Lord of Ultima Tools Part 2: LoU BoS Summary

Continued from Part 1

LoU BoS is by far the most complex of the LoU add-ons. It basically consists of lots of different tools, so you can use just one part of it without bothering about the rest of it. Some of the tools are more useful than others, and some of them are only really useful if you don't have ministers.

Unlike LoU Tweak, which adds buttons and information all over the place, LoU BoS only adds two buttons, "Summary" and "BOS Tools", and another little section, all circled in red below:

To be honest, I can't tell you what the section with the R does, because it doesn't work for me (I'm not sure if a game update has broken it or if it's something about my setup that it doesn't like). I believe it is part of the 'jump to coords' functionality, which has now been superseded by the in-game navigation rose. So that just leaves the 2 buttons at the top.

If I use Chrome, the "Summary" button causes an error which forces my game to restart. Hopefully a future update to either Chrome or BoS will fix this, but in the mean time, if you have this problem, try Firefox - I've had no problems with any add-ons in Firefox.

Clicking on "Summary" will bring up this pop-up:

Each tab across the top basically represents a different tool, although they do have some aspects in common. One of these is the Reference column. This displays the same information as the Reference section in the City Notes.

To open City Notes, click on the notepad icon to the right of your city name, circled in red below:

Which will bring up a pop-up like this:

Anything you type in the Reference box will display in the Reference column in BoS. But you can also enter codes in this box that BoS will look for in order to split your cities into groups. By default these codes are:

• C = Castles
• M = Moonglow Tower
• W = Warehouse
• B = Building
• D = Defensive
• G = Gold

You can also add your own codes in the options tab. When including these codes in the Reference box, put them between asterisks (e.g., *C* for a castle). You can have more than one code for a city (e.g., *WM* for a warehouse with a moonglow tower). You can also put any other information you like in the Reference box, but outside the asterisks.

Once the Reference boxes are filled in, the first tab of the BoS Summary (Cities) will look something like this:

In the drop-down boxes I've selected to only display defensive buildings (marked with *D*) on c22. In the reference column you can see that I've marked these cities as both Defensive and Building (so if I selected Building from the drop-down these would still appear, as well as some other cities). I've also noted, outside the asterisks, the troop type that each city is building.

Apart from the two drop-downs (for city type and continent), the buttons across the top are:

• Refresh resources: This only seems to be present if you have a small number of cities. It updates the resource values in the summary table, although as the tooltip explains it only gets information about cities that have available carts or ships.
• Refresh: This is also only present with a small number of cities. This refreshes even less information  than Refresh resources. It mainly refreshes information for the city that you are currently viewing.
• Fetch cities: This completely updates all the information in the table. It takes 0.5 seconds for each city, so for large empires it can take a couple of minutes, but it's the only way of getting completely up-to-date information.
• Fill with: This is a dangerous buttons. It will attempt to fill all of the displayed cities with the selected resource. An example use would be to select Castles in the first drop-down menu and then Fill with Food. The dangerous part is that if you are displaying all of your cities, it will just shuffle resources back and forth between cities, using up all of your carts and ships.
• Export Csv: Produces a text version of the table that you can copy and paste into another program (note that it may show up behind the summary page)
• Help: Lists the city type codes (again, may show up behind the summary page)

The summary table itself has a large number of columns, the names of which are pretty much self-explanatory. Columns can be added and removed by clicking on the picture of the table with the down arrow, circled in red below. You can sort by any column by clicking on the column title.

The next tab is Military. The buttons are a subset of the ones on the Cities tab and serve the same functions. The table shows the number and types of troops in each city (in the screen shot below I've removed some of the troop types so you can see the summary columns). This table shows the troops that belong to the city, regardless of where they actually are at the time.

The next tab, Defenders, is similar to the Military tab, but it shows the troops that are currently in a city, rather than the ones that belong in the city. In other words, it includes troops that have been sent to the city on support, but not troops that are out on raids or on support to other cities.e

The next tab, Castles, only shows information about your castles (as marked with *C* in the reference; it doesn't matter whether they have actually been castled or not), but it shows some information that is not available in the other tabs.

The names of these columns are not quite as clear as those in the Cities tab. The column labelled Food is the percentage that the storage is full (i.e., here it is 94% full), while the Units column is the percentage of barracks slots that have been filled. The three storage capacity columns (for Food, Wood and Iron) show how much free space is available for these resources. Food empty in shows 'food positive' here, meaning that the castle is self-feeding. If it relies on food from other cities, this column will show when the food will run out. Units queue is the time currently left in the unit queue. Orders is the number of command counts that have been used. Not raiding is the number of troops belonging to the city that are not busy. Defenders is identical to the Summary column on the Defenders tab.

Unlike the first four tabs, which just display information, the Purify tab actually lets you do something, namely, purify resources. It requires a bit of setup, which is explained if you press the Help button. First of all, all cities that you want to purify in should have *M* in their reference in order to be displayed on this tab. Then, you can either go through each city in turn and click Mark Moonglow Tower, or click on Mark  All MTs to mark all the cities with moonglow towers (it will mark cities even if they don't have *M* in the reference, that just determines if they are displayed in the table). Once set up, the summary will look something like this:

There are also some options for this tab. If you click on the Options button, this window will open:

The four numbers set the amount of resources that should remain after using the Purify All button. This may be displayed as an absolute amount, as in the above screenshot, or as a percentage (I'm not sure what determines what format it appears in). The boxes are labelled with the name of the purified resource, but the value actually refers to the unpurified resource (e.g., Wood, not Darkwood). If the Include castles box is ticked, resources in castles will be purified, although food will only be purified if you have a Building Minister; if you have a Building Minister only excess food will be purified. If Uses Recruitment tab data is ticked, it won't purify resources that are needed to recruit troops as specified in the Recruitment tab (see below).

Once all of that is set-up, there are two ways you can use the summary to purify resources. The first is to click the numbers in blue to purify all of that resource in that city (the Purify Options are not taken into account if you use this method). However, this method only works if you have a Trade Minister (in which case you could be using the Trade Minister to purify, so I don't think it's that useful). The other method is to click Purify All, which will purify resources in cities with marked Moonglow Towers according to the options you have set.

Note that the information in the table won't update after you purify. The only way I've found to update the information is to refresh the whole game.

The next tab is Recruitment. This tab only works if you have a Building Minister and a War Minister, and it becomes fairly redundant if you have a Defence Minister, so the number of people for whom this is useful is probably pretty small (it was useful at one point, but the functionality of the Defence Minister has since been expanded). To set it up, you need to go to each city you want to use it in and click on Enable, bringing up the following screen.

The troop types in bold are the ones that can currently be recruited. The number of each type that have been currently been recruited are listed at the bottom, and can be transferred to the boxes above by clicking Add city units. Or you can manually set a target number of troops by filling in the numbers. Hitting max will increase that troop type until all of the numbers add up to the current available barrack space (i.e., so that the number at the bottom right would read 9000 / 9000 TS). The form won't allow you to select more troops than you have room for, so you can't set targets that will be filled once barrack space is available, like you can with the Defence Minister. Once the target numbers are set up, hit OK and the summary screen will look something like this. As in other tabs you can filter the cities displayed with drop-down menus, but for this tab the only city types that can be selected are Castles and Defensive, and you can't filter by continent. Instead, the second drop-down menu lets you filter by the number of Missing troops (i.e., the number that still need to be recruited), although the >0 doesn't work properly (it displays all cities, even ones that don't have any Missing troops).

Under City/Orders you can see the name of the city and the target numbers for each troop type (if you have more than one city, you can expand and contract each city by clicking on the little arrow to the left of the folder icon). Under Action, there will be a Recruit button for each troop type where the target number is more than the current number. Clicking on Recruit will attempt to start recruitment of those troops, and display the results in the Status column (for a key to the codes, click on the Help button on this tab).

The rest of the table is for information purposes. Missing displays the number of troops required to meet the target number (after any recruitment currently in the queue is taken into account). Resources for displays how many troops of that type you have enough resources to recruit. Recruiting is the number of troops that are currently in the recruitment queue. Available is the number of troops that you currently have. In other words Available + Recruiting + Missing will always add up to the target number you have set. Recruitment Time is the time it will take to recruit one unit of that troop type.

This tab can also be used for mass recruitment. Clicking on Recruit All will try to recruit all troops in all cities that have been selected using the drop-down menus. If you want to remove a city from the table, click on Disable while view that city. You can also click Export settings to produce a pop-up (may display behind the summary table) with text that you can copy to another computer and then import with Import settings, to avoid the need to re-enter the target troop numbers. The button marked btnDefenceMinisterSetTargetArmy (I assume this will be fixed in a future update) will copy the target numbers to the Defence Ministers Target Army settings for all cities (not just the ones that are currently displayed).

The Carts tab is purely for information purposes, and displays all current movements of your carts and ships.

The entries can be filtered in four ways:

• By Type (Trade or transfer). Trade are sales made on the trade market. Transfer are trades that have been initiated manually or using BoS. In the table, ??? 4 means a minister-initiated trade, but this is not one of the options in the drop-down.
• By State (transport or Returns). Transport are carts/ships that currently have goods on them. Returns are carts/ships that are returning to their source city.
• By Transport (Carts or tnf:ships). Carts are carts. tnf:ships are ships.
• By Target player (You or Someone else). You are trades between your cities. Someone else are trades to other players.

The rest of the table is fairly self-explanatory, except to point out that Position is the co-ordinates of the target city, not the source city.

The Trade Routes tab lets you set up transfers of resources that you carry out frequently (e.g., sending resources from a resource city to a warehouse or from a food city to a castle).

To set-up a new route, click on Add Route to bring up this window:

Select the From and To city for the route, and the default amount you want to transfer of each resource. The Transport drop-down lets you choose whether you want to transport with carts or ships. The selection above, Carts then ships, will send by carts if they are available, otherwise it will send by ships. You also assign the trade route to a group (for example, putting all of the transfers from food cities to castles in one group). Unfortunately you can't name the groups, only assign them a letter. The note at the bottom indicates how it will interpret numbers in the resource fields -- 10000 means 10,000, but 9000 means 9000k, i.e., 9,000,000. Make sure you understand exactly what number you are putting in. Hitting the Max button will set all of the resource values to the storage capacity of the From city (in other words, it will send all available resources).

Once a trade route is set up, the Trade Routes tab will look like this:

The drop-down menu lets you filter by the group letter. The table then displays the routes that have set up. The two options in the Edit column (on the right) let you Edit or Delete that trade route. The Land/Sea column theoretically displays the number of carts and ships available, but since it uses the Request Resources command to check these, it is also affected by the number of resources in the source city (e.g., if you only have 50k of each resource in the source city, these numbers will display as 50 and 5 even if you actually have more carts and ships than that).

Before you send anything, you need to click Refresh Resources so that BoS updates how many carts and ships it thinks are available (again, this may not be completely accurate). Once that's done, in the Action column, two options are available. Send will send the amount that is set up in the trade route (10,000 wood in the screenshot above). Send max will send as many resources as possible, ignoring the number set in the trade route (although it will only send resources that a number is set for -- in this example it will only send wood, but it will send all the wood available). Only the carts/ships it thinks are available will be used, so if these numbers are inaccurate (as described above), it may not send the full amount. If it cannot send the full amount, it will send resources in the proportion set in the trade route (e.g., if it is trying to send 100k wood and 200k stone but there are only 30 carts, it will send 10k wood and 20k stone).

You can also click the Send all or Send all max buttons, which have the same effect as clicking Send or Send max respectively for all of the cities displayed. As in the Recruitment tab, you can Export and Import the trade routes via a text file. There is a Help button for this tab, but some of the information in it appears to be out of date (for example, this feature does not require a Building Minister to use).

The next tab, Orders, is another information-only tab, this one displaying an overview of the current commands of all your cities.

This table can be filtered by 4 drop-down menus:

• Order Type: The type of command (e.g., raid, settle, plunder, etc.)
• Order State: What the troops are currently doing (e.g. To (travelling to the target), Returns (travelling back to the source city), On Support, etc.)
• Source Continent
• Destination Continent

You can also decide whether to Show fake attacks. Unticking this box will filter out plunders, assaults and sieges with a TS of less than 4000.

The table will then summarise all orders based on the filter. The Last visited column displays how long ago that city was last viewed (I believe that the information in the table can only be updated when the city is visited), although this and other information is only updated when you click the Refresh button.

The final summary tab is Incoming attacks. This tab theoretically displays pretty much the same information as the in-game report of the same name, but it doesn't display any information for me, so I would recommend using the in-game report instead.

The last tab is the Options tab, which contains settings that affect multiple tabs as well as some that don't relate to the summaries. 

The Table settings let you save and load settings such as which columns are displayed on each tab. The settings are saved within the browser, so this is to allow such settings to persist between sessions, not to transfer them between computers. You can save settings for three tabs - Cities, Military and Purify, and either load them manually or select the checkbox to load them when the game loads.

The Saving cities data section will save information about the cities (e.g., resource levels) between sessions so that the summary tables are already filled out when you log into the game. Most of this information is likely to be out of date and need refreshing to be of use, but it at least gives you somewhere to start with (it's particularly useful if you need to refresh the game, in which case the information will still be up to date). Tick both checkboxes for a completely automatic process, or use the buttons to do it manually.

Custom City Types let you add additional codes that can be placed in the city Reference section. You can't modify the names of the existing groups or delete them, only add new letters. Click on Add, then type the new letter, and then the name of the group. Examples of groups you could add are cities that can produce barons, resource cities, food cities, palaces, and so on. To delete a group you've added, select it from the drop down menu and then click Remove.

The city types to groups copier lets you set up groups in the new in-game functionality based on the groups you have already set up in BoS. You need to first set up the in-game groups under options. Then for each group, select the BoS group in the left drop-down menu and the in-game group in the right drop-down menu and then click Assign to copy over that group. You will need to do this for each BoS group.

In the Chat section, you can select to Tweak chat at start, or press the button to tweak it just for this session. As far as I'm aware, the only change this makes is to make the text entry box in All Chat red to reduce the chance you will accidentally type here instead of in Alliance chat.

The final option is Save summary position, which will save the position of the summary pop-up so it will display in the that place the next time you open it, rather than in the default position.

Part 3 goes over BOS Tools.