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Comments
@Tecton @sarapis @makarios you're all beautiful fucking people who deserve to be happy forever.
I'll start with Imperian. Imperian's current malus is that the population is a little low by comparison to Aetolia and Lusternia. Extremely low by Achaean standards, but that's true everywhere. However, where Imperian shines is that it has outstanding quality-of-life improvements with config options like damage taken (and the kind of damage it was), displaying your crit rate, and other various little snippets like not making limb breaks a guessing game (it'll give you a message when an enemy limb is at 33% towards a break and 66% towards a break so you can calculate how much damage it'll take to ruin a limb). The combat is slightly slower by comparison to Achaea, but none of the PvP'ers really mind it. Artifacts have some scaling issues there right now and there is still a bit of a damage meta, but Garryn is one of the best coders I've seen in my long time in IRE, he's very open to ideas from everyone, and he has a good head for combat balance. Outside of the slight damage meta, the game is actually very well balanced. In terms of organizations, the population is really, REALLY stacked in favor of Anti-Magick at the moment. Pretty much all of the fighters are there, including myself, and Antioch (once the holy organization akin to Targossas) is pretty much now the villain for all the other orgs. Magick and Demonic have essentially formed a coalition to stop Anti-Magick (really just Antioch) from ruining the world. There are no Gods either since they died in an event awhile back. The 'Gods' are entities which mold themselves based on a concept that the players create with a cult. If an entity gets attracted to said idea from a cult, they'll become that cult's entity and patron from that point on. There's also a ton of honours quests if questing is your thing but the roleplay is pretty scarce. The game is really neat and I know a few Achaean players over there currently like Mizik. It's a very easy transition for an Achaean to go to Imperian since auto-curing is so good that pretty much everyone uses it and some of the class mechanics are still somewhat similar. I am Rahiel there for anyone with questions.
Lusternia, the game I'm currently playing, has a lot of... weirdness at the moment. There is a current overhaul to try to simplify the game's mechanics so that converts and newer players have an easy time of playing. However, this is going to translate into taking awhile for combat to balance itself out. Some of the artifacts and promotions have gone a long way into introducing feature/power creep and I think it's currently veering dangerously into giving class skills to everyone with promotion artifacts. However, where Lusternia shines is the lore as it has some very heavy religious references and real-world mythos references. You've also got a ton of conflict mechanics in the game with village revolts, domoths, raids, supermob conflict, and others. Envoys are currently attempting to reduce the penalties for dying in enemy territory so that raiding is more of a thing again. There are a lot of honours quests so questing is aplenty and the roleplay is okay. It used to be a lot better. As for curing, most people are using Vadi's open-source m&mf as Firstaid/Auto-Curing is not that great. I am Nienla there if you have any questions, but I may also be on my new Celestine character.
Aetolia is a game that I spent a long time in but retired from about a year ago. It is pretty much the roleplay central of IRE with a lot of conflict inherent around the two sides. You have Spirit, which is dedicated to life and the natural rhythm of it and then you have Shadow, whose classes are based on undeath, vampirism, etc. If you are really focused on roleplay and creating a story-based narrative for your character, Aetolia really is the best and you'll get spoiled on how good some people are there. However, PK in Aetolia leaves a lot to be desired. The liaison system there is currently a mess in my opinion since it's split between the two sides and they basically can never get along on buffs/nerfs unless they're vastly inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. A lot of classes, as a result, are kind of in a state where they're good, but won't do anything to those with good curing (which is only a few people, as effective public systems are pretty scarce/non-existent). Some classes, like current Sentinel, are vastly overcomplicated to the point of being virtually ineffective because of how long it takes to secure a kill and how complicated the offense is. Other classes, like Syssin (Serpent) and Monk, are currently in a state where the former is an affliction juggernaut and the latter can just bash people to death with little effort and some artifacts. The conflict system is currently based on 'ylem' and leylines, but organizations are rarely showing up for them since they have enough ylem or they just won't show up unless one side has a vastly numerically superior group. The war system, however, was my favorite PvP that I've ever experienced in IRE. It was a conflict system with mechanics where you'd lead NPC troops for your organization to battle against another and wrestled for control of territory one room at a time until you vanquished all of an org's troops and captured both of their city's gates. Once captured, they would be forced into surrendering to you and the winning org would gain 1/4th of their total commodities and pretty much all of that org's territory except for stuff in a 20 or so room radius from the gates of the losing org. Wars would generally be anywhere from 1-2 OOC weeks long and generally a non-stop PvP slog for the militias of both sides. People hated this aspect of it since there was a lot of attrition involved both ICly and OOCly, but non-combatants and combatants both got involved and generally were able to contribute to the war effort. Unfortunately, it got disabled 2-3 years ago when wars became non-stop due to egos and people would re-declare war as soon as the forced surrender period was over. In 2016, a new war system is slated to be released but we'll have to see if it lives up to the original. I played Seir there. I haven't played in awhile so I don't know the nitty gritty behind mechanics right now, but I can still answer any generic questions about Aetolia.
Whew. There you go. Hope this helps.
Album of Bluef during her time in Achaea
Results of disembowel testing | Knight limb counter | GMCP AB files
Everyone I have met thus far, are wonderful individuals! I look forward to many moments and memories here.
That said, there are a dozen things I love about the different games.
I absolutely love the server side curing in Imperian. It was amazing from the get go. I seriously dislike that they have always been so PK heavy and that they killed off all of the Gods. That just felt... completely anti-IRE to me. But as it's been mentioned the player base is pretty small. Also the players have a more gritty feel. I would never recommend someone to Imperian that wants a fluffy welcoming feel, because you're just not going to get that in Imperian. (Maybe that's changed but I sincerely doubt it.)
Aetolia has fantastic options for bashing that feel fluid from one leveling tier to the next, not to mention their bashing instance that guarantees something to kill at end game levels that revolves on a timer for a respawn. The havens are pretty awesome also, though they can thin the population considerably. You may see 60 people online, but 25 of them may be camped out in their haven. I really like some of the wares you can get from the bloody coins, and I have almost always liked the items that come out of their giftbag-like promos as they are more directly useful and less "collection" oriented. Aetolia also has some really interesting class options. One of my favorite things about Aetolia has always been, and will likely remain, the interaction between the Garden (Gods) and the players. I like that it is easy to get God RP there, and that you don't always have to go seeking it out, but that there is a damn good chance it'll randomly find you.
Lusternia. I. Love. Influencing. The fact that they offer an option to level without ever killing a single thing is an amazing concept and I love it. Bashing is bashing is bashing. Influencing gave a different feel to leveling than just going and killing stuff... again. Plus, it's an avenue for income at end game. I also LOVE how many quests they have that range in difficulty from mind-numbingly easy to bang-your-head-against-the-wall difficult. I dislike the numerous organizations that thin out the fairly small population way too much. Also, as interesting a concept as it is, multiple planes are a pain in the ass. It can be hard enough to learn the map of a single continent, but add in layers that can run several deep and it just gets obnoxious at times especially when various organizations lay claim to various planes. Yes, that's for conflict, but it's still annoying.
The cons for Achaea for me are pretty small. The chief among them is that the classes are largely the same thing the game started with. But that can't be much of a gripe since Achaea was the IRE flagship and these are the classes that molded the game. Once upon a time they were new and exciting. Now they've been around for a long time and I have become used to them, so they don't thrill me, but that's more a "tried them all" thing and not a fault of Achaea's. I do like that Achaea is constantly trying to improve classes and what not, like taking out trade skills from being class specific and making them optional for anyone, and adding in new skills. I guess the thing with Achaea is that there is a reason it maintains the largest player base.
No matter what, I look forward to seeing the deck shuffled up a bit!
There's a neat event going on now, too
Beware, I'm getting pretty good at combat. Everything hurts, though
Same with Influencing in Lusternia like Ashelynne said, it's a brilliant system. Bashing without bashing, and more profitable than bashing too.
Seir was awesome.
Re: Aetolia
The new Diablo 3 season started, so haven't IRE'd at all these last few weeks. I'm not sure if anyone else touched on this yet, but the economy on Aetolia seems to have restabilized with credits currently going at 6000 gold per (with recent average sale price going at 5125). If people are still considering trying the game but aren't sure if it's worth their retirement credits, at least go check it out. Thirty days is a fair bit longer than the original fourteen to get a feel for the game. Levelling up is a fair bit easier (as in, a lot easier), so someone familiar with the IRE games should be able to get to endgame in that time easily.
I wish that I either had more time or they just rolled all these features into one game.