Synopsis
From Almansur Battlegrounds
Almansur is a strategy game of politics, economy and war. It is set in the early middle ages and in some scenarios, in a fantasy world. You play the role of a lord, who is in charge of guiding your Land to greatness and glory. You have all the options and choices at your disposal. You can develop your Land’s economy, and try to become a merchant empire with a solid defense, or raise a mighty army to conquer and subjugate your neighbors. You may try to build a powerful alliance with other lords, or a try to be feared by all. You can carefully train an elite force, or raise troops by the thousands. It’s all up to you in this game where your strategy skills will be put to the ultimate test.
Almansur is a turn-based MMOG (Massive Multiplayer Online Game). Your goal will be to prevail in a dangerous world where every Land is, at least at start, controlled by another human player. All aspects of your Land, such as economic development, land size, population, army size and quality will be constantly evaluated to produce a ranking of all the Lands in the game, which will eventually determine the winner.
We tried to create a game such that the outcomes of your decisions should be as intuitive and logical as possible. Thus, many times you will only find the explanations about game mechanics and not the quantitative information. The goal of this approach is to avoid the need for the players to make elaborate calculations to determine the optimal course of action, and instead try to think about what makes sense in a given situation and elaborate their strategy and/or tactical plan accordingly.
The game is turn based, meaning that when ever you can access it the game clock is stopped, allowing you to give your orders. This way you can play at what ever hours (real time) are more convenient for you. Some of those orders will be processed immediately and the effects will be instantly visible, others will remain queued to take effects only when the turn is processed (as will be stated later on the manual for each case). When the turn is being processed you will not be able to access your Land.
This procedure will take a few minutes, depending on the size of the scenario and volume of information of the turn. A game turn will happen with a fixed periodicity, in real time, and will represent a fixed number of game days. Each scenario states the fixed values for each or these variables. So, for example, you can have one scenario with turns every day (always at the same hour), each consisting of ten game days, another scenario with turns every other day (always at the same hour), each consisting of fifteen game days, and so on. Once in the game, you will always be able to see on the left side of your screen the game date and the time remaining before the next game turn is processed.
In this manual you will find information about the game mechanics organized, as much as possible, according to the same navigation scheme of the game itself, so that you can find more easily what ever information you need.
System requirements:
All you need is an Internet connection and a web browser with Flash installed! If you don’t have Flash installed, the game will automatically install it when you first try to open the map. We recommend that you use the most recent version of the graphics-enabled browser of your preference (you’re likely to be using one, but this should be mentioned for the sake of many who use text-only browsers).
