A Tale Of Two Cities

Welcome back!

Yesterday we talked about the new version of research. Today, our menu consists of cities.

The idea of cities first entered the game last RX2, alongside the a new features known as "consolidation." In a nut shell, consolidation is a planned reduction in both the number of villages and the size of a realm, for the purpose of speeding up the end-game. Reducing the number of villages in proportion means that player power stays roughly the same, but what a player can achieve in an evening of attacks is greatly increased.

If your opponent has 400 villages, capturing four means almost nothing. If they have 40, by contrast, taking four villages is meaningful and damaging.

So, how do cities enter into this? Well, no one likes to lose something they've fought to build. For most players, the number of villages in their empire is the single most important indicator of their power within the game. It's a high score, and it matters. During RX2, two things changed for cities - point values and map icons. Player feedback was pretty clear, that just wasn't enough. Cities needed to feel more powerful than villages. They needed to represent the progress of an empire... not a step backward to facilitate overall gameplay.

As of right now, we haven't locked down exactly what the final version of cities will look like. Actually, let me say that again in bold so no one misses it. :P  As of right now, we haven't locked down exactly what the final version of cities will look like.

We're testing a bunch of things, though. Some will make the cut, and some won't. Here are the highlights.

  • Increased farm capacity. Right now we're looking at a 20% bump. That may not seem like a lot, but it stacks multiplicatively with both research and bonus villages. 
  • New building levels. One way to spend your new farm space will be further upgrading key structures. New levels will be few, but provide a noticeable increase in each building's capabilities, at a somewhat hefty food cost. I'm told that this potentially includes Palace levels, for those of you tired of waiting hours to recruit the fat, well-dressed buggers. (This section could change a LOT in testing, so don't quote me six months from now. Please. =P )
  • Bonus village shuffle. We're working on making sure that if a bonus village is removed to promote a city, that city gains the bonus village's ability. No, this won't let you stack multiple bonuses into one place - though I admit that would be cool. But it will keep people from losing bonus villages when cities come along, and it will provide a greater strategic incentive to go after them early.
(We're still working out whether to do any realm size reductions, increase troop speeds, or other geography altering variations. Same with the exact village to city ratio. A lot of that will actually depend on how big R24 gets to be.... something we can't directly control.)

My personal take is that these changes are going to make the later stages of Realm 24 a wild, wild ride. If you've been clamoring for a genuinely different experience, this is the realm you've been waiting for. All of the excitement of early game expansion, but with a dramatically revamped mid and end-game. It may not be perfectly balanced. Someone might end up with a 4,000 knight city. The earth may tremble and locusts may devour all the green fields.

OK, maybe not that last part. Probably. The point is, the end game is going to have 150% more awesome than ever before. For me, at least, that makes it worth checking out.

On research past and present

R24 will introduce a number of changes, but one of the biggest will be to the research system.

Up until now, research has been pretty much a chore. I'm not sure there's a better way to say it. It didn't really matter what path you followed, and you just ended up in the same place as everyone else anyways. Even the timing wasn't terribly important... researching casually with just one or two researchers, most players finished within a month.

And that was that.


For this realm, we're trying something quite a bit different. 

  • Higher base silver and recruitment speeds.  This means a quicker start, and it also means that the effects of research are proportionately greater later on.
  • Rebalanced research options.  Less essential structures get a bigger bang for your research buck.
  • It's over 9000. OK, not quite. But the research bonuses keep going... and going... up to 150% or more.

What does this all mean? Well, it means that your technology choices now matter. While for the first month or two you'll be mostly picking what everyone else does, the order you choose will impact your gameplay. More significantly, after the initial wave of technologies you'll find that you just don't have time to get everything you want. You can't get all the advanced techs. You can't even get half.

You'll have to choose, and those choices will help define the capabilities of your empire. Specialize into silver and you'll have an economic edge and more governors to expand with, but players who focused on farmlands and stables techs may overrun your armies, etc...

This.... is a pretty big experiment. We don't really know what combinations players are going to use most, or which combinations are going to prove most effective. (We do know that bonus villages are going to be pretty flipping awesome now, since all of their benefits stack with your research bonuses. Mwahahaaa.)

Fire away with any questions! Tomorrow, I'll be posting about how all this craziness will interact with the Age of Cities... and talking about the kinds of ideas we're working on for the Cities themselves. Check back then. :-)

A little preview of things to come...


Hey!


There are quite a few things to talk about today, so let’s get down to it. First of all, hello! I’m the Red Herald, your new community liaison. My job is to help you – the RoE community – to communicate your ideas, concerns, hopes and frustrations to the development team. I’m also here to help the development team communicate their vision and goals for Realm of Empires to you guys.

Over the next few weeks you’ll see more and more of me on the forums and Facebook. (Someone has to give Greg a break so he can actually code the game, right?) Go ahead and say hi. I’m friendly. :-P Moving along....


New Realms!


We have two new realms coming up in the very near future. First up will be a 90-day RX3 tournament realm.  If you like action, you’re probably going to want to give this realm a try.
  • No spells. You asked for a classic realm at RX speeds – you got it!
  • Age of Cities. 60 days in, villages consolidate into cities. Just like RX2, this will enable a truly winnable scenario. Unlike RX2, cities will actually be different from villages. I can’t tip all the cards here (and no, they won’t be six times as big as villages), but we’ll post more about those as we get closer to the consolidation date. One more big difference from last time… no map contraction – you’ll have your cities exactly where you want them to be. Check here for all the details.


OK, so that sounds great, but you’re more of a long-haul, epic empire building kind of player? No problem. We’ve got you covered. Realm24 is coming up right after we launch RX3. This one is going to be very interesting. From what I’ve seen, things are going to get flat out awesome in the late-game; I don’t know about you, but that’s friggin’ exciting to me!

Do note that all the new stuff is fairly experimental. Sometimes you just have to try new things though, right? We hope you guys like it!
  • Age of Cities. No more stagnant late-game. (You guys in the older realms know exactly what I'm talking about) This will work a little differently than the RXs, but the core concept is the same. Villages become a much smaller number of more powerful cities... so you don't have to take 100 enemy villages to feel like you even made a dent.
  • Specialized Empires. This is cool. Research has been completely revamped. Once upon a time you raced through a capped research tree and ended up at the exact same place as everyone else. Now you have the chance to set your empire apart.

    Want to be your clan’s banker? Specialize in silver and trading post tech. Want to be constantly on the attack? Keep researching stables and siege workshop technologies! Want to rebuild your poor, broken walls at astonishing speeds? HQ tech is for you. No one can get it all, so what you choose actually matters.

Keep checking back - I'll post more details as soon as I can.

-The Red Herald
Your friendly neighborhood lance-wielding maniac community liaison

Tournament Realm X2 just a day away!

As announced on our forum, we are reincarnating Tournament Realm X2

But since RX2 was good in its previous life, it is getting a better form this time around!

We will be introducing probably our biggest game play change since the game first launched.

For details please see our forum post but in a nut shell, after 2 months, the realm will enter a new technological age where villages will be consolidated to cities (at a rate of 10 villages to 1 city) and a true end game will once again become possible!

We hope that a lot of player will give the realm a try as we are hoping for lots of feedback on the change.

For detailed parameters, please see here. You will have 1 week to enter the realm before it closes.

ENJOY!

Blog for Servants II, The Resurrection


Since we have first launched our offer to earn servant for writing about us close to 3 years ago, we have given out 22,550 servants resulting in some really cool articles!

This offer is still active.

Our intention is to encourage those of you who  like the game, to take the time to write about us.

Our ultimate goal, is to get written about in a known gaming blog or magazine. Can you make it happen?

We are actively looking for ways for our players to earn servants; this is one of the way we want to do that.

IN a NUTSHELL

Write about us = Get Servants

simple.
Have an existing blog?
Know someone with a blog?
How about a magazine?
If you can either write a favorable blog, publish an article about us, or influence someone to do so, then we would like to reward you handsomely! You do not actually have to write the article, but at least influence someone to write one. If the author will confirm you as the reason for writing the publication you will be rewarded!


Rules
  1. The article / blog must be favorable towards realm of empires and must include a link to http://www.realmofempires.com/ or https://apps.facebook.com/realmofempires/
  2. One offer per person unless you clear it with us first
  3. No Spam! Anything that could be considered as spam is not allowed.

THE REWARD


We decide if the article/blog is acceptable for this offer and every article that is accepted will earn a minimum of 50 servants. We will then decide how much more is the publication worth based on the following:



  1. Popularity of the blog / magazine
  2. Quality of the publication (is it engaging, is it well written, proper grammar and spelling, length, presentation, how favorable it is to Realm Of Empires etc)
  3. Relevance of the blog / magazine to the game (an online strategy game magazine/website will be considered more relevant than a food magazine :)
  4. Presentation of the publication - does it include nice screen shots of the game? Does it include nice images?


How much can I expect to get?
A paragraph length blog entry on a personal blog with an active following will earn you 50-100 servants. Article on a relatively popular gaming website will easily earn you 10,000 servants. Get us into wired magazine, and there will be servants coming out of your … ears! :)

However, a new blog, created just for this offer, with no readers, will not be accepted.

Maximize your reward - Include nice images!
Feel free to use any of the game images you choose. We also creted a few nice images for you to use here: http://s650.photobucket.com/albums/uu225/RealmofEmpires/

How to claim your reward
Email us subject “blog for servants offer”, include a link to the article with any explanation, or metrics on the blog/website/magazine that you feel are relevant. Send using the email that identifies you are the author of the publication. If you are not the author, include the author on the email and he will have to verify you are the reason for this blog/article.

Remember to help us out in determining the popularity of the blog, website or magazine. Help us get the proper information, or offer us the matrics if you have them.

We will review your entry and will get back to you as soon as possible ( we aim for a 5 day turn around)

Yeah, yeah, you will just not 'accept' my article won’t you!?
No, we plan to accept every entry unless it is very poorly done/trivial, does not promote us at all, or even worse, damages us. We want to encourage you to use your talents to help us grow accepting articles will help us accomplish this goal.

Can I get an estimate before going to the trouble of writing?
Definitely! If you are thinking of taking advantage of this offer, but not sure if it will be acceptable, or what the reward amount will be, submit your idea to rewards@realmofempires.com and we will get back to you as soon as we can. Include as much relevant information as possible.



Examples of what will NOT be accepted
Remember that the idea behind this offer is to reward you for helping to promote Realm Of Empires.
Creating a brand new personal blog just for the purpose of this offer, a blog that has no readers of any kind, does not promote us and will not be acceptable. This offer is for exising blogs, website or articles with at least some popualrity /reader base.

Bubribaman on realms: Free-to-play damaging game industry?

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