10JUN11 - Blockade Fix, Patchnotes

10JUN11 - Blockade Fix, Patchnotes

• Extra HTML Removed
  Some mail subject lines contained HTML from the old UI which has hopefully now all been removed
  
  
• Notifications Order
  Multiple notifications that arrived simultaneously were occasionally being displayed in the wrong order, these have now been put in the correct order.
  
  
• Entering X|Y co-ordinates directly on the Unit Orders pages
  ... was causing some issues on certain browsers.  We''ve temporarily disabled entering co-ordinates directly into these pages whilst we work on a fix.
  
  
• Blockade Patch
  We've just completed patching the "largely broken" Blockade stratagem, and it's now working as intended.
  
  Below, please find details on how Blockade works.

BLOCKADE
This strategem can only be applied to Enemy or Neutral towns, but definitely not friendlies!

When you target a town to blockade, you take up position outside the town, and hold this position - attempting to intercept incoming and outgoing trade caravans, and divert them to your own city. 

The chance of intercepting a trade caravan is high, but can be reduced by the caravan's owner if they have researched some of the Blockade Running skills in the Trade technology tree and have a high level marketplace.

Bear in mind that your chance to intercept caravans applies to both outbound caravans leaving the blockaded city as well as any inbound caravans when they arrive at the blockaded city - including those from neutral third parties and/or friends.  Alliance friendships and confederations do not apply to caravans in a blockade circumstance, just as they don't in a resource harvesting/bump situation.

Intercepted caravans are severely damaged by the experience - they will head to the town of the intercepting player at a very slow pace, deliver their resources to the town, and then return back to the original owning town.  Once they return to their original owner's town, they are repaired and back under the control of the original owner's town.

In order to take up a Blockade position at an enemy town, you must target the town you wish to Blockade and you will then be prompted to choose an unoccupied square next to the town - which is where your blockade will assemble, as well as how long you wish to blockade for. 

Only one army may occupy a Blockade location at any one time, and in the event of multiple armies blockading the same city, only the first person to set up the blockade will have a chance to intercept the caravans.


A long overdue fix, we hope you like it.

Regards,

SC


Edited by GM Stormcrow - 10 Jun 2011 at 21:05

nice. Thx.

I presume occupying sov squares is the next in line for attention, or is taht one waiting for a more general sov overhaul?

Also the occupying force size should be considered a or does a Commander with a T1 spear blockading get the same chance as large 5k-10k army

@torn: I' say 99% sure that 1 unit has the same chance of interception as a 5,000 strong army... I wouldn't say that was unfair though... an army of 1 unit can be scouted and annihilated in a matter of seconds so I can't see it as a particularly viable approach.

Createure wrote: Does blockading effects stack on top of existing seiges or normal occupations? For example if someone sent a seige to a hostile city and their ally was reinforcing their seige, would it be in their interests to set up a blockade on the seige square, or would that result in the same effect as 2 seiges arriving at the same square? [Or do I have to work this out myself through a little... *ahem* 'experimentation'...?]

Sieges and blockades cannot stack.