Atlantis New Origin

Like many other PBeMs, Eressea is cloned from the original Atlantis PBeM (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantis_PbeM), in this case via the German Atlantis clone. Every Atlantis clone is a little bit different, and so is Eressea. Here is a collection of some differences between Eressea and the "more original" Atlantis games, as for example Atlantis New Origin:

• never-ending; there is no defined ending to Eressea. You set your own goals. If you achieve these, find others. Some players have been playing the game for 20+ years.

• no leaders; everybody can teach, but the teacher needs to be two levels better.

• no different races in one faction; you recruit from the peasantry, which seem to be of a "neutral" race until the moment you recruit them; then they belong to your race. Exception: Humans. Human factions may have a small amount of "migrants" from other races.

• there is no resource "income" for every region every turn that can be harvested; instead there is a limited amount of iron, stone, wood, silver, peasants etc. in a region; if you harvest it, it will be gone. But since wood and peasants regenerate very slowly, not harvesting usually ends up in your neighbors conquering you, then harvesting your stuff.

• no skill cap; there are players here who have units with skill levels above 50; but they have been playing for a long time...

• main money income will come from ENTERTAIN or sometimes TAX (if you have a positive skill modifier; otherwise TAX is worse); since both draw from the same regional silver hoard, using both in the beginning is not efficient; for ENTERTAINing you only need the skill, while for TAXing you need the TAX skill, a weapon skill, a weapon, and thus somebody able to forge the weapons and somebody to harvest the resources (lumberjacks or miners).

• if you have good trading skills, you can generate secondary money by trading luxuries; this is quite complex, so I leave this to others to explain in detail; every region sells one type of luxury, every region will buy the luxuries it does not have; regions with more peasants will buy and sell more each turn.

• there is only one magic skill, with which you get spells and cast them; what kind of spells you get depends on the school of magic you follow, but this is not a skill, just a definition you have to make when you learn magic the first time; all of your mages will follow that school, so no fine-tuning of different magic skills etc. Every school of magic has a "get 50 silver per skill point" spell, so if you don't have a negative skill modifier in magic, it is worth to start learning magic immediately even though it costs silver to learn magic.