TimTrain
Big Huge Games
- Joined
- Jul 24, 2015
- Messages
- 18
Greetings DomiNations Leaders!
We hope everyone has been enjoying the new War Coalitions and National Trade Goods! I’ve enjoyed hunting for specific Nations to attack (I’m always on the lookout for more French players to steamroll!), and I have kept my citizens busy upgrading the Embassy for access to some of the more advanced Coalitions. We’re excited to incorporate National Trade Goods into more features down the line - Coalitions are just the beginning!
The big news from the studio this month is that we are working hard to put the finishing touches on the next release: The Great Leaders. This has a major new feature starting in the Gunpowder Age, which gives you the opportunity to play with some of the Great Leaders from history. We also added more robust Leaderboard rankings for Alliances based on World Wars, so we can truly determine the #1 Alliance in the DomiNations! More on those features in a couple of weeks…
We’re also looking forward to adding language support for Turkish and Italian. We have a lot of players in these regions, and now they can play in their native language. Hopefully we can get even more Leaders from those countries to join the fight - the more the merrier!
With each release, we try to devote a significant portion of our bandwidth to fixing bugs, security flaws, and other annoyances, and the Great Leaders release will be no different. Some bugs are “client” fixes that require all-new version updates cleared by Apple and Google, and some are “server” fixes that happen in the background and might not even be immediately noticeable by players. Over the past month, we did a lot of server fixes that should have improved network connect issues. In particular, we significantly reduced the amount of data sent during battles, so people should see less of the yellow load spinner indicating a network issue. We hope this will result in meaningful improvement for many players, and many fewer network disconnects.
There are two issues that we haven’t yet fixed but are working very hard to resolve, and I wanted to give an update on each. The first is the problem of missing War Loot experienced by a small number of players. We fixed some of the issues here, but not all. We know this is an extremely frustrating bug, and we have not yet been able to consistently reproduce all the issues in a way that allows us to catch the problem. We added a ton of new notation to the game, which should point the way towards a permanent fix. The Great Leaders version also adds some behind-the-scenes reporting on War Replays, which is the last step in validating that we can turn on those replays so people can see how well they are performing during World War. Frankly, both issues have proved more difficult to resolve than we’d thought, and I apologize to the community for the long wait on these important updates.
One final improvement coming with Great Leaders - we’re tweaking the Alliance search algorithm to promote more active Alliances and be sure that there is a constant stream of new players to reinforce your World War armies! We also made some changes to show more medium sized Alliances in the search results.
As always, thanks to all our Leaders for their ongoing support of DomiNations! We look forward to seeing you in battle!
Tim
We hope everyone has been enjoying the new War Coalitions and National Trade Goods! I’ve enjoyed hunting for specific Nations to attack (I’m always on the lookout for more French players to steamroll!), and I have kept my citizens busy upgrading the Embassy for access to some of the more advanced Coalitions. We’re excited to incorporate National Trade Goods into more features down the line - Coalitions are just the beginning!
The big news from the studio this month is that we are working hard to put the finishing touches on the next release: The Great Leaders. This has a major new feature starting in the Gunpowder Age, which gives you the opportunity to play with some of the Great Leaders from history. We also added more robust Leaderboard rankings for Alliances based on World Wars, so we can truly determine the #1 Alliance in the DomiNations! More on those features in a couple of weeks…
We’re also looking forward to adding language support for Turkish and Italian. We have a lot of players in these regions, and now they can play in their native language. Hopefully we can get even more Leaders from those countries to join the fight - the more the merrier!
With each release, we try to devote a significant portion of our bandwidth to fixing bugs, security flaws, and other annoyances, and the Great Leaders release will be no different. Some bugs are “client” fixes that require all-new version updates cleared by Apple and Google, and some are “server” fixes that happen in the background and might not even be immediately noticeable by players. Over the past month, we did a lot of server fixes that should have improved network connect issues. In particular, we significantly reduced the amount of data sent during battles, so people should see less of the yellow load spinner indicating a network issue. We hope this will result in meaningful improvement for many players, and many fewer network disconnects.
There are two issues that we haven’t yet fixed but are working very hard to resolve, and I wanted to give an update on each. The first is the problem of missing War Loot experienced by a small number of players. We fixed some of the issues here, but not all. We know this is an extremely frustrating bug, and we have not yet been able to consistently reproduce all the issues in a way that allows us to catch the problem. We added a ton of new notation to the game, which should point the way towards a permanent fix. The Great Leaders version also adds some behind-the-scenes reporting on War Replays, which is the last step in validating that we can turn on those replays so people can see how well they are performing during World War. Frankly, both issues have proved more difficult to resolve than we’d thought, and I apologize to the community for the long wait on these important updates.
One final improvement coming with Great Leaders - we’re tweaking the Alliance search algorithm to promote more active Alliances and be sure that there is a constant stream of new players to reinforce your World War armies! We also made some changes to show more medium sized Alliances in the search results.
As always, thanks to all our Leaders for their ongoing support of DomiNations! We look forward to seeing you in battle!
Tim
