6 weeks of beta already, time really does fly. This time some love went into the new player experience for players who start later. Early research is discounted, newly settled villages are boosted and more. And a bunch of the regular features, balance changes, improvements and bugfixes.

The new Kingdom village queue overview The new Kingdom village queue overview

Features added

  • Added a confirmation to irreversible village actions: claiming a tile, tiering up to town/city and choosing a district.
  • The outgoing troops on a siege attacks now show the selected targets on the movement.
  • Added a screen to the Kingdom page where you can see the queued items and duration of each queue in the village.
  • Added a page to the Empire where you can see an overview of all PvP reports from the Empire.

Empire PvP reports page Empire PvP reports page

Balance changed

  • Buffed longbow ranged defense from 6 to 8. This brings them in line with spearman defensive stats and buffs defenses against cavalry archers early on.
  • The lower tier researches get very cheap every month. After 1 month tiers 1 and 2 will cost 100 and 200 science respectively. After 2 months tier 3 will cost 300 science, and so on until tier 5. Research tiers 6 and 7 never get discounted.
  • Settled villages are now buffed every month. At server start a village has resource fields at level 3 and Town Hall level 1. Resource fields will increase with 2 per month, up to a maximum of 10. The Town Hall also gets +2/month, up to level 5. And every month 3 levels of Warehouse and Food Cellar are added upon settling, up to level 10.
  • Player tasks are now reset for a respawning player that got all their villages conquered or destroyed, so you get that early game Aether again to rebuild faster.
  • Events no longer spawn right next to a village from players who have been playing fewer than 2 weeks.

Early research Early research is now cheap so you can catch up

Improvements made

  • The research tree was rotated to be horizontal. Now you only have to scroll in 1 direction.
  • You now get a notice on the Village Overview page when you can select a new district.
  • The unit icon is now shown in the village queue when training army.
  • You now see the population increase on the building page when the building upgrade is in the queue.
  • The bonus resource production for a tile or building is now displayed on production and bonus buildings (e.g. 60 wood/hr + 30 if you have a 50% bonus).
  • A village from your empire that was conquered now shows a defensive icon instead of an offensive icon.
  • You now get a warning when purchasing resources for Aether when the purchase exceeds your storage capacity.

Village resources view New villages now start with higher level resource fields each month

Bugs squashed

  • The server no longer crashes when 2 players try to complete an event at the same second.
  • You now get the proper error message when you try to claim a tile with an event on it from the Village Resources page.
  • Validating an attack multiple times no longer starts up additional timers that all modify the same value.
  • Hitting only walls on a siege attack without doing siege damage now shows up in the report.
  • Reinforcements were not properly updated during an attack (they wouldn't die). They do now, and luckily this was fixed before any serious battles.

Hope to see you in game! Play Aether Kingdoms now!