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Latest Housing Updates:

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11/6/10:
Minor Estate Update:

Cornfield - new estate building
+Food and +Energy
It can replace other minor food and energy buildings.
[At level 10 it produces 25 Food and 16 Energy]

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9/29/10:
The Tent's now give 1 extra storage slot (instead of zero) for each inventory type in the Shops.
The Tiki Huts now give +2 storage slots instead of zero.
All other houses now give two more slots than they used to!
The largest estates now give +9 slots!

FME/DME = +9 storage / 79 house item slots
FvCE = +6 storage / 61 house item slots
FSC = +5 storage / 55 house item slots
FLCE = +3 storage / 43 house item slots

7/4/10:

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ORIGINAL: ChaosMagician
Sounds cool, but i have 3 characters with rare faces from the wf thing and i dont want to lose them :D
One is a hood, one is a space helmet, and one is a face with a weird eye and stitches going thru it or some thing.

One of these days, we'll have a face changer thing added to the Estates which should have many of those WF faces.


6/14/10:
Yes, some new (and existing) building types won't be allowed underground.
And there will be new buildings that *only* work underground. Something like a food resource "mushroom farm"


6/13/10:
I have a plan that will eventually add about 18 more plots to any estate size.


6/11/10:
Current plan is to combine the functions of the never-released "Library" with the "Magic Trainer" into a building called "Mage Tower"
The Library will somehow allow magic research with a way to upgrade rare magic weapons, spells, and Misc items.
Something similar will happen to the Warrior Trainer.


6/02/10:
The game database now checks every 5 minutes to see if an Estate building is done upgrading.
The older system checked only once per hour.
The game client still only reminds you to refresh once per hour. A fix for that will come eventually.
Resources are still gained exactly every hour, and a full hour's worth of resources is gained, even if the building just finished upgrading anytime during the previous 59 minutes.
I thought about updating the system to start giving partial hour resource gains every 5 minutes, but since the hourly resource amounts are not very high amounts, it wouldn't be all that useful.


6/01/10:
The other devs may add more Guards. They just have to connect new Guards to existing monsters that make sense as guards.

I'm working on new exciting stuff like:
museum artifacts, rainbow ponies, doomsday devices, mushrooms, and magic beans.


6/01/10:
I'm working on a major AQ house/estate update in my spare time.

Today, I worked on re-structuring some game database info for estates to make it easier to add more "stuff" in coming weeks.

One small side effect of the changes, is that removing a building from your estate land now only reduces the building level by 1 level (instead of 2)
Selling an entire estate will also only reduce the building levels by 1 level each.

Oh, and the monster estate invasions are on a new schedule now. They'll attack a bit more often.

6/02/10:
Oh, I should mention that Guard and Guard Tower effectiveness has not changed.
It's just that the monsters try to attack more often per day.

[Attack times appear to be 8 AM, 3 PM, 10 PM, and 1 AM (all times Eastern) --- etching]

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9/28/09:

MUSEUM UPDATE:
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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.

9/28/09:
And I can confirm that Museum owners will not automatically be getting a pile of free z-tokens.

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3/23/09:
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.

3/23/09:
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.

3/28/09:
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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3/6/09:
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

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3/5/09:
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.

3/6/09:
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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Future Housing Plans:

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.

06/02/10:
Adding features that allow upgrading weapons is tricky.
My goal with the estate updates is to avoid adding anything that would affect overall "game balance"

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.

3/27/09:
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)

4/7/09:
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.

4/7/09:
Things could change, but for now, if you own a Mega World Portal, you effectively own the key to a new kingdom.

5/20/09:
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.

5/2/09:
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.

7/13/09:
The animal barn is not yet released.
We haven't decided on what all it will do yet.

9/1/09:
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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3/27/09:
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.
4/15/09:
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.

2009 housing thread
2008 housing thread
2010-2012 housing thread
The Estate System Guide
AQ Estate Building List
Guard Power Charts
Guide to House Guard Purchase
Guard Efficiency List
Top Homes List

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I'd like to remind everyone that this is a discussion about estates and not for demands of what things should come and what should be done soon. Let's have patience.

< Message edited by etching -- 5/7/2011 5:23:49 >

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Maybe the Houses could have a countdown system, to tell us when the next War will happen?

Maybe we could have a "Clock of Doom" as a house object.
I would probably pay 10000 Z-tokens to know this information.

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As to the guard change, I am a bit disappointed I thought z-token items were not meant to be nerfed, but as such my total guard investment in z-tokens that I bought to stop my level 10 buildings from being invaded are now under-performing. Just like reducing stats on a weapon or an armor after the first 48 hours is not allowed for z-token items, I would of thought the same consideration would be taken for the guards. As such my z-token items have been nerfed and are not functioning for the purpose they were originally bought...

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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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ORIGINAL: Captain Rhubarb
Update:
* The combined total of the Level of your Guards will lower the chance that any of your buildings will get attacked.
* Higher level buildings have a higher chance of getting attacked.

The players that have a ridiculous number of guards will likely never get attacked.

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I expect that eventually most players won't worry so much, and just deal with any attacks when they would normally play, about once a day, and not worry about a few lost resources.

But.... I suppose some of you will be obsessed with maximizing your resource production!

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Question: What happens when one of my estate buildings is under attack?
Answer: When one of your buildings is under attack, it won't produce or consume resources anymore until you fight off the attacker. You also won't be able to use the buildings special options, like training or trading, until the attacker has been fought off. Higher level buildings have a higher chance of being attacked than lower level buildings. Buildings with a level of 0 or 1 and the Guard Tower are immune from being attacked. For a quick overview of which of your buildings is under attack, check your character page. Buildings that are under attack show an exclamation mark next to them.

ORIGINAL: Captain Rhubarb

One more bit of the formula:

As you know, higher level buildings are more likely to get attacked.

A level 10 building with a level 10 Guard tower on the estate has an equal amount of odds of getting attacked as a Level 2 building on an estate with no guard tower.

In other words, every 5 levels of guard tower makes each building act as if they were 4 levels lower in regards to the odds of getting attacked.

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@xDeathlordx:- The museum is the only z-token item thus far that is a buy at your own risk... The Captain did mention that it had no functionality and that it would receive one SOON™®(the AQ definition of soon, but he did mention that it would receive functionality if and when he had the time to implement it). As thus the museum is a risky investment as you don't know how long it will take to get updated... All we do know for sure is that when it is done it will be epic due to the concepts that the Captain has put out for its function.

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That is assuming the original function of the estates was free gold and XP with no work involved, which it was not. The function of guards is to reduce invasions, not utterly prevent them. They are now functioning as intended.