Also, I don't plan to turn off the old UI even if we make the new UI the default one.

There is a chance that new features and functionality only exist on the new UI so there may not be feature parity.

we'll get to it, don't worry :)

You're a big part of our life, Marshal!!!

And obviously we're not wiping anyone's post counts.

Thanks, it's much appreciated!!

Looking into how to best spend the $$ to grow the community

:)

No, it was every time someone -- anyone -- buys patron, it resets Marshal's post count.

I was thinking there new server would be either premium or patron, either one gets you access :-)

Ya, the overflow into stored turns. If your stored turns are also full you're out of luck.

Always try to give yourself as long as possible to batch with!

We'll find another icon, I used one we had in there for now.

Fixed!

But thanks for the detailed feedback -- I'll look at addressing some of those items like the time.

Not sure how best to reconcile the cooldown for purchases though

Oh I had to disable PayPal because they needed me to sign up for a business account and I don't have that setup yet.

This is all live now!

Note: you'll be redirected to https://alphaui.earthempires.com/portal/shop for the shopping experience, which takes place in the new UI :)

So something I've been toying with in my mind for a while is changing up the war/kill mechanic to make kills take longer while still giving people who love war a way to get accomplishments (like kills).

There have been lots of discussions about special attacks putting countries into DR, making logins/taking turns/etc clear that DR but I don't like a system that effectively promotes not being active.

So with that in mind, I wanted to do a quick brain dump for discussion on a vague concept I've been thinking about: decisive victories in battle.

The way this mechanic would work is that instead of attacking a country until it dies, there would be a mechanic where after a certain number of attacks (based on some yet-undetermined mechanic, maybe # of attacks, total military killed, civs/buildings/etc killed, etc), a country would get the decisive victory attack. This victory could give better returns to the attacker and/or all of the countries that have attacked recently -- maybe give some readiness back to the attacker(s) (morale boost!), maybe give some better returns, lots of possibilities there!

For the defender, it would throw the country into an immediate un-attackable state for some period of time(minutes/hours) or until certain actions are taken (like taking turns) and potentially keep the country in DR for some longer period.

The hope with this change is that you don't lose the days/months of work you put into a country in minutes while you're unavailable while still making getting attacked painful.

For the attackers, it still provides something to shoot for (decisive victories over kills, although kills could still be a thing after a number of decisive victories) and could give some new benefits to attackers.

Anyway, I'm interested in seeing what people think before I explore this idea further.

Thanks!

Thanks for the feedback so far everyone -- been a busy couple of days and I tried to spend game-related time doing work rather than responding so I'm just getting a chance to follow up on this now.

I decided to lower the cost on the credits to start with, this will be the new breakdown (updated on the announcements post):
<quote>
For launch, the cost of Credits will be as follows:
20 Credits for $3.50 USD (down from $6)
50 Credits for $8 USD (down from $15)
100 Credits for $14 USD (down from $25)
</quote>

We'll see how things move longer term, but I'm almost ready to launch this (maybe today), so we'll see how it all goes!

Related to letting other players "babysit" for you, I will say that the general concept of it being frowned upon was mainly because of it being against the rules. If we're offering a way -- that everyone can access equally -- to do it then I don't see an issue from that perspective.

From a "does it break the game?" perspective, that's something we'll need to consider when we get to that point. It's not something that's on the radar to release right away. My personal opinion is that it would be a nice way to increase engagement for those who are super engaged and allow folks to not need to be available 24/7, especially in war. It's worked well for Utopia from talking to their devs so I'm definitely on the side of trying to flesh out how it could possibly work for us. BUt like I said, it needs more discussion first.

I'm glad folks are looking forward to getting rid of the captchas lol
That was a big reason for this change going out -- making bonus point collection simpler and on a 22hr time instead of 24hrs.

I hope everyone likes what we release and thanks again for the discussion and passion you all bring to this game!

they either need to upgrade or use an HTTP library that will follow the 301 redirect from the http URL to https

But sorry for anyone it broke either way!

I consider this resolving a defect, not an enhancement. Everyone should have changed to ssl for feeds years ago! :-)

Can folks catalog which bots/services are broken here so we can either fix them or reach out to those who manage them?

Thanks!

yep, everyone will need to use https now or make their services respect the 301's to https

should be fixed now!

oh fluff I bet it's using an HTTP instead of HTTPS URL, let me go see if I can fix that

Got qz to make the changes i didnt have access to make in nginx. Should be good now.

I fixed it by adding some more padding -- should get deployed in the next day or two!

weird, I was able to duplicate it and I don't know why it's doing that lol

^^ I'd love to see folks putting PRs up for that repo!

Ok I'll try to replicate it later tonight

Very weird!

What browser/OS are you using? I'll try to replicate it when I get home from work.

I made a thread for feedback on B&S:
https://www.earthempires.com/...edback-48332?t=1578919993

Starting this here so it doesn't need to go on announcements

Hi everyone!

I’m excited to announce something that’s been in the works for a long, long time — Patron, Credits and Premium subscription for Earth Empires! We'll be looking to roll this out in the next couple of days but I wanted to give everyone a heads up so they can get ready.

Here is a quick rundown of the new stuff:

Patron
Patron mode is a one-time purchase that grants you access to the Patron board on the forums. We’ll also do some more vanity things — icons and the like — once I get a chance to get a designer re-engaged in this work. Patron is basically just a way to show your support/say thanks for the work we’ve put into the game over the last decade.

Patron costs $30 USD for now, but I’ll probably up it to $50 USD after the current user base has had a chance to join. People who come back in 6-12 months from now will have the opportunity to buy it at a higher price. We may shut down enrolment to it eventually as well.

Credits
In order to make in-game transactions, we’ve created a new Earth Empires Credits system which players can purchase on the Earth Empires Shop. The shop is powered by Shopify and accepts all major credit cards, PayPal, Google Pay, and Apple Pay.

Credits will allow players to purchase benefits for their countries or accounts. To start with, the only thing that is able to be purchased is Premium, but we aspire to do something more like Utopia where they have many options for things to buy that improve the gameplay experience but don’t unbalance the game. This could include things like allowing other players to temporarily log into your country (babysit), taunting other players/tags, SMS/email bots when hit or market transactions are completed. We’re very interested in hearing what sort of ideas everyone has for things like this so please share them with us on the Bugs and Suggestions forum.

For launch, the cost of Credits will be as follows:
20 Credits for $3.50 USD (down from $6)
50 Credits for $8 USD (down from $15)
100 Credits for $14 USD (down from $25)
Edit: I lowered the pricing since we'll be potentially tweaking that moving forward, we'll see how this goes first!)

Premium
Being an Earth Empires Premium member will give all of your countries several bonuses. To start with, we’ll be launching with the following items:
- Ad-free game and forum experience
- Automatically receive 9 bonus points daily just for logging in (replaces daily voting bonuses AND 1 extra bonus point)
- Provides estimated chance for spyop success
- Daily bonus point reset time is 22 hours
- Change country names while in protection
- No more captchas
- Access to Alpha servers (test servers)

As discussed in the Credits section, the focus for the Premium benefits is to improve the quality of life of players without making it into a pay-to-win service. We’ll look to add some more things to this list as we think of them/find time to code them.

Earth Empires Premium is a subscription service done at the account level and applies to all your countries across all servers.

For launch, the cost of Earth Empires Premium will be as follows:
1 month for 15 credits
3 months for 35 credits

I’m hopeful this will all work without issues (I’ve tested it all a bunch) but have added a lot of logging for transactions and have a list of all transactions in Shopify. If something breaks with this system, please let me know as we don’t want to be in a situation where paid services are not working as expected.

As I said above, we’re really excited to make this available as it’s been something a lot of people have been wanting for a while (especially the automatic bonus points). Increasing the revenue base for the game is also important to help fund marketing and create incentive to keep putting time toward building and growing the game. We'll be continuing to tweak all aspects of this system and look forward to hearing everyone's feedback.


Thanks for everyone’s support!

Cheers

I'll announce the paid stuff in the next little while. Thanks for the ideas!

The UI rounds the loss % whereas we use the unrounded % ingame. I added 2 more decimals to the rounding that will ship in the next few days.

Thanks for the bug report!

welcome back!

I think what many folks are missing is that while the percentage of people who will want to play this game is much lower than when it first came out, the universe of people who have devices generally has blown up.

That and the growth strategies I have for the game is targeting places with low bandwidth and less language-specific support than trying to target the English world's/high end smartphone market.

Handegg

We can't win every year. Just most of them! :D

I've actually debated making it so you can't grab your own tag to curb intra-tag landtrading.

But I hope to find more elegant solutions

We did make ghost acres a thing so that people would be more apt to be ok exchanging hits. But it just made organized landtrading a thing instead

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TGJgRkb2EY

I check into this forum randomly but often don't reply to everything -- typically I don't weigh in much on spyop stuff, specifically, as I've made my general opinion known that I think the whole mechanic needs a ton of work and there are currently too many spyops. :)

Also, I generally like that there is some asymmetry in some aspects of the game. So having some parts of the game that aren't impacted by spyops (like destroying turrets/tanks) has always been part of that in my mind.

But thanks for the suggestion and conversation it generated. It's interesting to read and I appreciate it even if I'm not replying to every thread all the time.

Easier than showering, I guess?

Wasn't it "your ass better call somebody"?

Welcome back!