BattleMaster
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BattleMaster is a turn based role-playing wargame played on the Internet with a web browser. It combines the concepts of turn-based strategy with real-time strategy by giving the each players characters a certain number of "hours" every turn that they can use to perform a variety of actions when they log in.
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Mechanics
In BattleMaster, the player controls a family (1-4) of nobles, called "Troop Leaders" in a fictional quasi-medieval world, consisting of several continents, of differing sizes, game-play and economies.
The continents are divided into various regions and cities, with differing climates, productions, resources and populations. These regions become part of various "realms", that vary in size as realms battle for control of the regions and their resources.
These realms have various government types, including democracy, monarchy, and tyranny with various degrees of separation of the offices of goverment, these being the Ruler, Banker, General and Judge.
Each realm has it's own economy, with requirements for various character classes such as Bureaucrat, Trader, Mentor, as well as the military classes of Solider, Infiltrator, Cavalier and Hero. Most characters are of the military classes. Some of these classes are only available to characters, who have the correct value of the in-character metrics "Prestige" and "Honour".
Each region generates gold, from tax revenues, and this is distributed by various methods to the Troop Leaders, in the form of bonds, that can be used according to their class.
Players may message others in their realm, and forward information at anytime, even if they are in different regions, but can only move to one region per turn.
Gameplay
The game has been designed to be low-impact, a player can usually read messages, and do all their character's actions, in a few minutes. But as there is more information available towards the end of a turn, there is some advantage to logging in later.
There are many options for each class, and a certain number of some classes are required to manage a realm, a degree of co-operation is required among the Troop Leaders in order to maintain, defend or enlarge a realm. As the game was created as a role-playing platform, this co-operation is the key to a successful realm. There are also many in-game mechanisms that prevent a realm from growing to large, and monopolising a continent, ensuring constant flux in the number and size of realms.
The players actions are "resolved" at the end of each turn, which takes place at 05:00 and 17:00 GMT. After the turn, each character receives messages regarding the results of battles, region moves, local events and status reports. The player can then use this turns allocation of "hours" to direct their Troop Leaders actions, such as Training troops, repairing equipment and doing region maintains
The game has been declared a "permanent beta test" as new features are added constantly and it will likely evolve as long as it exists. This is a feature that many players find enjoyable, as there is an active mailing list and wiki (http://old.battlemaster.org/tiki/tiki-index.php), so it allows the players to contribute ideas and features into the game.
The game uses a community approach to fend off cheaters and other abusive people. The system works on two levels: At the automated level, the game server tries to identify cheaters, and assigns rating indicating the amount of cheater-typical behaviour seen in each player. At the community level, players record how much they trust or how well they know other players, and can vote abusive players out of the game to protect themselves.
History
The project was created in 2000, originally as an add-on to the game SpellMaster by Tom Vogt. BattleMaster is still active in 2005 and has ~1000 players.
External links
- BattleMaster Web Site (http://battlemaster.org/)
- Battlemaster Wiki (http://old.battlemaster.org/tiki/tiki-index.php)