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10/19:
update:
One more storage slot per item category added to Darkovia and Forest Mansion Estates.
(=Forest and Darkovia Mansion Estates now have 7 extra slots (67 house item slots).

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9/28:

MUSEUM UPDATE:
---------------------

The features for the Museum won't be ready until probably November.
I'm really sorry for all the delays!
I have a huge high priority web site project to complete first, and then I will attempt to focus my attention on the House Estate stuff.

In order to reward the loyal players that have suffered these long delays:

When the _______ function of the Museum is finally released, everyone that has owned a Museum will receive a ______ item for every day that they have owned the Museum.
Even if you bought one and sold it already, you will receive a ______ item for each day that you did own it.

9/28:
And I can confirm that Museum owners will not automatically be getting a pile of free z-tokens.

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8/25:
* Storage Buildings can now be leveled up to level 15. The gold upgrade costs are relatively cheap, but the upgrade time is longer than other buildings.
* The Museum hourly energy, food, and stone costs (resource consumption) have been cut in half. (-4/0/-2/-4 at level 10 now)

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8/18:
I'm still ridiculously busy working on ballyhoo, payment system integration, and other "boring" marketing stuff.
So, I won't have any time to work on AQ housing until after August.

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8/17:
The original house value weekly increase rate was 5%
Almost exactly a year ago this was reduced to 3% a week.
Starting tomorrow, house values will only increase 1% of their original buying cost each week.
Plenty of Z-Tokens can be obtained through battles and especially Ballyhoo to upgrade the lower priced houses.

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8/11:
I've increased the rewards from using the guard tower and MWP some.
The higher level buildings will give an even larger amount now.

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7/27:
The timing of the buildings getting attacked has changed...
NOTE: The new times seem to be (all times ET): 2:00 AM, 11:00 AM and 8:00 PM.

7/27:
I think I tweaked the invasion odds a bit. Higher level buildings are more likely to get attacked.

Somewhere on my to-do list is allowing visitors to defend other player's estates.
When that's finally in place, I think I'll increase the invasion odds even higher.

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7/9:
I forgot to mention that the latest update to the shop system included increasing the number of buyable 'house items' you can purchase.
The larger your house, the more of an increase you will get.

DME/FME = +6 extra slots (61 total slots)

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6/16:
I want to let everyone know that I'm very busy working on WarpForce right now.
Along with all my normal duties (ballyhoo ads, payment system integration, etc)

So, I won't have any time to work on AQ housing until late July or August.

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5/15:
I just now added level 85 and 105 versions of the Drakel Bouncer guard.
Oh, and I tweaked some of the guard prices.
Major change is lowering the cost of the nerf kitten guard to 10,000 z-tokens.
Sorry, no refunds on existing players that own it.
I think i've given out enough free tokens this week!

Price changes:

Nerfkitten Scion (130) 15000 now 10000
Mutant Dracolich!! (92) 1100 1300
MeGogg (92) 2000 1800
Ferocious BURP (90) 1000 1300
Wolf Brain Spider (90) 3,000 2500
Dragoncat Guard (110) 1500 2000

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5/15:
New "Storage Building 2"
Works exactly like the regular storage building, and you can have both on your estate.
Same exact leveling costs, and gives same 200 extra resource capacity as the original building.
Only difference is that this one costs 2000 z-tokens.

4/13:
I saw a concern earlier that if the storage building was under attack, that it would not count towards total "storage capacity".
I just confirmed in the game database code, that as long as the warehouse is built on the estate, and Level 1 or higher, it will provide storage, even if under attack.
The in-game screen might report otherwise, but I'm sure you won't lose resources if the storage building is under attack.

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4/21:
I knew that some of you have way too many guards, and so I added the 1/2 and 1/4 army options.
There's currently no difference between sending 1/2 twice and full once. The total cost and average rewards are about the same.

4/17:
* Small increase in the Gold/XP rewards that you get when deploying armies.
* Reduced the # of waves defeated when using the Mega Portal and Guard Tower to fight in wars.
This does not affect the rewards, just the amount of waves defeated.
* Less overall randomness in the # of waves defeated. (it's a bell curve now, for those of you that are stats scholars)

3/23:
Guard Tower or Mega World Portal War Kill Formula:
Please do not ask staff for the formulas behind the new Tower/Portal combat system.
We have decided not to reveal the exact formula, and we can't (and won't) reveal it if asked.

3/23:
The rewards are sort of like Ballyhoo, except you get Gold and XP.
The larger the army, and the higher your estate buildings (guard tower or world portal) the better the prize.
Oh, and the rewards do count towards your daily cap amounts, but like ballyhoo if you are already at your caps, you can still get rewards from armies.
The level of your Tower or Portal do have pretty strong effects on the rewards, but don't underestimate your Guard level or your Reputation.

3/28:
Currently, the attack power of the guards for war deployment uses the same formula for the "power" of the guards for defending your estate.
Total Attack Power = Sum(GuardLevel^1.5)
The estate resource costs are based directly on the amount of Attack Power, so that's easy enough to calculate.
The Gold/XP rewards are the most complicated formula, and I don't want to give out any details on that yet.
And the reward formula might change before the next war event.

At a Level 10 Portal, Trescol and Kairula have 1000 Attack Power.
Power: (Reputation - 6)*200 (Always positive)

Trescol costs:
Full army: 550 Energy and 200 Food
Half Army: 275 Energy and 100 Food

Kairula costs:
Full army: Energy 500 and 250 Food
half army: Energy 250 and 125 Food

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3/6:
New Lower Prices on large estates:
Forest Mansion Estate (15000 tokens)
Darkovia Mansion Estate (16000 tokens)

Players that already owned these houses will not lose the current value of their homes.
(wouldn't that be nice in the real world? )
The weekly +3% house value is based on the price you originally bought your house for.

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3/6:
I also increased by 1 extra storage slot for the Tiki with Beach Estate and Frostvale Cottage Estate houses.
It was only 3 extras, and now it's 4 extra.

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3/6:
Guard stuff:
For calculating how effective Guards are at protecting your house estate buildings from random invaders,
higher level guards are now proportionately more effective.

As a quick comparison, each guard level is worth a certain amount of virtual 'guard' points.
Level 10 = 6
Level 25 = 25
Level 45 = 60
Level 75 = 130
Level 100 = 200

For the players that have *tons* of guards, you'll find that if you lots of Level 60+ guards, that you no longer need to keep all your Level 25 guards.
Your estate is very safe now.

Guard Power Formula:
(Level^1.5) / 5.0 (rounded off)
Guard Power Charts

4/17:
When the Guard Tower is "starving for resources" the tower's level is not calculated into defending your estate.
However, all your guards are still able to defend your estate at their full ability.
They hang out in the little guard house next to the main house, and defend the estate from there.

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3/5:
New House available for buying now:

Forest Log Cabin Estate
Cost: 3100 Z-Tokens
Includes 7 plots of estate land

This will be the lowest cost "starter" home that comes with an estate.

Houses Removed from Shop:
Forest Log Cabin
Forest Log House


3/5:
The portal system is basically the last expansion stage in the housing system.
There will not likely be any larger houses to upgrade to.
There will be new "stuff" to buy to add on to existing houses.

3/6:
I doubt we'll ever have any higher priced homes.
Unless we totally get rid of the % value increase, which could happen eventually, but not any time soon.

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3/5:
* Almost all of the house paintings ("Small Portals") now link to somewhere in game, like towns, old special quests, or class quest areas.

Portal Paintings Destinations:

Lolosia
Aquella Portrait
Aquella's Light
Captain Rhubarb Portrait
Trobble at Night
Devourer Saga
Brontus
Morgan
Temple of Hope Inside
Temple of Hope Outside
The Eternal
Culak and Kendrel
Lorithia
Galrick
Nightbane's Last Stand
Xilar
Dragonstone
Dragon's Eye
Earth Dragon
Paxia
The Nautican Bard
The Nautican Thinker
Frostvale
Frostval, Rise of the Frost Kingdom
The Frost King
Chilly and Robina
Grandma
Zorbak's Hideout
Zorbak
Nightmare Family
Nightmare Town
No teleport
Twilly Portrait
Mother's Love
Krovesport
Robina Portrait
Krovesport Painting
Others
Artix - Paladin Quest
Old Boog - Boog's Tavern
Drakonnan Portrait - Rip in the Sky
Thalia - Thalia
Eselgee Portrait - Berserker Class
Mercuria - Doomquake Caverns
Pae the Gecko - Isle d'Oriens
Witches Portrait - Granemor

Twig Fishing Game - Twig fishing minigame
Thanks zarqueam

* The two new alien world portal paintings link you to the actual alien worlds to explore.
Portal to Trescol (1500 tokens)
Portal to Kairula (1500 tokens)

Alien Worlds
Using one of the world portal paintings you can visit another alien world.
On the alien worlds, read all the information you can.
You can earn the trust of the alien factions and gain access to special shops and guests.
You can visit both worlds, and earn reputation on both of them.

How do I use a painting (also called "Small Portal") ?
To use your paintings, go to your house, and click a painting to zoom in the view.
Then scroll left/right using the on-screen arrows to select a painting.
If the 'teleport' button is visible, click it to go to that painting's destination.
If the button is not visible it means that the painting just doesn't have any destination area yet.

How do I use the Mega World Portal?
Mega World Portal estate item (4500 tokens)
When the next big war event starts up, access your Mega portal from your House Estate.
There will be options to send your army from the alien planets where you've gained their trust and earned favorable reputation with them.
Your army will instant auto-battle the foes in the big war event, and you'll earn a pile of gold and XP, and also earn "army wins" for that war's battle counter.
You can choose which alien world to send forces from.
Sending an army will cost Energy and Food estate resources. If you have plenty, you can send armies over and over till you run out.
When the Museum features are eventually added to the game, there may be special artifacts found by your armies as they do their battles.

3/6:
We haven't decided on the final exact numbers yet, but the higher level mega portal will also be more "accurate" in how it send armies and guards.
More accuracy means better reward outcomes, and less chances of anything "really bad" from happening when messing with worm hole generators.

3/19:
Similar to the trade hut, the Mega World Portal will be "offline" when upgrading, and can't be used to send armies in that mode.
The portal will only work when it's on your estate, has its worker setup, is not under attack, not upgrading, and not starving for resources (if it ever gets changed to require resources per hour)


War Counters
Army "wins" in wars will count towards the total war goal and also to the player's personal "army wins" counter.
Soon, we'll have on our character sheets some sort of personal war counters like, Wins:17, Guard Wins:20, Army Wins:137
Special war reward shops could limit access by the personal amounts, but no decisions have been made for that yet.

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2/23:
When you view your guards from your character web page, or from inside your guard house, the guards will now be sorted from highest-to-lowest level.
If you have more than 12 guards, the lowest level ones will not appear in the display.
When you visit other people's houses in-game, you will get attacked by their guards in random shuffled order.
(like shuffling a deck and drawing them one at a time)

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2/6: All the houses now have an up-close painting viewer.

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Upcoming Updates:

Museum update
The special Museum features are not enabled yet, but you can start upgrading the building now for when the features are active.

Higher level museums will offer more interesting "features", such as:
- Displaying all your paintings on screen at once in a virtual art gallery.
- Owning a museum will add the ability for your character to find random "artifact" drops from monsters.
- Use artifacts and other [TOP SECRET] knowledge and items to [TOP SECRET] your inventory weapons.

Kingdom project
A few things that are definite regarding the "kingdoms" project:

- It is not going to be a larger house.
- Owners of any size house can participate in some way
- Owners of estates will have more options
- Real PVP type stuff is not likely to happen for AQ "kingdoms"
- Some sort of cross-game (AQ/DF/MQ/AQW) PVP thing is coming eventually... Hard to say right now exactly what that will end up as.

3/27:
Everyone can own their own kingdom.
The plan right now, is that the kingdom will be on one of the alien planets. (you have to pick just one)

4/7:
The future kingdoms stuff will not require selling your existing estate.
There could be other kinds of estates someday, like a farmland terrain estate with massive food production (and less production of the other resources, of course)
But those estates would be the same sizes as the existing ones.

4/7:
Things could change, but for now, if you own a Mega World Portal, you effectively own the key to a new kingdom.

5/20:
I started off thinking each character could eventually own more than one house, but the game code got too complicated, and it became easier to manage with the assumption that 1 character = 1 house.
A lot of players will buy different houses for their other characters on their user account, to try out different combination of buildings.
I'm going to attempt to allow each character to own more than one 'kingdom'. One per alien planet.

5/2:
I'm thinking about someday adding a "Library" estate building which a player would used to research something that would be used to upgrade/enchance/craft magic weapons.
The existing Magic Trainer buildings would turn into the Library building, so both functions would be in the same building.
Something similar could be done with a "Forge" building for doing Melee/Ranged weapon research along with the Combat trainer tied into it.

7/13:
The animal barn is not yet released.
We haven't decided on what all it will do yet.

9/1:
On my todo list of things to make estates more useful:

An "armory" section inside the Guard Tower where you can put weapons/armor/shields from your character inventory into the Guard Tower.
Your guards will then use the items you give them to increase the defense value of your estate.
And you free up some inventory storage slots.
You can swap items anytime, they're not stuck in the guard tower.
I think to be fair though, there should be a very small z-token fee to swapping items. A training cost for your guards to learn to use the cool stuff you give them.

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3/27:
Organizing Pain's ideas into categories:

Stuff that Houses may get someday:
Custom paintings. Paint-your-own-painting.
Buy better steeds and mounts for your house.
Custom colors/designs on your house ... graffiti, class symbols, NPC faces etc.
Quests to get respect from fractions or races. e.g. moglins, vampires, werewolves. And then buying guards of them.
Portal paintings to the past to fight old bosses in extreme mode.
Library inside houses. (like the one in the rip in the sky, but smaller, like a book self)

Stuff that House Estates may get someday:
Armory ... petting zoo to get guests from your house.
Maintenance and upkeep on buildings.
Breeding nerfkittens, trobbles, truffles and selling for profit.
Quests to establish transport routes to make more money from your businesses.
Quests to protect your stock when it is attacked by bandits.
Library buildings.
Custom gardens with plants and statues (of your favorite NPC) you can buy and add.
Having an underground dungeon.
Look out posts. Barracks. Farms. Windmills. Workshop (builds catapults).

Features coming (eventually) to the Alien world "kingdoms" expansion:
Recruiting builders, soldiers, clerics, expanding your house with stone (building a kingdom up in small stages).
Employ archers on large buildings ... using gold for different kinds of employees.
Forming an army of guardians (not real players) and having flanks of archers, pike men, spear men, warriors, ninjas ... cyborgs.
Making friends and enemies with different legions and races.
Becoming a king/queen of a place no one has even heard of. Throne room. Palace. Royal Guards.
Diplomats. War Generals. Employees.
Wars over land.
Wars over resources.

PVP Type stuff that just isn't likely to get implemented into AQ, since the focus of AQ has never been PVP:
Forming alliances with other players ... waging war against other players ... fighting mini wars with/against other players ...
Protecting or harming shipments and convoys of other people's homes
Stealing small amounts of resources or gold from other players at random by sending guards or fighting another persons guards.
4/15:
Yeah, let's stop debating on whether stealing resources is good or bad, since we're not going to add that feature.
We could add other stuff, like the fun prank ideas.

Stuff that would be awesome, but the existing house artwork is too limiting.
Buying placeable and movable furniture for houses.
Choosing time of day for your house.
Setting traps in your house. (Fun things for visitors to click.)
House appearances based on alignment (good/unity = gold, evil/chaos = black, neutral = green)
Garden gnomes and flamingos.

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To answer the criticisms that existed in the deleted thread (mainly that guards serve little to no purpose). Well, neither to paintings, but people like them. Not to mention I like having my little corner of the internet and trying to make it accessible only to me, yet with the tantalizing opportunity for someone to TRY to get in. :D

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ORIGINAL:Noirin,
Wish there were pics available of all their NPCs. Cant think of anything more that I would want in my gallery.