Everyone was enjoying the reworked fullscreen map, but not its performance. We've taken the step to rewrite the rendering entirely, with a much better result. We're also giving attack units another buff after viewing the results of multiple close battles. And finally, some more information about Aether Premium.
Aether Premium
Sometime in the next weeks we'll be activating Aether Premium. Behind the scenes and in your view we've been building out the framework and features. When we activate Aether Premium, the game will no longer be fully free. The game still is, and will always be, free to compete!
When activating Aether Premium you'll get access to many convenience features developed during the beta:
- Detailed Kingdom Statistics to track everything going on in your account. Free players get a very limited version.
- Culture and Science projects will auto-repeat if they're last in the queue.
- Access to Village notes, the Culture planner and the Walk times on the map.
- The ability to have your merchants make a trip twice.
- More features to be added.
Once premium is active, you'll be able to purchase Aether Tokens in bundles of 1, 3 and 5. Each Aether Token gives 1 week of premium. Anyone on an account can activate premium, whether it's the owner, a dual or a sitter. The Aether Token will always be subtracted from the personal balance of the person activating it. This way you can share the cost between duals or gift a week of premium as a sitter.
With Aether Premium we hope to sustain the operations and ongoing development of the game in a way that feels fair to both free and paying players.
Tactical map view
Features added
- The map rendering has been reworked into a much more efficient technique. This also allows us a lot more customisation and room for future improvements. It's been a back and forth process between server and game client updates, and now we feel the map is where it should be. We hope you enjoy!
- The map now has a Tactical view, highlighting villages, objectives and affiliations, and replacing the tile art with muted colours, you can zoom out much further on the map, and scrolling and pinching now zoom the map.
- Added a button in the simulator to apply losses to the simulator input.
Balance changed
After seeing multiple close battles, we found that attackers were not getting enough bang for their buck. With these buffs, attackers can win a close fight a bit more often, while still having the more expensive armies and taking more resource losses than defenders on average.
- Swordsman attack increased from 48 to 53
- Archer attack increased from 20 to 22
- Cavalry Archer attack increased from 132 to 144
- Horseman attack increased from 54 to 60
- Knight attack increased from 138 to 152
- Cataphract attack increased from 216 to 234
Apply losses in the simulator
Improvements made
- Added engine improvements to address a variety of bugs that came with larger scale. The less you notice of it, the better.
- Population and villages are now shown on the Empire members list for people with management permissions.
- The Empire members list displays better on mobile if the username and visible role are on the longer end.
- The Aether Accounts UI has been touched up to bring it in line with the game server.
- You can now preview the available resource fields on unclaimed tiles when you haven't claimed all tile for the current tier yet.
- Project queue buttons are now disabled when the culture or science entered is above the maximum amount.
Bugs squashed
- The next and previous buttons on reports now work again on same-second reports.
- Attempting to log in as sitter no longer breaks your current login session.
- The Kingdom Statistics day filter now shifts to the new day when the previous highest day was selected.
- Objective timers now show <7 days instead of >1 week when the duration is between 6 and 7 days.
- The purchase button for buying resources and builders with Aether no longer jumps around on mobile screens when the amount increases.
Hope to see you in game! Play Aether Kingdoms now!