Aquilae

Alpha Launch

What Is Aquilae?

You are not playing an adventurer. You are running a realm, a starting point of which is nothing but you, a backpack, and some basic tools. Grain feeds the population that staffs your mines, the mines provide your smiths, and merchants and ships fill the distance between where a thing is made and where it is wanted.

As your realm grows, so do your options, and so do your problems.

Eventually you can afford to have standing troops rather than levies pulled off the farms in an emergency, and you fortify whatever you cannot afford to lose and organize territory into provinces, and then go take somebody else's if you think you can hold it. Sieges, raids on an economy you cannot beat in open battle, and ships sitting across a trade route are all available to you, and to everyone else.

The systems are wired into each other; what your economy produces sets the ceiling on the army you can field, geography decides which directions you can expand at all, and logistics decide whether that army accomplishes anything once it marches. A war damages production and trade a long way from wherever the fighting is.

Most of what happens to the world is because a player did it.

Build Your Realm

A settlement is not a menu of upgrades to select on a checklist. You place buildings one at a time and choose the industries you want, assigning the workers who staff them and balancing production and storage as it becomes a place worth defending.

All resources sit in a particular location on the map, and somebody has to bring it from there to wherever it will be used. An army without incoming equipment ceases to be an army, and the same goes for an industry without materials and a city without grain.

All the settlements, industries and regiments you add to the mix consume another thing.

Wage War

Territory you take remains that way until somebody takes it back. You raise regiments and call levies when the alternative is losing the province. Then you hold what you have and try to take some more of it off the person currently sitting on it.

Castles and fortified cities do not fall because you turn up outside their walls. A siege consumes time and supplies, and it boils down to whether the attacker can keep an army fed outside the walls for longer than the defender can hold out behind them.

A won battle still leaves you with the siege and the province to hold on to afterwards.

Command the Seas

A good chunk of what matters is transferred via water. Fleets carry cargo and soldiers, and they fight for the routes those cargo use.

A fleet can earn its cost without ever winning a battle, so long as its presence dictates what other people are willing to put to sea. A blockade cuts a coastal settlement off from every resource it does not produce for itself.

Trade and Economy

All the realms end up buying something they do not produce. Raw materials, finished goods, food and equipment all travel between settlements and around the world by road and sea.

Specializing a settlement makes it more productive and more reliant on everyone else in the same breath. The roads, ports and merchants keeping it supplied end up mattering as much as the troops defending it.

Wars are paid for out of trade income, and they tend to damage the trade that pays for them.

Public Alpha

Aquilae is under active development. The public alpha exists both to play the game and to find out what happens when real players start pulling on its systems.

During alpha, you should expect:

• Bugs and unfinished systems.
• Balance changes.
• Commands and interfaces to change.
• New systems and content to appear.
• Existing mechanics to be redesigned.
• Occasional downtime for maintenance or updates.
• The possibility of world, character, or account resets if they become necessary during development.

We will keep the world and your progress if we can, but during alpha we cannot promise it.

Finding something broken is not a problem. Please report it. Knowingly exploiting bugs to gain an unfair advantage is not permitted.

Accessibility

Aquilae is text-based and designed to work with traditional MUD clients and screen readers.

Because the game is played primarily through text and keyboard commands, virtually every gameplay system can be accessed without relying on a graphical interface.

Accessibility problems are treated as bugs. If something is getting in your way, report it.

Community

Aquilae is a multiplayer game, and the community surrounding the world is part of the experience.

Join the Aquilae Discord

Use the community to meet other players, discuss the game, report problems, follow development, and keep up with important announcements.

Connect to Aquilae

Host

aquilae.fabrifex.com

Port

4007

Status

Alpha

Recommended Clients

For the best experience, we recommend the following MUD clients:

• VIPMud, for blind and visually impaired players.
• Mudlet
• MUSHclient
• TinTin++

Aquilae is a Fabrifex project.