) unused sections your orders to save scrolling on my end. Use the new Excel order form from here on out.