Lord of Ultima Tools Part 1: Script Installation and LoU Tweak

There are lots of tools out there to help with Lord of Ultima, and some of them become almost indispensable as your empire grows. But some of the most useful of them are quite complex to use. So here is a guide to the basics.


First of all, there are the Greasemonkey scripts. These modify the game to add a bunch of shortcuts and summaries. To run the scripts, you need to be playing the game in either Chrome or Firefox. Chrome supports Greasemonkey scripts natively; in Firefox you will need to begin by installing Greasemonkey. Here's a Greasemonkey guide if you have any trouble with the installation.

These are the scripts that I'm aware of:

• LoU Tweak
• LoU BoS
• LoU Assistant
• LoU City Sort

In addition, the TDK Extension runs without Greasemonkey. You will need to restart Firefox to install the extension. The scripts should just require a refresh of the game page, but if they don't work immediately, restarting your browser is always a good first troubleshooting step.

Here's what the game looks like without any add-ons:

And with all 5 add-ons installed:

In this post I'm going to talk about LoU Tweak, the most important of the add-ons. I'll go through the other add-ons is subsequent posts.

Circled in red below are the new buttons and information added by LoU Tweak:

At the top left of the map is the queue info. BQ = Building Queue and UQ = Unit Queue. For each queue, it shows the time the queue will finish (my building queue will finish at 20:14), the amount of time the queue will take (there are 6 hours and 44 minutes worth of buildings in my queue), and how many items are in the queue (my building queue has 6 items out of a possible maximum of 6).

At the top right, below the navigation area, is the mini-map link. This functionality is now available using the in-game world map, so you can ignore this button.

Above the building queue is the Incoming resources overview. This shows you the resources that are currently on their way to your city (for this city there are no incoming resources, so all values are 0). Below that it shows the Total Resources (TR) that will be present once all the resources have arrived (taking into account the resources that the city will produce in the mean time) and how much Free Space (FS) will be available once the resources have arrived.

Straight under the Building Queue heading there are two buttons marked "P" and "L". "P" is a shortcut to the Purify Resources page (instead of clicking on Trade and then the Purify Resources tab). "L" will take you to the Layout screen, which I'll come back to in a little while.

In the queue itself you'll see "T" and "B" buttons - these move a building to the Top or Bottom of the queue.

Above the chat window there are 4 buttons - City, Player, Alliance and Link. These will add the appropriate linking codes to the chat (i.e., '[city][/city]', '[player][/player]', '[alliance][/alliance]' and '[url][/url]'). Since these codes are part of the game functionality, not the add-on, I won't comment further except to point out that the [city] tags require coordinates (e.g., 133:148), not a city name, since city names are not unique.

Down the bottom, the "O" button will take you to the LoU Tweak options.

Now let's go back to that "L" button. Clicking on it (note that it is only enabled in the City map, not the Region or World maps) will open a pop-up like this:

This gives you three different representations of the resource nodes and buildings already in your city, as well as links to open these layouts in 2 different planner sites. I'll come back to how to use these sites in a later part of this guide. If you click on the Overlay layout tab, you'll see something like this (although unless you've already been playing around, the text box will be empty):

While the ShareString on the first tab showed the current layout of my city, this one shows the planned layout of my city. If you look back at the full screenshot, you can see some buildings with yellow squares (for example, the iron mine that I circled in red). This building doesn't actually exist in my city yet, I've just entered it in the Overlay layout tab. LoU Tweak remembers where I want to put the building so I can add it later.

Probably the most important functionality of LoU Tweak is one that is not apparent in the screenshots - the keyboard shortcuts. The LoU Tweak installation page lists all of the available shortcuts, but the most important one you need to know is "l" (that's a lowercase "L"). Hitting "l" will add an upgrade of the lowest level building to your building queue, saving a lot of searching for building to upgrade. You can be more specific about which buildings to upgrade by using different shortcuts (e.g., "c" will upgrade the lowest level cottage) or by going to Tweak's options. Tip: if pressing "l" or the other shortcuts does nothing, try clicking anywhere in the building queue first.

The last part of LoU Tweak you need to know about are the options. Clicking on the "O" button at the bottom of the screen will show this pop-up:

Here are some notes on some of the options.

"Hide 'Get & Use' buttons" will hide the buttons under the building queue that let you buy artefacts. Ticking this box will add an "A" button under the Building Queue heading that will toggle the buttons on and off (so if the box is ticked and the buttons are still there, you need to click on the "A")

"Show queue info window" turns the queue info section (the bit with BQ and UQ) on and off.

"Save overlay layout Sharestring in city notes" does pretty much what it says - when you change the sharestring in Overlay layout, it saves a copy to city notes. I'd suggest turning this on - it means your layouts will be retained if you change browsers or computers.

"Limit requested resources to city free space" - if this is ticked, you won't be able to request more resources than the city can fit (i.e., it won't let FS in the Incoming resources section go negative). It can be useful to make sure you don't waste resources, but sometimes you want to request more than the free space because you are planning to use the existing resources before the new ones get there. You can change this option on an individual trade by ticking the "Limit" box in the bottom left of the Request Resources tab, so I'd recommend leaving the overall option ticked.

"Enable MiniMap" can be turned off, since as I mentioned earlier the functionality has been replaced by the World map.

At the bottom of this tab, you will see the options for the "l" key. Only building types that are ticked will be upgraded when you press "l" (this doesn't affect the other shortcuts, so "e" will upgrade any resource building, even if only some are selected in options). I would suggest unticking City Wall, since it seems to be buggy (i.e., the city wall upgrades even when it isn't the lowest level building).

The Hotkeys tab lets you change some, although not all, of the keyboard shortcuts. The Colors tab lets you change the colours of some parts of the interface.

I'll come back to Tweak's layout functionality when I talk about the city planners, but that's a basic overview of what you can do with LoU Tweak.

Continue to Part 2