We just released the VIP package, and if you’re registered in the game you received the announcement already by in-game message.

The VIP features you can find here.

You have a 7 day free trial to test it, and see if you like what it has to offer. If you don’t, you can still play the game for free, and you’re under no obligation to buy anything. The game is still free for everyone. The VIP package is for those that want some comfort features while supporting the further development of the game and the running costs.

We’ll release the payment by PayPal in a few days for the VIP and we’ll look into adding credit card payments in September probably. We need to test the PayPal payment first, so it will take 1-2 days before you can buy the package. In the meantime, go to the VIP page, in the upper part of the page and activate your free 7 day trial.

Enjoy :)

Raywall just completed the deletion of all inactive players that haven’t logged in for at least 2 months and had a score lower than 5.

For those worried that this isn’t unfair for the new users, it should not be the case. Inactive players older than 2 months were from older regions, where there are strong players. New users still have inactive accounts in their area.

How we’re going to handle inactive accounts in the future

When Raywall has some time to make this, players that did not log in for 4 weeks will receive an email, telling them that their accounts will be marked as inactive two weeks later.

If he still doesn’t log in, 6 weeks after the last login his account will be marked as inactive and one of two things will happen:

Case 1: small accounts will be deleted directly (score lower than 50 maybe)

Case 2: bigger accounts will be marked as inactive, all their troops will be killed, castle/fortress destroyed, loyalty will drop to 1% in all villages and the first senator attack on them will win the village. This is also the case for capital cities. Inactive accounts where cities can be taken easily, will be marked with a special color on the map.

In Case 2, inactive villages will stay on the map for 2 weeks. If they’re not taken in that period of time, they will be deleted from the game.

Hey there.

Just wanted to let you know that the second age of Imperial Ages has been introduced to the game.

It comes with an upgrade to most of the troops that are in the game, and some of them get new names as well. A bit later in the second age you will also get at least one new building, which will dramatically increase the capacity of your merchants, making it easier to supply your villages.

You can upgrade to Gunpowder Age in a lvl 20 City Hall, in the Gunpowder Age tab.

Requirements for the second age:

• City Hall lvl 20 (in the lvl 20 City Hall you can make the upgrade to the second age)
• 2 Villages
• Population 600 minimum total for your account
• 30,000 Gold, 30,000 Iron, 30,000 Wood, 30,000 Stone
• 10% of the cost of all troops you have in your villages.

The resources for the upgrade are taken in an equal percentage from all villages that belong to your account.

So, if you need 200,000 resources for the upgrade, and you have 250,000 total in all your villages, 80% of the resources in each village will be taken for the upgrade.

Prices of all troops, capacity and special attack values are increased by 20%.
Attack and defense values are increased by at least 20%, in most cases by more (20-40%).

Troop speed was increased by 1 for all troops from the second age.

Enjoy! And let us know if there are any problems!

Yet another milestone was reached today, the 2 month one, and also the one with 4000 registered players (not that many active players though).

Raywall worked hard these past few days, and most of the changes announced in my previous blog post are done and you can see them below.

Changed the way the raid works

The raid was changed to work just like the normal attack, but you lose only 50% of the troops you were supposed to. So, you can lose a maximum of 50% of your troops in a raid, if you lose the battle. Stealing resources and gaining general experience is conditioned on winning the battle. The combat simulator now reflects these changes.

Send back only a part of the reinforcements

You now have the option to send or recall only some of the reinforcements, instead of all. So if you want to keep some troops and send some back, now you can. For each reinforcement received you now have two options in the Camping Ground, "Send back all" and "Send back". The "Send back" option allows you to choose which troops to send back home and which to keep.

Also, new reinforcement troops sent from the same village will be grouped together in the Camping Ground from now on. Existing reinforcements will remain the same, due to the difficulties and risks involved in grouping them right now.

Changed building hitpoints

As announced, we’ve modified the hitpoints of buildings. Instead of 100 hitpoints per level for all buildings, the values are those below:

500 Hitpoints per level: Fortress and Castle

300 Hitpoints per level: Warehouse, Treasury, Camping Ground, Gold Mine, Barracks, Stable, Arena, Training Ground, Military Academy, Stonemason, Archery Range, Tavern, Royal Court, Siege Workshop

200 Hitpoints per level: Wood, Iron and Stone resource fields; Consulate, Trade Office, City Hall, Trade Center, Dungeon

One level buildings:

• 4000 hitpoints: Sawmill, Stone Cutter, Iron Forge, Gold Purifier, Deep Shaft
• 6000 hitpoints: General’s House

Also, you can now see how many hitpoints a building has when you enter it. In the example below it’s the number 1500.

What’s next for the 3rd month of the beta?

Some of the plans for the 3rd month of the game include a new template for the front page of the game and the blog, starting the work on the unit stats for the second age of the game, launching the VIP package, finishing the manual and probably a referral system with VIP packages as prizes for people that bring new players into the game.

As always, if you notice any bugs caused by these changes, let us know in the forums or using the Report a bug option from the game.

As I’ve mentioned on the game forums, we had a meeting last Sunday and with great results. We managed to come to a conclusion regarding some difficult problems from the game and a series of improvements to be added to the VIP system, especially in the statistics department.

What we decided:

Raid - the raid will remain in the game, but we will change the way it functions, bringing it closer to the normal battle system. It will function the same as a normal attack for the most part, but we will cut in half the number of casualties, so the most you can lose in a raid is half the troops you send. The attacker will be able to steal resources only if he wins the raid.

Beginner Protection - besides the normal 7 day period of total protection, we will implement a system that protects beginners from being attacked by people more than twice their size. This type of protection will function as long as the user has a score smaller than 100 or less than 30 days since he started.

Hitpoints increase for buildings - we decided to increase the number of hitpoints for buildings and differentiate between them. Economic buildings will likely see double/triple number of hitpoints depending on the building, military buildings will see the hitpoints triple, and the fortress (that marks the capital) will probably see an even higher increase.

The increase in hitpoints for buildings is caused by a number of things: low cost of special attack upgrades that are too late to be changed for this server; high rate of development and the relatively low cost of catapults compared with the resource production potential of the game.

Modifications to how reinforcements are displayed in the camping ground.

Right now, if you send 10 reinforcements from the same village, it will make 10 different tables in the camping ground, creating a longer list that is not necessary. We decided to group all reinforcements coming from the same village in a single table.

Another modification in this area is the possibility to send back or withdraw only certain troops that are sent as reinforcements, or only a certain number. Right now you can only send back or withdraw all troops that were sent. So if someone will send you troops that you don’t need as reinforcements, you will be able to send them back while keeping the troops you need.

Game moved to the new server, and to the http://s1.imperialages.com domain. ImperialAges.net redirects to the IP of the server for now, and starting tomorrow it will redirect to the s1.imperialages.com domain.

update: the move is delayed until Sunday

2-3 hours from now, we will be moving the game to the new server. It will probably be down for around half an hour. Raywall and Tony are configuring the new server now, and when they’re done they’re going to move the database to the new location. During that period the game will be down.

You might be automatically redirected to an ip address instead of the .net address that you’re used to for the next few days, as the DNS updates, but you’ll still be able to play the game normally. The final address of the server will be s1.imperialages.com , the url we wanted since the beginning for the first server. ImperialAges.net will keep redirecting to the new url, for those that are used to the old address.

And for those interested:

Old server:

• Processor: Athlon XP 1700+,
• 512MB SDRAM
• 30 GB HDD

This little guy served over 1 million page views in the last 6 weeks, but it’s time to move on, especially as the HDD is starting to fail.

New server:

• Processor: Dual Core Xeon 3060 - 2.40GHz (Core2Duo) - 1 x 4MB cache
• 4GB DDR2 RAM
• 2 x 250GB SATA II HDD’s

We’re really hoping for a lot less downtime on this new server.

PS: normally, we would give at least 24 hours warning before moving, but the downtime today was caused by bad sectors appearing on the old server’s HDD, so we can’t risk staying on it any longer.

One month since we launched Imperial Ages as a beta, 2100 registered players later(not all active though) and over 700,000 page views served, it’s a good beginning, and hopefully it will be even better in the second month.

The stats aren’t bad considering that it’s our first game and we don’t have any kind of budget for advertising and bringing new players.

As for the plans for the next period, Raywall has a one week vacation that he’ll use to track down the last bugs and to work on new features for the game, Mars is working on a quick tour for the game, Alex on writing down the last pieces of the VIP on paper, and Tony is implementing the VIP.

Probably two weeks from now we will move to a better server, and the game should move faster at that point. The VIP should be ready around that time also.

If you have ideas that you would like implemented in the game as a regular feature or as part of the VIP package, let us know, either by email at alex[at]imperialages.com (replace the [at] with @) or in the forums, in the Suggestions & Ideas section.

Had some problems updating the database version today, while we were preparing for the upcoming move to a better and more stable server. It was fixed eventually, so the game is up and running again.

Next post, on the 26th, one month after the game was launched. Raywall is coming also in our city that day, so we’ll plan on the next steps that need to be taken.

The problems we had with the DNS and the www.imperialages.net domain seem to be fixed now. It wasn’t anything we could do about it, we just had to wait for it to be fixed, and it finally is. It should propagate to everyone in the next 24 hours, but you can still use the IP address until then.