Time in the Realm

One of the suggestions made by players is that in order to compete you cannot miss a Housekeeping.  At Housekeeping, all players receive large amounts of movement points, food is produced, troops are fed/paid, etc.  When Conquest! first started there was just one Housekeeping.  Over time, more HKs were added, to improve the pace of the game.
Until today, the server time dictated when HKs ran.  I have made a change to the server to allow players to specify an offset from GMT (in hours).  This offset ensures that the 9pm HK, for example, runs at 9pm for everyone.  "World HKs", which is when cities open markets, change prices, etc. still occur at the server time.
I also changed the HK times to run from 6am - 9pm, when most people have availability to play.
This was a fairly involved change and I do expect some bugs.  In the end, I'm hoping this will make things easier for people to enjoy the game.


Non-time related enhancements this week include a button to show who is currently connected to the server and adjustments to the client UI.  I removed some extraneous information (like showing "Yes" next to the icon indicating if you were protected) and grouped other items together where it made sense (Remote Kingdom on the Kingdom tab, for example).
And since the last Age was won in 4 days I increased the strength of the Barbarian Hordes and modified the payouts.
Finally, I continued my quest to standardize the messages with updates to 20-30 messages.


Enjoy!