Roadmap 2017: The second and third quarter.

Dear Community,
We would like to take this opportunity to give you some more information about what’s planned to happen in Empire in the upcoming months.
The following features are set for the second and third quarter of 2017, even though not everything has a final design or concept, yet. We will give you more definitive information about these features before their implementation. There is also some additional information regarding ongoing important topics for you, the community.
Through the guidance of the Player Satisfaction survey results, you may notice that the roadmap has a consistent theme of stability and fairness. Please read on for more details.

The second quarter

Performance Fixes

• Without any doubt, stability of our players' gameplay still remains one of our top priorities. Therefore, we are planning further improvements on the server side of the game to make it feel even smoother and faster. In the nearest future our main goals in that area will be:
• Minimizing server response time, which means how fast you get the data from the server (dialogs/battle logs/etc.)
• Stabilizing and improving performance of all the major global events, such as Foreign, Bloodcrow, Samurai and Nomad Invasions
• Furthermore we will have a bigger focus on server load tests that will allow us to reveal even more performance related issues, and will help us to ensure stable releases in regards to performance.
• We will also extend our efforts towards this into Q3.

Easter Content

• While the first themed Event (St.Patrick Day) has already been introduced to you on our forums, we are also working on a special Easter themed event for an upcoming month. You will be able to fight against new units in order to obtain a new look item.

Gem Rework & Tooltip

• The current stats cap used for equipment does not apply to gems that use normal equipment effects (e.g. general melee or ranged combat strength). This unwanted possibility adds an option to use unique gems in an unintended way, creating a heavy inbalance in the game.
• After the first testing phase on the Closed Beta server we received a lot of valuable feedback from the participants. 

• Problems we saw were:
• Increased range defense for the castellan would mean the attacker needed more / better shields.
• NPCs would become too easy to defeat.
• Power gap between players with and without unique item sets could increase.
• Legendary items would have to be adapted as well, which would need a downtime of several hours.
• Potentially there are other unpredictable effects on the balancing that would only become visible on live servers.

• Therefore, we have come to the conclusion that enforcing a consistent stat cap would be the most sensible approach.
• We are now set to start the second phase of testing, whereby we will enforce and test the stat cap alongside a clearer overall display of effects on equipment.
• We are also already looking into several ways we could make the transition smoother for all players in case we decide to take this option, potential solutions include removing gems for free for an initial period of time and potential refunds.

Screenshot from the closed beta of how the gem tooltips should look. (Armour of the Foreign Warlord)

New Achievements from Community

• As mentioned in the last roadmap we shared with all of you, the achievements linked to the Alchemist event will be removed and replaced with new achievements sets.
• Following a long standing community wish, we will also provide more achievements on top of this, to increase the variety of challenges available to you!
• In doing so, your input will be required and we’ll share our intentions with you and gather your combined feedback along with the Empire: Four Kingdoms community in the upcoming days.

Wishing Well Optimization

• The Wishing Well will be reworked with a focus on making it more accessible and useful for different play styles.
• There will be more options to get not only rubies, but also additional other cool rewards in a completely new and reworked interface.
• Lucky pennies will also be obtainable in the long term event - Spring nights festival.

The following features and optimizations are aimed at establishing more fairness within the game.
Kingdom Resource Rework

• Considering the feedback from the communities and our data, we realized that the time needed to get Kingdom Resources in the Great Empire is too high, given the slow production rate, the high transfer taxes between kingdoms and the looting chances for those resources.
• This created a gap between low and high legendary levels that we consider too substantial.
• To give some some additional insights, here is some of the parameters we plan to test on the Closed Beta server:
• The production rate of kingdom resources will be increased by roughly 450%
• More kingdom resource production buildings will have a 100% workload
• The costs of kingdom resource production buildings will be reduced by ~66% to 80%
• Kingdom resource booster buildings (e.g. "Charcoal Burner") will get two additional levels and won't cost rubies anymore
• Keep in mind that these changes are planned to be tested, and by no means are the numbers and changes final.
• We also plan to make the resource villages accessible to everyone, allowing players to even have their own set of private resource villages that cannot be captured by other players.
• To solve this issue we have some changes ready that will be tested on the Closed Beta server first, and once approved it will be deployed on a larger scale.

Black Market Inventory

• Due to certain exploits linked to the way the tools are currently stored among a player’s castles, the mechanics of the tools inventory will undergo some important changes. Details will be shared at a later stage.

Bots

• Our fight against bots continues, with the plan to ban for longer periods of time and a keen focus on convenience features that make the use of bots less attractive. Some of which are as follows;
• Speed up PvE!
• We are working on the ideation of a new feature that will allow you to automatically attack NPC opponents.
• The details of this feature will be defined along the way.
• Auto Recruitment Optimization
• The auto recruitment feature will receive some additional tuning up to make it fit better with all recruitment process as it was initially intended.
• Additional steps in this direction will include more options for the feasts, to adapt the boosters to the recruitment process and the new system.

The third quarter

Global War of the Realms & Difficulty System (Server vs Server)

• Many things are being discussed about the current War of the Realm event with the higher intent of delivering a new version that will be equally challenging to all of you. This may yet include global rankings, cross server competitive brackets and a league system.
• More details of this feature will follow.

Unique ‘’Premium Currency’’ Vendor 

• To improve the convenience of purchasing premium items, we are planning to bring all merchants together so that all the goods available for purchase can be found in one single dialogue.

New Event Mechanic

• As you have probably already noticed, we have not had any events with a completely new mechanic for a long time. We made our best effort and spent many resources into the stability of the game as well as improving the overall game performance - we will still keep doing that, but we also believe that new content is very important for the game development and evolution.
  Although we do not expect that to happen too soon, we feel it important to keep you informed about our plans in this direction. We have some ideas in mind and we will be happy to share details on the final concept as soon as it will be confirmed. 

Summer Push (Summer surprise)

• The world is very unpredictable at times and you need to be flexible for any change. Therefore, we left freedom for some "quirky" ideas. That could be related to a new event or balancing rework of existing feature. Of course, you are very much welcome to share suggestions with us and we will surely consider them.

Ongoing Topics

Alliance Tournament

• This event brought a lot of fun and skirmishes to our competitive community, but with the growing knowledge of exploitability within this event the challenge has all but disappeared for many players. While fair play becomes ever  increasingly important to our community, and thus ourselves as well, we have decided that for now we will not run this event until we optimize and rework the battle system. For now, we will spend our resources on fundamental PvP features such as global rankings, cross server competitive brackets and a league system as mentioned. We understand the importance of this event for many of you, and so we assure you that this topic will remain at the forefront of our minds in the coming months, but we hope with the introduction of the difficulty system and those features relating to it we will satisfy the urges of those that long for fair battles and unquestionable victory.

Royal Capital

• We are aware that there are mixed opinions on the Royal Capital event. There are several issues relating to this event which has brought us to the decision not to run it for the time being. That includes the unfair advantages of those able to monopolize the event by obtaining two capitals, and those that suffer the most who are unable to even have just one. This leads to further faults with the event, whereby alliances are unable to place defence tools on the walls.
  Not only that, we see a great deal of feedback upon the completion of the event. The rankings disappear, so players aren't given a clear perspective of whether or not their attacks arrived on time. We understand this is extremely frustrating for competitive players.
• We plan to fix these issues as soon as possible, but we presently prioritize other topics such as performance and bots.

Multiaccounting

• We will prepare a more detailed statement on this in the near future.

HTML5 update

• In January we announced our focus on the modern technologies. We have already started the transpiling process from Flash into HTML5 which will improve the quality of our game. This is a long process as the whole code of the game must be properly investigated and corrected.