The Blog of Susanoo

Well, a couple new things going on.

#1.) We do have have the paypal things worked out now, so that announcement will die as soon as I finish up here.

#2.) As I have already mentioned, I have been working on a new set of tools to help us manage multiple accounts and bots that will be seeing some action in the very near future. I am planning on using them to full effect tomorrow.

I would like to remind everyone that it is against the rules to have other people playing your account for you unless there are special circumstances. If you have been doing this (and you know who you are!), I would highly recommend making sure that it stops immediately or you will most likely get your account suspended.

I have tried to maintain a list of known cases where we know there are multiple people connecting using the same connection. If I have discussed such things with you in the past, it wouldn't hurt to send me a reminder through the shogun wars messenger to make sure the list is as complete as possible.

That is about all for now. This morning I will be working on the second half of the paypal stuff, updating the blog, and doing some other minor things until the workday begins in earnest.

We also have a big announcement that is still pending. I can not say yet exactly what it is, but we are really excited about!

Today I am working on the way Shogun Wars handles incoming information from PayPal.

We have had some requests for other paypal options, like gifting and one time payments.

In order to do something about those I have been doing some preliminary work with the database. The down-side is that it is untested, without much in the way of being able to test it!

In other words, I am not going to know for sure if everything works right until we have a new subscriber. I *think* the code will work, but no way to know for sure. Hopefully that will happen sometime soon. :)

Of course, if it does not work it will not be a problem to fix that persons account to have a paid status.

I guess I will just have to find something to occupy me until it is tested!

Well, we finally figured out why the recursion wasn't working like it should, resulting in allied members showing in red on the attack list.

Everything should be working now as it was intended, thanks everyone for hanging in there!

Ok, like I said before I''ll give fair warning before putting the new missions up, but the code is done, so here is the warning. I also posted to the forum, but just in case anyone out there watches the dev blog but not the forum, here they are:

New Mission #1 - Pillage: Kill Peasants (16 Attack Turns)
This is a direct attack on enemy peasants. The defense score is calculated as normal for defense, the casualty formula is the same, but instead of looking at defending troops, it looks at how many peasants you have.

New Mission #2 - Counterstrike: Kill Attack Troops (17 Attack Turns)
Exactly like above, except attack specialists are targeted.

New Mission #3 - Deathstrike: Kill Ninjas & Shinobi (25 Ninja Turns)
This works something like a normal attack, both Shinobi and Ninja are targeted. The attacker takes casualties for Ninja only.

I might still tweak a few things right before making it live, but I don''t think it will change much.

I will be enabling the new missions early this Sunday (12/10/06), so be prepared.

So the bot debate seems to finally be calming down a bit. Bot detection is coming along nicely. We have several detection methods in place to pick them up, some of which are even nearing accuracy. We also have more ideas we want to try out before actually cleaning accounts.

My personal project is using the known bots to train a neural network to pick up future bots.. which also gives us a head start in AI development. That's a good thing.

We added a feature to allow commanders to bank for their officers, which seems to have provided enough of a release valve to prevent logging into others accounts to bank 24/7. Lower gold on the board is still a problem, and is very much a declining factor within the higher ranks. We are going to have to do something to remedy that, as it is an important aspect of the game. Things get dull when all you do is bank and wait for upgrades to happen.

My personal thought is that a good evolution would be to add more options for attack missions... missions of destruction and death, presumably assassination missions and military counterparts. That would give lower players the chance to take down a larger player and maintain better game balance overall.

My goals for this age in Shogun Wars are to prod Xaudius into finishing his alliance system, get some destructo missions going, and expand the auto buyer detection. I think if can get those things done it is about time to start a new age and see how it all works out.

The age after that we have a ton of things in the works... heaven only knows how much of it will get done and whether we will end up above and beyond what we are thinking about now.

So there is our update. Check back again soon, I'm sure more is to come...