You have chosen the wrong pattern type for your pattern. As you are using a Perl regex pattern you must chose the PCRE regex pattern type - not substring - then it'll work.
We'll add more information on the different pattern types to the manual later. The manual is still being compiled. As I'm sure, many users will run into similar problems:
In your example above, your trigger would fire if your prompt in Achaea looked like this ^(\d+)h, (\d+)m, (\d+)e, (\d+)w, but it probably looks like 500h, 500m, 500e, 500w and thus will never fire unless you change the pattern type to regex.
Substring patterns are a literal representation of sequences of letters in a larger sequence of letters, be it a word, a sentence or a paragraph.
If we take this string: "Tom likes Mary, but he doesn't like Mary's sister."
and you'd define this substring pattern: "Mary"
The trigger would fire as soon as the line contains the substring "Mary".
The trigger would match twice on this line if the per /g switch is turned on (= multiple matching of the same trigger on the same line). If this switch is turned off it would only fire once.
Regular expression patterns are a way of expressing more abstract and more complex patterns that go far beyond the literal representation of a substring pattern. In your example (\d*) represents an abstract pattern as it describes a set of possible matches. The trigger would match on any amount of figures. "Tom has 539 books" would match, but "Tom has good books" would match also, because the quantifier * in regex patterns means any amount including nothing of the preceding element which is \d in your example and means any figure (0-9). However, if you want your trigger to match if there is at least one figure in the text you can write: (\d+) as the quantifier + means any amount of number, but at least one.
I'll add more on regular expression in the manual when everything is done. Until then a good reference on the net is:
http://www.regular-expressions.info/
If you are using ubuntu or compile your Mudlet binaries from source code you already have Beta-10pre which has graphical user interface colorizer triggers (= highlighter option for triggers). This is the best way to play around with the capabilities of the trigger engine as you can visually see your triggers on the screen as they match.
Beta-10 for Windows will become available this weekend.