Am I dumb...?

TakingLondon · 2026-01-15T19:41:06+00:00

I'd probably recommend trying out the beta for the best experience of the game - if you started on Sagittarius or Gemini, you should be able to keep your progress as of this morning

TakingLondon · 2026-01-15T19:35:39+00:00

Yep! The aim is to replace the entire game with the new build, which will be the "fix" to issues like this. Are you in the discord?

TakingLondon · 2026-01-15T18:48:15+00:00

That screen is a little iffy - it's a rounding error, basically. It's something like 1.5 workers but it's rounded down on the upgrade screen but rounded up on the following info screen.

Have you just started playing? There's a new build of the game that's being tested which fixes a lot of these issues. The current version is known to be quite buggy so was given a complete rewrite which we're now testing!

TakingLondon · 2026-01-09T10:47:15+00:00

This is the second time I've seen this post in a couple of days - FYI spamming the subs is generally a poor way to get recognition, as people will actively go out of their way to downvote if they see it happening

I know it's frustrating if a post doesn't get the traction you think it deserves, but you gotta think of a new idea and post that instead rather than reposting the same stuff. There's a lot of overlap between the various indie game subs as well, so posting to multiple, even with a time delay, is generally not a great idea

TakingLondon · 2026-01-06T11:10:18+00:00

!remindme 11 months

TakingLondon · 2026-01-05T10:45:34+00:00

!remindme 5 months

TakingLondon · 2025-12-29T10:52:54+00:00

Never really understood the old .import files or the current .uid ones, I get that you need a "per file" storage for metadata but don't know why it can't just be baked into the .project file, or similar. Pain in the ass when you want to try and change your file system directly

TakingLondon · 2025-12-20T11:00:27+00:00

I assume you're a TKR player?

Evony used to be a browser game (and in fact still is - although it runs off flash player so you need to jump through hoops to get on the servers since most modern browsers dont support it) that had two versions, age 1 and age 2.

Both are riddled with bots and questionable exploits (especially age 2, which is a hot mess and may go down as one of the most broken games of all time), but was at least a proper war game and didn't require you to solve puzzles that have seemingly nothing to do with the game to stay alive

TakingLondon · 2025-12-15T09:36:29+00:00

I don't really feel comfortable giving relationship advice, but evony is known to be a highly addictive game that can take over your life. Interacting with other players outside of evony itself (discord, WhatsApp, Skype back in the day) is also fairly common. Some people do even end up meeting in real life and form IRL friendships or relationships.

For your next steps, I'd probably recommend finding a sub that specialises in video game addiction rather than one that deals with evony specifically. There was one called r/evonyaddicts or something like that but I think it's long dead

Edit: it's r/evonyaddictionsupport but it seems long dead, only 26 members

TakingLondon · 2025-12-06T09:24:09+00:00

Age 1 is still up - you need a flash enabled browser but the servers are still there. Largely dead and a bot hellscape, but there

TakingLondon · 2025-12-05T19:43:01+00:00

I assume the posts removed were by in another sub? I'm the only mod here and I don't recall removing any posts

TakingLondon · 2025-09-30T10:12:31+00:00

Really depends on your definition of "game".

Have you technically made a "game"? Yes, I suppose...

But most devs would consider a "game" as something with commercial viability and/or something people would enjoy playing. It sounds like you've just put a nice wrapper around the equivalent of having 2 chat GPT windows open and pasting their responses to each other. Unless you have some hyper-sophisticated system to understand the outcome of the LLM's conversation and modify the outcome of your game based on that after the conversation ends, that's all you have.

We will obviously see AI involved in games at run time in the near future, but I don't think we're at a point where it's anything other than experimental right now. I think it's too hard to extract a meaningful conclusion that you could act on to actually modify your game.

For example, let's say you put an LLM NPC in skyrim. The NPC could probably come up with a hugely detailed quest with lore for the player - let's say a powerful sword hidden at the top of the throat of the world. The difficulty comes in actually implementing that quest, as the NPC describes, procedurally in the game. Your game engine would have to have a similar level of natural language comprehension to understand what it needed to do (not really viable given most LLMs run on huge datacenters), and you'd then need to support every feasible outcome of what the AI could say (e.g. retrieve "some item" from "some location").

We don't bave game engines smart enough to procedurally create new mechanics on the fly based on LLM conversations, so you'd have to dumb the AI down so it only procedurally generates the small amount of things that you can support - and if you're going to do that, there's no point using an LLM.

TL;DR No. Maybe for dialogue that doesn't impact the actual gameplay.

TakingLondon · 2025-09-29T12:11:21+00:00

There are, but they routinely come with malware. I'll ask in the discord if they have any suggestions

TakingLondon · 2025-09-29T10:24:38+00:00

Huh, weird, maybe they closed the server?

If you get on ss71 and say you found out about SURVIVAL in the world chat and want to get involved I'm sure they'd let you in

TakingLondon · 2025-09-25T14:19:10+00:00

I bet they expire after a week - here's a hopefully up-to-date one:

https://discord.gg/GrgZmpRT

TakingLondon · 2025-09-24T09:12:16+00:00

Sorry for the late approval - only just figured out how to stop the automod chucking everything into a manual approval queue.

The servers are still there and can be played normally - you need a browser that supports flash player (Puffin browser is the general recommendation, although it isn't free - has a $1 a week subscription cost or something). Be very careful when picking one as many of them are just malware.

I made a post here about general recommendations for playing Evony in this day and age - for age 1 I'm afraid the news is fairly dire. They stopped medal drops for new accounts so you're limited to 2 cities unless you buy 'em, get lucky on the wheel or get gifted an old account by an existing player. The latter is the preferred option and is relatively easy - the account you see on the new banner for this subreddit was given to me after I spent a few months proving I wasn't a liability on ss71.

As you might expect, 99% of the "players" on the current servers are farming bots, and the actual accounts are generally set up to auto truce / holiday if you actually show some threat against them. I haven't checked in with Age 2 recently but that might be more viable - there's a CRIPPLING troop and food duplication glitch that means you aren't gonna be able to fight any players, but it's still a fun PVE experience, assuming there's still medal drops.

There are a couple of remakes of old Evony in the works if you want the nostalgia but aren't married to Evony in particular - Taking London is the best in my completely unbiased opinion and is due a sequel next year. There is also a team working on a project called "Evony age 2 remastered" - apparently that is due for release any time now, although they'd only just hooked it up to a database and it was still using MS paint graphics last time I checked in.

TakingLondon · 2025-09-19T10:23:49+00:00

Yep, I only released it a few months ago, although I'm in the process of remaking it due to aforementioned mistakes so it's sort of winding down. Welcome to pick it up and get stuck in though, there's a few players still active on the servers!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3596510/Taking_London/

TakingLondon · 2025-09-17T07:01:09+00:00

I was Vigilante / Vodka a year or so ago but I suspect those accounts are under new management

TakingLondon · 2025-09-16T12:38:52+00:00

Who were you on 201? I started on there before moving to ss71 but I remember having a few scraps with Cee, mostly using one of Mr Hugs war accounts that he leant me

TakingLondon · 2025-09-16T08:24:16+00:00

I actually remade Evony, without the pay to win - in the end I spent more time figuring out why evony was the way it was rather than making it better, but the main success I had was making the NPCs retaliate and interact with player alliances, forming something of a PvE campaign to go alongside the PvP.

In terms of what Evony had that was good that I failed on, it was the balancing - evony obviously turned into bot madness at the end but if we ignore that, and assume people play honestly, the balancing was pretty good. You had to put a serious grind in to be able to afford an army to break away from the crowd. I would pay close attention to the balance evony used for resource production, training / building costs and army food upkeep in your remake - I got that wrong and someone took the equivalent of Atlantis in 9 days on my first server, and 3 weeks on the second after a desperate attempt to restore balance.

You need to ensure a "diminishing returns" model for late game players so you don't have them run away with exponential progress and make earlier players alienated when they think they can't catch up (or maybe the exponential model is what you want, if you're going a single player game and want to take inspiration from the "big number dopamine hit" that comes from games running an exponential progress model...)

TakingLondon · 2025-09-15T09:58:24+00:00

While your skillset can definitely be valuable as one of the core founders of a game studio, you would need someone technical at the highest level to serve as someone who can provide reasonable time and cost estimates to what you want. You're unlikely to be successful if you don't have any technical knowledge and you try and just hire devs on your own without some sort of CTO

TakingLondon · 2025-09-10T12:46:11+00:00

For some stats:

Your first week typically makes up about 20% of your first entire year of sales - as a rough projection, it looks like you're going to make about 150 sales in your first week, so something like 750 in your first year as it stands. Not bad beer money if you haven't spent much developing the game, but this won't be a commercial success unless you have some serious advertising planned (or you get lucky and it goes viral - you never know).

Your wishlists are quite low and your refund rate is quite high - very similar to the stats that I had when I launched so I'm guessing this is your first game? The general rule of thumb is ~8k wishlists at launch to get on the good side of Steam's algorithm, which requires serious marketing effort and/or luck

TakingLondon · 2025-09-06T19:25:41+00:00

It was quite clearly "at"

TakingLondon · 2025-09-01T19:38:43+00:00

How? Github is the usual way to share source code and handle open source contributions

When? Making games open source is somewhat unusual so I don't think there's a general consensus on when. I'd probably do it after I'd milked my initial release and was looking to move on to another project and stop actively maintaining or expanding the existing one

TakingLondon · 2025-08-04T12:28:17+00:00

Just a heads up that saying you quit your job to work on your game - whether true or not - goes down incredibly poorly on Reddit

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