Rise of Tyrants is designed to be a game that you can play without having to have an alliance or a lot of friends. Sure, both can probably help, but it is possible with some time and dedication to excel going solo. The game is inspired by Kings of Chaos. Right now there are a lot of features in common, but this is because of the demand for a kind of Kings of Chaos where the admin is active and their input counts. I try my best to listen to each suggestion in the community. Sometimes it doesn't always get implemented, but at least it's acknowledged.

As of now, this game is essentially Kings of Chaos with a lot of the limits uplifted and a few highly requested features added in. If you have been put off from the game because of its similarity to Kings of Chaos, just check it out in a little while. Over time, Rise of Tyrants will evolve into something greater than a Kings of Chaos spinoff, just as Kings of Chaos evolved into something greater than an Outwar spinoff.

I am Dennis Field (you may know me as flurffmeister or fury or asshole), a 19 year old student of Indiana University / Purdue University located in Indianapolis, Indiana, USA. I'm working toward a degree in web development. I work on this game in my spare time. Sometimes I actually forget to sleep and instead am working on this game. I have a mom, a dad, and 2 little terrorists..er..brothers. :P

Many of you heard of this game from the Kings of Chaos community. I was a big name there at one time. Read on if you'd like to understand my history there. I started some time in May, in the middle of KoC age 1 where the rankings were based on total army size and you didn't have to have as many soldiers as you had weapons in order to be able to use them. So I had roughly 700 soldiers and thousands of weapons, and could steal 3 million with one attack turn.

During June, I was invited to participate in the KoC Age 2 Beta by DCz_power and I became the 7th user to sign up to it. This beta had no limits on clicking yourself, turns were 15 minutes long and gave you 5 attack turns each. I spent a lot of time racing ahead in clicks. Using the mighty power of Mozilla Firefox, I became the largest by way of clicking myself (as I recall, my largest size was 24,000 soldiers), and thus I held the #1 spot. I issued a challenge to BunBot, the #2 player, that he could not defeat my defense by the end of the beta; I would not spend any of my gold, and he would continue to spend and farm. KoC Age 2 Beta ended some time in August or September, after Age 2 had begun. But what happened was initially just the access page that forwarded you to the testing server was removed, and if you had left the browser window open you could still log into your account on the testing server. After this access page was removed, you could not get back to the testing server at all. My browser crashed and BunBot's had not. He ended up stealing hundreds of millions of gold and taking all the #1 spots, but technically I had still won the challenge because the end of the beta was when the access page was removed. He'll tell you differently, obviously. :P

KoC Age 2 Beta players formed an alliance for KoC Age 2 which eventually named itself "The Nameless Alliance." I became a member of this alliance. I also utilized the experience I gained in the KoC Age 2 Beta to create certain tools like the Spy Success Calculator. I got the idea of doing this from Xakep's calculator page which contained tools to determine possible attack damages and counterattack damages, and included his recruit link on the site. I gained a small following of worshippers who had used my spy calculator to successfully sabotage thousands and thousands of weapons (including one who had successfully sabotaged some 80,000 knives off of a poor little orc who deleted his account in a fit afterwards). There were a couple of link trading sites by this time, one of which was the Archangel Recruiter. A simple recruiter which sorted by most credits and gave you a big long list of users to choose from to click. I gained thousands of soldiers from it before all link trading sites were banned. I joined a link trading channel started by DuEy called #koclinks on irc.chatchannel.org. Link trading channels were a little harder to ban considering they left no referrer traces in the web browsing process. There were roughly 20 people in it. I created some tools to help click through the link list and track link clicking. The channel grew to over 100 users as I kept adding new stuff. I gained another slightly larger following of worshippers who had made wise use of the channel through my enhancements and gained many soldiers. Lor20 (a fellow memver of The Nameless Alliance) was the best example and achieved rank #7 at the end of KoC Age 2.

When KoC Age 3 beta began in February, I was recruiting officers like mad through the respect I had earned in #koclinks. Through their clicking in #koclinks, I was competing in growth with the likes of LordStriker and orc00, which I thought was pretty incredible. I held the #1 position for roughly a day before LordStriker overtook me for good, but I still stayed #2 for quite a while after that. I decided LordStriker needed some better competition and began working on a recruiter for The Nameless Alliance based on what I remembered from the Archangel Recruiter. Word got out to the higher-ups in Relentless, at that time the top-most (in status) alliance of the entire coalition of alliances in the orc00 command chain. They wanted all of their alliances to use it. Initially I thought it should remain with TNA only, because that was my primary alliance, but then I figured the more people using it the better. So at that point I was working on the "Relentless Recruiter." I had something basic working within a day or two and dozens of people joined shortly after it opened. Not long after, it was just as popular as the original Archangel Recruiter. From generous user donations, I was able to put it onto its own dedicated server. It worked to close up the gap between Striker Clan players and Relentless players for a month after it was initially opened. At this point, two Relentless leaders Morten and kyrakyle quit the alliance and the game. After myself and several other active members began filling in the leadership roles that the two left behind, some of the original Relentless members who played during Age 1 and 2 showed back up and pretty much disrespected all the work that we had just put in to pick up the pieces after the fundamental shakedown. There were some pretty stubborn disagreements between the two groups on how the alliance should be run. Things ended in a split between Relentless old and Relentless new, which became Phoenix Rising, founded by Denny, princess-magenta, Errtu and myself. I worked to help build Phoenix Rising up to be the best by improving on the previously dubbed Relentless Recruiter.

By the time Age 3 began in July, Phoenix Rising had established an alliance second in size only to the Striker Clan recruiter and everyone who wanted to help take Striker Clan down was rallying under the utterly massive Phoenix Rising command chain. In fact, there was so much overwhelming support that the Phoenix Rising command chain left everyone else in the dust when Lor20_RJ created the Clickwhore recruiter interface tool which was released to the whole command chain to use. We began growing at roughly twice the speed of Striker Clan. There was nothing left for me to improve in terms of the programming. At that point, we had thriving forums, a farm list, a recruiter, active IRC channels, and everyone was rooting for us besides Striker Clan. Then we became the one everyone hates. Our lead in the top 5 and domination of the rest of the top thousand ranks grew so quickly and so vastly that people who had previously despised Striker Clan out of jealousy now despised us. I became intertwined in a bunch of alliance politics that served no end except adding stress. My KoC account was more important than my sleep, my well being, and my free time.

After a month of deliberating, I quit KoC. I am not a politician; I felt sick to my stomach because of all the stress I had let myself take on. My account is still there merely to be sold off to officers and friends that need/deserve it. Those that helped me get as big as I was.

I longed for the days when KoC was fun - back in Age 1 and Age 2 beta where you could attack someone and steal their gold and turn around and have a laugh on IRC about it. The times where you didn't have to put up with all kinds of flack just because of what side you were on. I remember vividly the days when you didn't have to have a big command chain to succeed.

I began working on Rise of Tyrants about a week before I quit KoC. You can read the progress on the home page by clicking on the link that expands the old news. I originally built it to be a remake of the Kings of Chaos Age 2 Beta (click for a page capture of the Age 2 Beta recruit page). Including the unlimited clicking. I even based the style and colors off of it and changed out the Kings of Chaos shield for one that I made in Microsoft Paint. I based the formulas at the time off of what I recall from the Age 2 Beta.

On September 11th of 2004, I opened the game to the public for testing. Yeah, I know. Hell of a day, isn't it? I meant nothing disrespectful by the date that I chose to open the site. I'll never forgive or forget the day, but I wanted something positive to occur on the date to balance the force somehow.

Within 2 weeks, 6,000 people signed up to play. People were instantly addicted as I could tell. I was running it on the same server as Phoenix Rising and Rise of Tyrants was already pulling 2/3 of the server resources in its direction. That's no small feat considering 2,000 people used the Phoenix Rising site daily.

The first month or so that the game was open to the public was spent adding features such as the bank, and tweaking certain aspects of the game such as weapon damage and casualties. One of the major features added was special weaponry which, similar to Kings of Chaos in Age 1, you did not have to have any soldiers in order to use it. The cost of this weaponry increased as you got more clicks or soldiers from officers clicking. Toward the end of the beta period, I gave everyone 500,000 attack turns and started a contest in which the 5 people who used the most turns would become a special race in the next beta. I reset the game and the second beta period began. The 5 Gods received all four 25% bonuses. During this beta period, I redesigned the pages, added a community with forums and messaging, the ability to change your commander, created moderation, karma, and reporting in the forums, and added a Hot Potato to the game. The Hot Potato currently multiplies game turns by 10, giving you 10 rounds of unit production and TBG, and 50 attack turns every 15 minutes. The Hot Potato is randomly selected from the battlefield whenever the current one is attacked. This period lasted a total of around 2 months and I began the Gamma testing period. sweetkitten was the winner of the Beta.

This was the final testing phase before Age 0 began. Some of the changes since the beta were a reduction in numbers and a change in the unit production. TBG was drastically reduced along with weapon prices, the stat formulas were reduced to mitigate the effect of huge numbers (people were getting billions of stats every few hours), and upgrade prices were changed accordingly. Unit production was altered to make it possible for people who cannot or will not click to compete fairly by using only their special weaponry. Special weaponry and unit production price increases when you get a click or a soldier from an officer clicking, but neither special weaponry nor unit production increase in price when you receive soldiers from unit production. This brought a mix of Kings of Chaos Age 1 and Age 2 fun into the game and people generally rejoiced. CWAL was the winner of the Gamma.

Age 0 went off without a hitch. People claimed selloffs left and right near the end, but in the end a true competitor came out on top. isNULL was the winner of Age 0.

In age 1, the possibility for selloffs has been removed and now only the real competitors will have a chance to win.

I am a total addict. 250 sodas consumed so far during the making of this game. I really love soda. Drinking it helps me code. Since I'm on a diet and have lost 60 lbs at it so far, I have no intention of quitting now; thus, most of the sodas in the 6 pyramids you see on that page are of the sugar-free variety. I prefer the taste of Diet Rite over all, but where it is not available, some form of Diet Pepsi.

The site is built entirely in PHP and MySQL. I use TextPad as the editor and submit the pages to the site with GlobalSCAPE CuteFTP. As of December 2nd, 2004 at 7:31 PM there are 11,192 lines of PHP code powering the site. There are 64 tables in the MySQL database which is currently 296MB in size including data and indexes. Just before the last reset on November 27th, I made a dump of the database which backs up the data onto the hard drive - the size was 1.9GB.

All code powering the site is written from scratch by myself. Yeah, I could have used a stock template system and a stock forum system and saved myself a couple weeks of coding, but I wanted it all `to` integrate into the game smoothly and I wanted to accomplish something done entirely by myself. The database is also designed by myself. I receive ideas and suggestions from other people and then make them into reality. You can see a brief list of credits at the end of this page. It is my intention to continue being the sole coder of this game although people do volunteer to help maintain the community.

This is a short list of the people or groups who have contributed something towards the game is as it is now. If I missed you, sorry and send me a PM with what you contributed. It's not that I forgot you, it's that I misplaced the part of my brain that you're in. If you find it wandering around anywhere while I'm gone, could you please staple it to the floor so it's still there when I get back?

Credits from Kings of Chaos
Kings of Chaos admins Rocco, Ben, Aman, and Nick - their game gave me a lot of fun while it lasted, and was the inspiration for Rise of Tyrants.
DCz_power - brought me into the Age 2 Beta at which point I picked up a big interest in the game and got truly serious about playing.
Kings of Chaos community - after the Kings of Chaos admins disappeared off the face of the planet, this is the only thing that kept me coming back to Kings of Chaos.
The Nameless Alliance - the most powerful little alliance in Kings of Chaos history. Everyone who was anyone in the game knew what TNA represented and what it could accomplish. Proved that you didn't have to have thousands of members to make an impact and inspired me to be better.
Phoenix Rising Alliance - the reason the server existed long enough for me to start working on Rise of Tyrants. The source of a lot of fun for my last few months. I love you guys and gals.

Rise of Tyrants and friends
princess-magenta - for putting up with me.
eriu - for being the cute unofficial secretary, hehe. ;) <3
Emosabi - the self-commander bonus idea which halts the officer bonus from other officers and started the massive influx of people who played on their own.
encrypto7 - several ideas including the bank.
JayizKool - numerous ideas including increasing the unit production price based on clicks, same as special weaponry.
IRC server/channel operators/users - for keeping order on the IRC server and providing many hours of entertainment.
Forum participants - boatloads of ideas about pretty much everything from the page design to the game play and formulas.
Forum moderators - for keeping the forums clean and sticking threads that I need to see immediately.
Donators - for being the reason the server exists now.