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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Update: problem should be fixed, but it will take 1-2 days for the DNS to propagate again. You can access the server in the meantime by using the IP address above.

And now for the updates uploaded to the server today, fixed bugs and improvements:

• Latest battles and scout reports from the alliance now showed in the Battles tab of the alliance.
• You can now cancel an army attack or reinforcement, in the first 5 minutes of travel. After that the troops can’t be recalled.
• Trading now has a 2 to 1 limit. So you can ask for half the number of resources you’re offering, or double. Not more, not less. The NPC trading remains the same, 4 to 1.
• In the simulator, you don’t have to manually insert the first defender anymore, it’s inserted automatically, as it was normal.
• You can send messages to multiple recipients at the same time, by inserting the ; sign between the names. So a message sent to 3 people at the same time would have this at the recipient:  User1; User2; User3
• On the front page of the alliance, you can now see the long name of the alliance as well, not just the short one.
• The Events tab in the Alliance should now work properly and display news of interest about the alliance.
• The Alliance Forum link can now only be seen by the members of the alliance.
• Where you can see a name of a player or an alliance, those should be clickable links now, going to the player or alliance profile. If we missed any, let us know.
• Uploading the alliance banner should work every time now.
• The Player and Alliance Search in the statistics area is modified to show only those that contain the searched string.

That’s it I think. Great work from the programmers today.

Here are a few things that were fixed/added today in the game:

1. You can leave an alliance now. You can find the button in the Consulate building.
2. Sent messages should be saved automatically from now on in the Sent tab from the Messages area.
3. You can now see the list of members of other alliances, even if you’re not a member.
4. Sitters can be logged in at the same time as the main user, or as the other sitter. Previously, you could only log in as a sitter if the main user wasn’t logged in.

Mars worked a bit on an article about the history of the game, since we started talking about it, and I’ll post it as soon as I translate it to English (in 12 hours or so).