Old GM-Messages

Many thanks to Tomás Capapé for the conversion of the rules of the actual game to pdf. Available for download here.

As you can see, I have added a new section to this Atlantis Page. The Advanced Rules. If you have experienced an effect of the game not covered in the standard rules, please let me know and I will, if it is not a bug in the engine, add it to the list.

I've received this week a lot of mails about not received reports. I had a closer look into the games mailbox and found a lot more rejected report mails. ALL of them have been hotmail or msn-mailboxes. Looks like hotmail is blocking gmx mails every now and then. I have found some accordant entries in German forums. Looks like the blocking had been done only on Sunday and early Monday. Justification for this is the protection of hotmails users against "known" spam sites. Since gmx is doing a hell lot to prevent spam from their sites this is completely absurd. I think hotmail is trying to hamper their competitors a bit... I don't know if this will happen again. Also I cannot prevent this in any way. My advise would be everybody with a hotmail or msn address as game address should change to another freemailer (I would recommend googlemail, haven't had any complains with them. For the German, Austrian and Swiss Players I would recommend gmx, they will not block the game mails ... obviously :D)

here's the justification hotmail send in their bounce mail:

Connected to 65.54.245.104 but sender was rejected. Remote host said: 550 SC-004 Mail rejected by Windows Live Hotmail for policy reasons. A block has been placed against your IP address because we have received complaints concerning mail coming from that IP address.

I wonder who has "complained" against mails from gmx...

I have the next Atlantis engine ready. It will be a version 5 engine with a modified standard rule set. The change that will stand out most will be the disabling of the work order. With this I hope the game will not end in a gridlock like the last one. There are enough means of earning money for war and trade factions to not being dependant to working. The second most important change will be the distributing of faction points. Every faction will have 3 mages regardless of the amount of faction points spend to their MAGIC attribute. To the attributes WAR and TRADE 4 points can be allocated, but with a maximum of 3 to any of them. A 2/2 Faction can govern 20 tax and 20 trade regions. Without the WORK order I hope empires will not grow much bigger than this. There are some more, but smaller changes to the ruleset, but them players will have to explore while playing (a good start to learn about the changes will be the new Rules I hope to put online sometime next week).

For the size of the map I will calculate 20 regions for every player. The Oceans will cover about 30 percent of the map. Thus for every player the map should have 27 regions. With areas more attractive than others I hope a mapsize like that will offer enough space for players to settle and also some friction between factions struggling to get the best parts of the world. Right now I have about 40 registrations for the new game. Please send a registration mail to al-s@gmx.de, I will not automatically transfer all players from the actual game to the new one. Also you can ask everybody you think fit to play in an Atlantis game if they are interested in taking part in a fresh starting game. I will advertise the game the next week in some places and I would be glad if you would do the same.

The current game is in it's 167th turn now. Today will be the 168th and next week the 169th turn. With a turn every week without an interruption the game has been running for about 3 years and 3 months now with at all times at least 60 players. I thank you all for playing in my game and hope to see you all in the next.

Results for the Poll
Do you want to reset the game and start anew?

the question has been issued if I should reset the game and start a new world. Thus I propose a poll. Every active player (the ones with a factionnumber and password - I will also count votes by factions recently but through no fault of his's/her's own eliminated from the game) can take part. D-Day will be the next deadline (Sunday 17.06.2007)

The question is

I have integrated the New Player Guide made by Fuzzyman and converted for our game by Barry (player of the Tsurani). The New Player Guide can be found left with the button "NP Guide".

Visit the newly opened Atlantis Forum!
Your username should consist of part of your faction name followed by your faction number in square brackets. For example if your Factionname would be

"The Tingtangle Consortium (999)"

"Tingtangle[999]"

I have just noticed, the nocross description in the rulespage has been missing. The rulespage has been updated.

I do not approve of multiple accounts! and will delete them if I find them. Using multiple accounts and thus trying to bypass the 5 faction points limitation is unfair against any player who is playing by the rules. Please play fair and forbear from registering multiple factions!

The ARMOR and WEAPON commands have been enabled. You can read their usage in the Rules section

While activating the advanced trade structures some turns ago, I have forgotten the "Arcane Mines". Everybody who's owner of a unit with the mining skill of at least 3 should give the order

I have included a syntax-check into my mailscripts, so from now on, if you send in orders with a syntax error, you will receive a reply with the error in your orders marked.

We had a lot of problems, especialy with yahoo.com addresses this week. Maybe this is due to some spam filters. Could everybody who hasn't received the report in time check if the mail has ended in a spam-folder? And could everybody set the game address (st.atlantis@gmx.de) into a whitelist (if existent).

I also have included the #resend function in my mailscripts. If you want to have your old report resend to you, just send a mail to the game address with

the server of my webspaceprovider is not allways set to the right time. The deadline is allways sunday 20:00 MET. I will have a look every now and then and correct the offset, but don't trust it by the second :)

Some users of hotmail.com mailboxes have had problems receiving their report. The cause of this is hotmail bouncing the reports back due to the size of the mail. It is exceeding the hotmail limits. Therefore I strongly advise against using hotmail as a mail address (sorry hotmail folks) since if a faction is long enough in the game and acquire enough units, the mail will eventually grow bigger than the hotmail limits allow.

all players with faction numbers higher than 315 will have received their reports just today (tuesday). My scripts have stoped sending reports at that point and I have noticed only today after some request mails... If anybody still don't have a report please do not hesitate and contact me!

Dear new players, If you think about joining the game, please be aware that a major part of this game is about communicating with your fellow players. Especially if you're starting as a new player and trying to establish your faction on the board. Since we are now in Turn 52 there are some older players with well established factions (thus with large, well trained armies!!!) on the map. Attacking them on first sight is never a good idea. Talking to them and asking for help is! The later variation of approaching an unknown force on the map will in most cases help your faction to prosper and you to find somebody to help mastering the technics and tactics of the game. To contact the player of an unknown faction or unit you can use the #Atlp2pMail and #AtlUnitMail special mail commands, see the rules section for further explanations.