Questions from a newbie

Soku

Recently, I started playing Achaea. This is probably one of the only real MUDs I have ever played, so I am completely new to this sort of games. After playing for a while, I have learned the basics of hunting,cities, houses etc. But when I went on theforums, I read about things I have never heard of before, like for instance city economics and Mudlet and stuff like that. And now it feels like I am back to Level 1, struggling to get a hold of things. So I havesome questions.

1. What is actually Mudlet? So far, I have been playing the game from my iPhone just on the official webpage.

2. Why do I see so few people around the lands? I have been in almost every major city, and I have only seen around five guys through my entire playthrough. Is there different servers or something like that?

3. How do city economy work? I have absolutely no idea...

4. I have never tried PvP, so in order to do so, is there something I have to download or do?

That is all I can think of at the top of my head. Any answer would be greatly appreciated.

Tecton

Soku said:

Recently, I started playing Achaea. This is probably one of the only real MUDs I have ever played, so I am completely new to this sort of games. After playing for a while, I have learned the basics of hunting,cities, houses etc. But when I went on theforums, I read about things I have never heard of before, like for instance city economics and Mudlet and stuff like that. And now it feels like I am back to Level 1, struggling to get a hold of things. So I havesome questions.

1. What is actually Mudlet? So far, I have been playing the game from my iPhone just on the official webpage.

2. Why do I see so few people around the lands? I have been in almost every major city, and I have only seen around five guys through my entire playthrough. Is there different servers or something like that?

3. How do city economy work? I have absolutely no idea...

4. I have never tried PvP, so in order to do so, is there something I have to download or do?

That is all I can think of at the top of my head. Any answer would be greatly appreciated.

1. Mudlet is an alternate client for connecting to Achaea from your computer. It runs on windows, mac, and linux, and has a great support community.

2. Hrrm, can't really answer that, really depends on where you are wandering around. A lot of people congregate in their home cities, and you'll see more people in the realms in the US evening (but theres still over 130 people online right now).

3. Heh, this a very detailed subject, I'll let someone else cover this, or I'll revisit it when I have a bit more time.

4. Nope, nothing you need to download! You can enable a server-side curing helper with the CURING command, which will attempt to cure your afflictions as you fight another adventurer.

Antonius

1. Mudlet is a client used for connecting to MUDs. It's a standalone application that does essentially the same thing as Nexus/HTML5 client that IRE offer on the webpage.

2. Like most games, there are peak playing times when the most people are online. If you're playing on a different schedule it might seem like there are fewer players than there actually are. You may also be going to the wrong places - there tend to be a few places in each city where people congregate when not out hunting, questing, fighting, etc. Looking at your HONOURS, you haven't yet joined a city; that might be something to consider if you're looking for more people to interact with, though I think there's also a clan for rogues that helps with that kind of thing.

3. I'll let somebody else answer this one.

4. Technically no. Achaea has its own built in curing system that will keep up defences and cure afflictions for you (see HELP CURING SYSTEM in-game). However, there are still some things that it doesn't do defensively that you might need at higher levels of combat, and it doesn't do anything offensively so you'll need to make aliases for all of your abilities that you'd want to use. I'd suggest waiting until you're a higher level, have some more lessons invested in your skills, and have a decent grasp of the game mechanics first, because PvP can be incredibly complex.

Sena

Soku said:

2. Why do I see so few people around the lands? I have been in almost every major city, and I have only seen around five guys through my entire playthrough. Is there different servers or something like that?

QW will show you a list of people who are in the game (excluding anyone on a different plane, or anyone using one of various methods to hide themselves from the list), and HELP WHO will give you a bunch of other ways to find who's around. To find out where people actually are, eating a bit of echinacea or dolomite will add everyone's current room (unless they're hidden somehow) to the WHO list, or there are various abilities to locate people, such as detect in Shindo. Since you probably won't know where any of those rooms are though, ~55 lessons in vision will teach you farsight, which gives a person's general area instead of the room name (unless they're in the same area as you, then it shows the room).

Soku said:

3. How do city economy work? I have absolutely no idea...

This is pretty hard to answer. There's no single "economy system" to explain or anything, there are hundreds of little ways that gold (and other currencies/resources) is gained and spent. This thread should give a decent overview of where cities get their gold, credits, and commodities from. As for what they spend those resources on, there's building/maintenance costs for city improvements, payment for the city's guards, expanding the city's subdivision, expanding and developing the city in general (adding new rooms, denizen shops, and various other interesting things), repairing damage from raids, buying and expanding libraries, buying and replacing furniture, stocking and maintaining city shops (player-run shops that are managed by the city, not denizen shops which restock automatically), buying and maintaining ships, and dozens of other things that I can't think of at the moment.

If you're interested in more about how cities work, HELP CITYSTATES is a good place to start, especially the "Ministries" section. There are a lot of details that the help files don't get into, but it's a good overview.