Lord of Ultima

My earliest memories of Ultima are seeing my brother and sister playing on the family's communal computer. All that I really remember of it was the gargoyles, so it must have been Ultima 6. By the time they moved on to Ultima 7 I was taking part too (where taking part meant sitting and watching, and occasionally taking notes). I remember thinking that Ultima 7 was an impressive game because it came on 7 floppy disks. When I was a little older, the early Ultima games were rereleased, so we played those too. I even played a bit of Ultima 6 by myself, but then I managed to kill the talking mouse and decided that I preferred computer games as a spectator sport.

Eventually I got into the swing of playing computer games by myself, but by then Ultima had moved past the isometric style that I'd grown up with and seemed to be require a level of coordination that I just don't possess :)

And then last year we discovered Lord of Ultima. I didn't have any experience with the MMORTS genre, although I'd played Civilization and Age of Empires (again, mostly as a spectator sport), so I had some idea of the basic concepts. And I loved the idea of being able to play with virtues and moongates again without needing twitch reflexes. And then... well then I got addicted.

I started on World 7, but after 3 mergers I ended up in a dead-end alliance while another group won. In the meantime I had started on the first Australian server, World 22, which remains my main server. I'm in Crimson Thorn, the third-ranked alliance on the server, and I think we're doing pretty well so far.

I also have an unfortunate habit of starting a new server whenever there's downtime, so I'm also on World 26 and have a small presence on a couple of newer servers, although World 22 is where I spend most of my time (and all my diamonds).

If you play, give me a shout-out (I'm Snowdrop, easy to remember).

Here are some of my favourite resources:

The most important supplements to the game are the two Greasemonkey scripts - LoU Tweak and LoU BOS

A close second would be the LoU Flash City Planner (FCP) which lets you manually plan cities. I used to use LoU City to generate my resource cities (with the options use_slots=90 num_cottages=20 placement_schedule=F,*2,WSI,*100) but recently I've been using the  LoU Optimizer. I find it a bit fiddlier, and it doesn't provide an FCP link, but it seems to produce better results.

For general information, the official LoU Wiki is usually pretty helpful. The forum thread Fundamentals of Lord of Ultima is a very thorough strategy guide for new players, although it's probably a little overwhelmingly technical for brand-new players.

My best tips for new players would be:

• Start on the newest server in your timezone (the game should recommend this by default anyway), otherwise you will have too far to catch up
• Do the tutorial. It's not the best source for information, but it gives great quest rewards along the way.
• Join an alliance run by an experienced player. There's enough people on their second (or third, or fourth, or...) server that letting the blind lead the blind is a waste of everyone's time.
• Ask questions. The wiki is helpful for the basics, but if there's something you don't understand you're much better off asking someone in your alliance (or in world chat, or on the forums) than making mistakes that could take weeks to undo.