Runaway Success, Kickstarter Blues

Careful what you promise, you might get more than you can handle.

Kickstarter First World Blues

First World Problems.. being too successful.. Kickstarter has its fair share, and I honestly thought my little project would be too self contained for such.. but.. here we are, and I'm at 600%+ of funding, facing 300+ hours of work for $5.50 an hour.

My Earlier, colourised, world map.. well, an unfinished part.. 

What went right:

I gathered a decent community of people before I started, I let everyone know months, then weeks in advance, I expected to get 50% of the way there from my own marketing, and maybe 25% from the kick on effect of that, then I'd have to promote it to cross the finish line.

I hoped to learn 3 things.. How to set up marketing for a kickstarter.. How to Run a kickstarter, and finally how to push through the funding, chasing the market to cross the finish line..

two out of three ain't bad.. but this new lesson, well that's gonna teach me.

What went wrong:

I was woefully unprepared to succeed.

I moved my goals around in the first 48 hours, which lost me a little respect.

I added a new tier without properly calculating the plausible (and now actual) end result, and I didn't do my math on the results of that new tier, adding 80% more work, for very little increase in payment.

What Happened?

Kickstarter, kickstarter happened, exactly as its meant to.

Kickstarter has an internal algorithm, If you hit certain thresholds within certain time frames, their system promotes your project. People spot it, and if they like it, they'll back it.

Because I had funded in the first 24 hours, I got an initial bump, I saw a bunch of new and increased pledges in that period as the news went out to 'saved' backers, so KS internal advertising was promoting my project.

I was hitting 10 pledges a day or so.. some, maybe 3 from external sources,  and the rest from internal search engines. Meaning, if someone came to kickstarter to browse the projects, mine was bumping into 10th place average, people were finding it often and pledging often..

External vs Internal.
Kickstarter works by having people come and pledge, if they don't come, existing pledgers might pledge, but since they have already and recently, they might have spent their monthly/quarterly amount, so kickstarter is likely to prioritize external pledges as being more of an advertising boost for them, as a result, by my staggered posts to several locations about my project, meant I was bringing in a steady stream of backers.. so kickstarter was rewarding me by keeping my project high up in the charts.

Higher than Average follow on pledges.
When someone backs a project, similar products are posted in the spot below your success screen. The problem here might be, after backing a $100 board game, I'm done for the month, so I'm unlikely to back another $100 board game.. BUT.. at $4 a map, I was in the sweet spot of.. just 1 more thing, and inexpensive.. so as often as not, I think, people were spotting my project and deciding that little bit extra was worth it.

How do I know all this? Well that's why I did a kickstarter.. to discover how their metrics work. They use a different link mechanic to record each and every backer, where they came from. If a backer spotted my project from the screen of another project.. I can see which project lead to them choosing mine.

A Break down of what happened and When:

(Apologies, Kickstarter doesn't give out data until later so I had to rig up this, which is in reverse)

The First 16 hours.. to 120% funding.

The Purple is the "make 100" limited pledge, light purple are people pledging at $4, dark purple are people pledging above $4, and red are people adjusting their $4 pledge later, I wanted to see the typical level of people understanding what they are doing up front, vs coming back and pledging more later.. (doesn't yet take into account the shift from dark purple to red, just the increase)

So far so good. People tend to be pledging at the amount they intend to pledge at, the red 'adjustment' at the beginning stays true for most of this part of the graph, that person was the first pledge, who adjusted up, not realizing he could from the very beginning.

M) The first pledge for 'just a map' it increases at maybe 2 pledges a day for the first 3 days.

A) You can (sorta) see here the jagged increases as people realise they can pledge above the base $4, some friends and family who've come in with their first backing at $10 bring up the darker purple line, A0, A1 and A2 are people pledging $10 or $12, they've got an idea of what they want on the map, and know how much they need.. so hopefully my descriptions were on par, people understand what the 'rules' were and followed along.

Between A2 and B), there are a number of people just joining with increased their pledges, note the dark purple bump up a few times.. they can see 'oooh, look, I can jump from $4 to $6 to help fund the goal.

The Psychology of wanting something to succeed is all well and good, but if you don't give people the tools to do so, how can they. People here have pledged the minimum, but to get it higher, they either need to go out of their comfort zone and sell it to their friends.. OR they can just give a little more.. yet.. what will they get for this little more, you need to reward people, just a little reward, to increase their pledge.

13 days of funding, 630%, 20 hours to go... 

Now, the next stage in the process.. the goal has been achieved.. but I had 12 days left.. How to keep it going?

Kickstarter has this stretch goal system, adding more and improving your product to raise more capita, Its not directly created by kickstarter, it was done by some board game projects and has just become 'the done thing'. I didn't expect to have to do this, so my initial stretch goals were just 'pie in the sky' thoughts, but now.. at almost $400, I had to consider, I was actually going to hit $500.. I needed to have more realistic goals... AND means to achieve them.

So I added in the $3 Easter Egg pledge.. (I named it 'a little thing' but later I couldn't change the name, another lesson learned) but.. note the rocky road after.. no.1 was the first cancelled pledge, there were some adjustment pledges in there, people giving up their $4 pledge for a $2 map, but straight away, it gets snapped up (99 of 100 taken.. 1 left... fear of missing out.. people jumped on it)

People who had backed before, were not 100% keen on the change, some voiced it, some acted on it. My experience is, for every 1 person that does something, 25 people are thinking it. I hope I addressed the concern in my next update message, that I had no intention of diluting the project, I just didn't want anyone to miss out.

C) from here starts The New Yellow Wedge, the new $3 Easter Egg pledge, which as you can see goes as strong as the map pledge.

D) Some people like to help out, this was a map pledge +, just helping the project to get to the $750 tier.

E, F and G) Once it was understood that there were no real bounds.. some people just started pledging crazy amounts, some, to break the rules of the map (which was allowed.. i.e. you pay for it, I'll break it) and some want whole kingdoms of stuff going on..

For 200+ backers, I've had only 5 cancelled pledges.. I understand this is very very good, but maybe in the last 24 hours, some might quickly jump out. (I understand some advertising companies, pledge to access your details, then back out in the last 24 hours)

So there I am..

The graph doesn't show, someone bought the map, and pushed the total to $1830 at the time of writing..  have 20 hours left of the project, so if you've just seen this pop up in your feed and want to grab a final slice of the pie, feel free.

I don't know where this will go from here. There is enough interest, so I'll likely post a drivethuRPG map PDF for $4 or something fair to the backers (can't have it cheaper than the KS price), Many of the backers have asked I do another.. which I'll consider. but won't have it as cheap as this (I'd like to gauge what kind of interest people would have if it was twice the price...)

16 month Calendar and other time keeping

I saw a youtube video about the Human Calculator, and his 13th month Calendar and I thought.. Hmm, I wonder If I've mentioned it in my blog? my Calendar that is..

16 Month Calendar

Earth has a strange calendar, You can google hundreds of articles and videos about it, how to calculate it, ways to fix it, etc etc. I do like the idea of the 13 month calendar and how people in power have crushed all attempts to have it through history.. makes you wonder.. 

So I looked at my world(s) and thought.. Hmm, How many days/weeks/months etc would I have..How would people measure it?

Earth has 4 seasons, hot, warm but getting colder, cold, and cold but getting warmer, depending on where you are in the world. Unless you could think of anything else in such a binary system, It'll stay.

Then there is the moon cycle. Travels around the world, gives you a sense of when things should happen next.. 4rd moon this year? must be time to plant crops, 7th moon, animals will begin to breed. So there's that to consider too.

Moon cycles were divided into four, to make the week, giving us 7 days a week, luckily, would be havoc if it was 27 day cycles, we'd have some messed up calendars.. maybe that's why many civilizations don't get space travel, their clocks are so confusing, their lives so disordered, they can't get anything done efficiently, and why should they, the universe is obviously not consistent, so why should we?

So, that's Earth.

The Coyn.

Well At first it was earth like, and later I thought.. that's wrong, because of many reasons. So I had to do some math, lots of math, and figure out all the angles.

A brief reminder: The Coyn is a flat, disc shaped world, it has a sun, smaller than the disc (for reasons) which rises and sets on the same side of the world, but moves around it, 1 full rotation of the sun is a year, and takes, now, 515 days. Actually its 515.25258.. but more on that later

There are many ways to divide up 515, not. You have 5 and 103. So would the civilisations choose 5 months of 103 days each, or 103 weeks of 5 days? 103 doesn't divide easy, so, yay!

So, Ancient Civilizations might have 5 seasons, areas that are usually cold, might have, "the Great cold" as a season.. Russian Winter! Then a season for getting warmer, but its still cold, getting warmer and its nice, getting colder but its still nice and getting colder but its already cold, each season is 103 days long? 

Does it have to? We have leap years, where we add in an extra day every 4 years, so why not leap months? Maybe as time went by, they looked at the 103 days and figured.. you know, we could break it up into 51 days x 2 and a spare day... or 25 days and 3 spare days, or 3 sets of 26 days and 1 set of 25 days. Then 25 days can break into 5 days each, since 5 seems to be a dominant number here..

Viola.. its got some logic, but is broken, so I gave it to the Orc Tribes in the mountains (since they'd be watching the sun and figuring this stuff out), but broken enough to be a little chaotic, unruly and cause fights. 

"Midsday, the 3rd week of Forthmonth of old winter, I was reminded by my mother that there would be no end of month day celebration as it is the end of old winter and the next day would be Firstmonth of wintergone, war is coming as does the sun"

Of course races with a bit more aesthetic, would be insistent on declaring some days as seperate celebratory days, and having a nice clean set of numbers to work with. Humans, arriving at the world, remembering their earth calendar would be putting together a 30/31 day a month calendar, resulting in 17 months, 12 with 30 days, 5 with 31 days. But an offshoot of people would try to force a 12 month calendar of 43 days each, with 1 less day each year, except leap years.. 

What about leap years?

So, Earth, has 365 days, but we also have .24, so every 4 years we add a day (leap year), but thats .25, so that little..01 means that every 100 years we don't have a leap year, BUT theres a teeny tiny bit, so if the 100 year is also divisible by 4, then it is a leap year, except a miniscule little leftover, we'll add a day in the year 4909.. got that?

So, If I allow for leap years, every 4 years you add a day, and every 40 years you add an extra day and every 160 years you don't add either of those extra days.. thats the .25258 part.. 

So now, our offshoot humans have 43 days a month for 12 months, for 1 year, and then the other 3 years, December has 42 days (better to have 1 less day of winter, than 1 less day of summer)

The Elves

The Elven Homeworld is an eight sided octohedron, six gigantic mountain ranges that seperate the eight lifestyles of the elves. The aesthetic of the number 8 permiates their existance, and relates to their innate usage of magic. They quickly recognised that the world was not right and have attempted many times to get it right by speeding up the sun, slowing down one of the moons, their long term impression is that once its 'back to normal' the internal machine of the world will start back up and set things right. Their clocks have 80 second minutes and 80 minute hours, broken into four 8 hour chunks of the day for 32 hours, so it stands to reason they're try to force their calendars to a 8, and then when they realised they couldn't, force the world to conform to their system.. 

The Dwarves

The Dwarves are based on a 4 and 6 structure, 24 hours, broken into 4 sets of 6, 60 minutes, 60 seconds. All very logical, so their calendar too tries to split into 24 months, but that makes 21 days per month.. not very 24 like.. but 21/4 gives 5 days a week (one for each finger on the hand) for 4 weeks, and a day off at the end of the month.. very dwarf like.. very agreeable. oh and 11 days at the end of the year for a festival.

Of course, this is all for the major civilisations, all the minor groups have their own, and their neighbors influence, and then it all gets messed up by the spire.

The Spire

In the middle of the Coyn is a gigantic spire of ice, at its base, its 100km wide, rises 60 something km high, above the clouds of the clouds of the cloud cities, The very nature of a gigantic structure, causing a shadow across the land for miles and miles, the sub being blotted out for days or even weeks, will affect the psychology of the people and the weather of the area.. As a result, a sub-section of the calendar might also come up.

In my Dark Moscow campaign, there was 10 days of utter darkness in the winter where the sun was behind the spire, it was called Deep Winter, and was not recorded on calendars at all, for fear that acknowledging it would bring out demons, vice versa, during summer, autumn and spring, a few days of extreme warmth from the reflected rays of extra sunlight, caused a Mid Spring Summer, a mid Autumn Summer and a Very Hot Summer for a few days, So for them, there were almost 8 types of weather, the equinox of winter and summer marked by days of extreme cold and heat.

In roleplay, this happens for a few sessions, players are reminded of the natural course of events that their characters are fully aware of, and the players are always fascinated by. Before, I might explain it each time, later I had hand-outs and now.. I can reference this blog.

World Build October Part 14

Its World-Build-Tober: 

Sunday the 14th - World-build-tober

"Draw (or describe) what your inhabitants wear in warm weather"

Describe Warm Weather?

In Australia, Warm is 30-39c, In Russia, Warm is above 15c to about 30c.

In the Highland Swamps of the Kukuru mountains, the reflections of the sun on the mountain ranges, means year round warm weather, muggy, humid, The soil composition has left the valley in a perpetual swamp like pond, it rarely rains, just constant moist weather.

Clothing clings to the body, restricting movement, so most clothing is made from vines, weaved together to form a mesh, its not worn for protection from weather, but from the bites of fish.

Often, mud is worn on the skin to protect from bugs, and coloured mud has been sought after by several inhabitants, creating a trade in rarer shades of red and white (from the normal range of browns)

Celebrations often bring out the women covered head to toe in a variety of patterns of mud, in varies stages of drying out. clever 'dressmakers' have layered the mid so as a layer dries and breaks away, it reveals another colour beneath.

----

Deep in the mines of Karak-Dune, The Dwarves sweat when it gets above 20c. Maybe because its due to the varied layers of leather armour and mail, maybe its the forge tunnels are full of warm foggy air, so often Dwarves sweat. When the lava pits or forge halls get roudy, the rest of the tunnels start to get really warm, up to 40c, Dwarves can put up with alot, temperature included, but their clothing can't. So, when the temperature gets high, leather can rot, so off comes the leather.

But Dwarves are very traditional when it comes to gender relations. What with the beards and all. Often Dwarves mating rituals involve years of getting to know if the person you're friends with is a male or a female. Its considered extremely rude (at point of death) to imply, let alone ask a Dwarves gender.

As a result, in the warm tunnels, revealing anything that could imply gender would be extremely upsetting. So the dwarves invented a chainmesh, smaller links with the link gaps fused closed. Its slightly heavier, more comfortable than plain mail and still conceals enough of the body to remain respectable.

p.s. With my house-move-issues, I thought I scheduled these to post on their respective days, but obviously failed to do so, hence the block of posts all in a row

Number Crunch - The Fall of Fort-town

Here I will simple write out the actions taken by two players on a game untitled, the basic rules are in my previous post here. I'll try and post a small brief on how each turn played out, but I'm going to leave the conjecture on the history for the next post.

Number Crunch - The Fall of Fort-town

Firstly Maps: I took this randomly created map (left) that had a fort & walls and a river between, to make it two halves of a city. Then Myself and my Player, plotted relevant points to a hex grid and counted out areas that were 'population' vs 'anything not population'

It worked out well enough.

Introduction to Structure:

Turn #1 - isn't it obvious?

CITY NAME: Since this is a tale of two cities, I'll separate them until later when they re-merge.

ADV - Each turn in the beginning, a significant adventurer arrives in the town (fleeing from the zombie horde), They have an influence on the city, before settling in

Actions: typically It'll be like this "3 x Action name - results if imporant

Lastly, Changes to the game, 

-------------- Then a separator

Turn #0 Roll for Population increases, due to influx of refugess. North side poor = total Pop 11, South side Pop 17, Gathered food roll d6: 2 = population.. dang it.. well better than a 1 = half the population, would have gone cannibal on us.

BOTH Cities still joined: Jsemeby Fort-town it remains.

ADV - None from the Chaos.. starts next turn.

Major Changes.. All Zombies active attack this turn, Zombies co-ordinated attacks against the wells to check for initial breaches, wow.. none.. Wall spell happens, all Walls are now 2x health + 2x AF. Ok, secured.. no more external zombie problems.. oh wait, they can climb on their backs like ants? Nope, thats not in the Number crunch.. leave that for the Write up..lol. ok..

Lastly, Bridges are destroyed to ensure safety of north, as south seems to be overrun.. so the north panics.. Kaboom. two cities

-----------------

Turn #1

CITY: South JFT (Jsemby Fort Town)

ADV - - Mage Arrives, Offers Spells: Earth Elementalist - Shore Up the Water against river flood zombies.

9 people assigned to shore up the river bank

2 assigned as guards

3 assigned to tear out the houses on the west bank.. (My world doesn't have west, but I'm using it for ease of translation)

3 assigned to turn land (the west bank) into Farmland.

ZOMBIES: 6 Zombie hordes emerge from the river into the south side, as the embankment is being made.. argh! 2 guards are not enough.. 1 death.

RESULTS: 3 food added, total 20 food, 16 consumed (guard loss) = 4 food remains.

BONUS: Hero MAX destroys Zombies on river bank.

BONUS: Hero RILEY Overseas construction of river embankment +1 wall

--

CITY: North JFT

ADV - Merchant, Bonus 25% food covered for turn.

3 x tear down the rich apartments on most ariable land.

1 standard Village destroyed

2 x build Farm on that land.

4x Guards to defend walls (I have no idea of what to expect)

ZOMBIES: Emerge at my Pyre location.. crap -1 happiness

RESULTS: only need 75% food = 7, 3 food remains.

==========
Turn #2

CITY: South JFT

ADV - Entertainer - decreases unhappiness for turn.
Due to Overwhealming attacks by Zombies: 13 Guards
3 x destroy buildings
1 x Build Farm
ZOMBIES: Attack Pyre & Farm
RESULT: 7 population loss from starvation, 3 population unhappy
BONUS: Hero Max, destroys Zombies at River Bank
BONUS II: Hero Riley oversees construction of river embankment +1 wall.
-----
CITY: North JFT
ADV- Doctor, Sets up Medical Practice -10% disease
2 x build embankments
6 Guards
1 x Destroy buildings,
1x Build Farms
ZOMBIES: Invade Pyre Land, Take over Village in region.
RESULT: 1 Loss to Zombies, 4 Loss to Starvation, 2 Unhappiness
==========
Turn #3
CITY: South JFT
ADV - Entertainers, Once again clear unhappiness (what luck)
3x destroy Town
3x Build Farms
2 Guards
ZOMBIES: destroyed, Town Cleared.
RESULTS: 2 pop loss from starvation, 3 unhappy
BONUS: Hero Max purges the Pyre
BONUS: Hero Riley, Shores up the Pyre against attacks.
-----
CITY: North JFT
ADV: Academic - Helps town to Build Walls
5 x Guards, to clear town, but fail.. pyre still zombie infested.
ZOMBIES: Pyre is Zombie shanty town now..
RESULTS: no deaths, population food stable
===========

So, 15 years, ( 5 years per turn) Our populations stabilized from Farm income vs pop requirements.

While we were a bit lax on rules, and making stuff up on the fly, we had fun. We played 20 turns and around turn 16 managed to rebuild wharfs so we could transport goods and services from town to town, effectively reforming into one town, but by then, political upheaval caused the two to remain semi-seperate. I don't want to give too much away at this point, because the players might read it and also I'm not sure how interesting it is to read a turn by turn of a unfinished game. If there is any interest, I could later post it up.

If I did it again, I'd have thought out the turn by turn, destruction of peoples houses causing unhappiness, but maybe destruction of zombies causing calm, our food system was broken, and in effect we cheated to get as much population as we did, but maybe there were hidden stores that were unaccounted for, and we didn't include more food abilities in adventurers, Turn 6, a Mage Adventurer turns up south side, so maybe a few banquet spells weekly, and north side had some merchant adventurers, somehow get through from another town..


So, For I'll write up the 'history, as known by the players, as their characters who grew up in the city would have learnt from their parents and grandparents.

World Building Game Update

A kind of Post-mortem / Resurrection thread of what happened with version II, How it maybe worked, how it didn't and how I can improve on it for the future.. oh and what we're doing with it.

Years Later, the Adventurers discovered a plaque that spells out the demise of the Ancient Civs: Pokemon Go!

Ancient Civs started in Feb 2016

40 Players started, each playing between one and three races, starting in the Stone Age. I personally knew about 25 players, I also played, but not wholeheartedly I guess, Each player started with 1 city, of a size 4 (max 6). Players were given a set of instructions, I was available for email at any point, we had several video conferences and I made some video instructions (well, beta attempts at this) but we still didn't get even 25% attention rate of players..

I've run several Roleplay events, and getting 100% is impossible, getting 50% for the first session is a huge turnout. Usually 10-25% is standard. My friends in sales are always asking me, how do I get such a huge turnout.. mostly because 5% is standard for a sales conference.

No Players... No Game!

And so, while I was happy with a 25% attention rate, it also turned out to be my retention rate.. i.e. week after week, I was lucky to get 1/4 of the previous weeks players to remember to make a turn.

Now imagine if your a GM, running a game, you have 8 players at your first session, 2 at your next, 1 the week later and finally, you're by yourself. Dismal.

What worked: Players were interested, getting a huge number of responses from the start meant I could have had a great game. The concept was intriguing, people wanted to see where this was going to go and how it was going to work. Some didn't believe it would, but they wanted to see the train-wreck up close.

What didn't: Players were interested in seeing things happen, almost instantaneously. Is the modern role-player, so gratified in all their dealings that they can't hold out for a month? let alone a year?

So, The Interface was lacking. I gave all players carte blanche on their 'character sheets' with a template for anyone to work from.. but pretty much everyone stuck with the template.

The Maps took too long to process, and when I got a new job, and lost 40 hours of my week, this became too much to run by myself, thankfully Rory stepped up and was a great help, but maybe too late.. players were sensing a drop in the game and maybe that contributed more than I thought.

Player vs / meeting Player, didn't happen quickly enough in many players views, and this maybe was a problem in expectation.

By the time we sorted out these problems, we'd lost the interest of over a quarter of the players. Once that happened, the players still playing were encountering 'empty' players.. they didn't respond to messages, and playing a game by yourself is boring.

How to Improve: By the end of turn 12, we had a list of things we'd have liked to have done before play started.

• Some kind of interactive map, so players could "see" their game easier.. even if turns would still be processed by GMs, they could maybe interact with the map and get a feel for whats going on.
• GMing needed to be done, per player, and weekly.. verbally even. I think that the 15 odd email players, should have been upgraded to skype players, having the interaction with the GM, asking questions about turns, etc. Maybe using roll20 or something for the next run.
• Allowing more scope with turns, i.e. you can be a turn late, and pre-process your turn ahead, might have helped deal with timing, and the lack or in ability for GMs to always contact a player
• In counter to that, NOT allowing player to fall behind, even 2-3 turns, players felt like they had already lost too much and continuing was pointless

GMing 40 players in one game sounds impossible, or at least daunting, yet I've run this game with 80 and it went well. The difference was, 80 players within arms reach, I could speak with them all withing a week, remind them of their turns, the rules, they could ask questions, make deals. heck, when we had 'negotiations' we'd do it live, it was sorta fun watching two or three people negotiate contracts about a fictional universe.

Maybe they all had the same player?

What Now: Well, not to waste all the hard work done already, the GMs and some players have elected to take up the mantle of several of our lost players, and play them on until we reach turn 50. We'll see what happens, mark records of major events, and use it as a kind of decent world for roleplay.
Yet with only 8 minds, it'll be limited in the creativity, decisions, deals and crazy that it might have had, we might allow a smaller kingdom to be swallowed up into a larger one, because its easier to deal with less paperwork, while a single player may have fought it out to the bitter end, or come back from the brink of defeat with a successful event or two.

The End game was already pre-set, A great war (on a different continent) triggers a spell turning the mountains into mud, and swamping the continent, burying all the cities and such, causing people to dig into the world to retrieve their culture, creating hundreds of dungeons, which names the very game its all run in.

DungeonWorld.

As per my promise, When its done, I'll draw it up, scan it, and all players that started will get a copy. If you were/are a player and you'd like to maintain influence on your race/culture, drop me a line and we'll work something out.

p.s. you may have noticed, I tried to blog my turns, I got as far as three blogs when things went sideways, I didn't publish the last two, because it didn't seem relevant, but maybe I'll do them in blocks of 4 turns and catch up.

World Building Game, Turn #0 Race creation. Crocodiles

If you've read the previous post about the world building game, you might have been interested to see how its running, but of course I don't want to reveal "live" game turns, because then the other players will have an extreme advantage against me.. So this post is saved at the point of writing, and I'm going to make it public in around 12 weeks.

I'll be playing my own race, Croconians, from the ground up. Because I wrote the game, I have an advantage, but by revealing the turns (even 12 turns later) I give myself a disadvantage, so I guess that balances out. I've purposely placed my race apart from the others, so I won't gain any trade advantages either, I most want people to see how the game runs without the need for too much Interaction.

Fantasy Kingdoms, Croconians turn #0

Set-up

First things first, I need to create my account. I need the following:

1. What kind of Race is it?     Bipedal, Humanoid, Crocodiles
2. Name of my race                Croconian
3. Name of my King / Chief   Krogar Rugg'a
4. "statistical Modifiers"         Strength++, Speed--, Magic++, Health ++ Luck-- Training--

Note, While Statistical Modifiers are here, they represent more of a roleplaying aspect to the game, a "squad" of one race will be the similar equivalent strength of a "squad" of another, regardless of the stat modifier.

Next, my "king" has traits that are assigned by the game and by the player, my King has Frugal (-2% to all spending) and my choice is Inspired (+2% tax increase ) All kings start at level 3 for this run of the game.
So on my charactersheet I have the following:

Leaders Name	Krogar Rugg'a	Experience	0	Traits List
Race	Croconian	Level	3	Frugal (-2% x lvl = -6% costs) Inspired (+2% x lvl = +6% tax)

First City

This city represents the 'remains' of the previous civilization after some kind of catastrophic event, where we've lost access to our kingdoms full resources, technological know-how and such. I've decided that my 'rebuild' have managed to secure the last mages tower, and my Chief has found a decent enough building to use as his place of leadership, and the other 2 locations are to be markets, to ensure my kingdom has a chance of rebuilding. So my starting city will be like this:

Starting City	Grogary Rogg'a	….	Turn0
Current Stores	-	Food	1000
Caravans	0	Resource	1000
		Stone	0
LOCATION BUILDING	HAPPINESS	TURN MODIFIER	INCOME / COST
Chieftains Hut			-125
Mages Guild			-250
Markets	100	-10	+360
Markets	100	-10	+610
(empty for later)
		Subtotal	595
Other Costs
KING/Leader	=50 x Level	e.g. 150	-150
		Total	445

Without overwhelming you with any rules, lets just say that this is an acceptable start, but my income is rather low. I'll need to improve it fast if I'm going to get off the ground. This is because I chose the expensive and currently useless mage tower.. but saves me a massive later game cost to try to invent & build the mages tower.

Starting Map for the Croconians

My Map:
Not a bad start, only losing 1 cell over the river. because the terrain is all swamps, I think that being close to the forest is a good thing (wood?) but don't want to lose any more cells from that river blocking my path (rivers in this map are almost a km wide, no crossing easily.

My Techs:
I chose to take 3 random techs from the Cave-era( my choices are 2 chosen from Stone-age, 3 random from Stone-age or 4 random from bronze-age). I got Elders, Despotism & Surface Mining. .. Despotism looks interesting, minus happiness, lower tech, but Military prevents unhappiness... could be interesting.

After Watching the "account creation video" I see that I've pretty much completed all that I expect from other players.. so that's it for this Blog..

(After 12 weeks addition) - We've had a couple of drop-outs, only 2-3 so nothing too drastic, story line, its understandable that not every prince/princess is going to be as good a leader as their father/mother, so story line, accounts that are left abandoned by their players will 'play on' as Non Player Accounts, these accounts can be taken up by anyone at any time (the new crowned leader is a decisive leader) and continued, so if you're reading this blog and think, this could be interesting, pop me a line/email and you can join in as one of the untouched accounts, I'll walk you through the first first turns.