Menhir

Menhirs or Menhir Stones are field reservations for a foreign governor setup by a king. The governor can accept the reservation, teleporting his village to the reserved field, losing his resource field in the process. This feature is intended to allow premade players for an easier start together.

Basics

Menhirs can be set up by the kings of a kingdom. They're visible for everyone and will prevent any other player from occupying the field. There are several conditions to be met, in order to setup a menhir:

• The player, for which the menhir is setup, must not have more than one village (or city).
• The target field can be settled on (i.e. may not be occupied by an oasis, landscape or village).
• The target field must not be of the types 3-3-3-9 and 1-1-1-15.
• The village of the player must not be inside the kingdom borders.
• The player wasn't part of the political kingdom he's invited to in the past 72 hours.

Due to general kingdom join conditions, there are two additional requirements:

• The player must not be inactive (gray).
• The highest wonder of the world must not be at level 50 or higher.

If a king sets up a menhir for a player, he will send a kingdom invitation to the player automatically and nobody will be able to settle on the reserved field. The player can accept the invitation, triggering the following effects:

• The village of the governor is teleported to the reserved field.
• The village's resource field distribution adapts to the reserved field.
• All resource fields of the village will be destroyed.
  • All buildings, troops and everything else will stay.
  • At least 80% of the cost of the fields will be refunded in form of resource piles in the hero's inventory.

Refund Calculation

If a player accepts a menhir invitation, his resource fields get destroyed, but he will receive resource piles in his hero inventory as refund. Resource piles are consumable items, compareable to ointments. They come in four sizes: Small (500 resources per pile), medium (2000 resources per pile) and large (8000 resources per pile). One can combine four piles to receive a larget pile or split a pile into four smaller piles, but this is purely for convenience. Upon consuming, the amount of used piles disappear and the corresponding amount of resources is added to the current village's warehouse or granary.

The amount of resource piles is calculated for each resource type seperately (i.e. one might for example receive small piles for wood, but medium piles for clay). At first, the resource cost of all destroyed resource fields is added together. Then the size of the piles is determined:

Total Cost	Pile Size
< 10k	Small Piles
10k to 40k	Medium Piles
> 40k	Large Piles

Lastly, one receives $floor({\frac {Invested\ Resources}{Pile\ Size}})$ piles of the previously determined size for that resource.

This algorithm implies, that one always receives between 80% and 100% of the originally invested costs.

Usage

The intention of Menhirs is to allow premade teams to start together more easily. There are two other uses cases, the latter one being often seen as bad play style:

• Menhir Settling - Using menhirs to quickly settle the second village
• Stripping an off account down to one village to teleport its hammer close to an enemy target, to reduce travel time

See Also

• Political Kingdom