If you haven’t already read the previous announcement about the changes coming to empires, I recommend reading that first.

The short summary is that Empires will be changing so that they no longer require premium currency for any functional aspect. This means that the entire empire system can be played without spending anything additional.

We are very excited to bring these changes to you all, but we believe it only makes sense to make them with some form of wipe to give empires a clean slate. We have posted more info about this here on how we will be deciding what type of wipe to do.

In this blog we will outline the details of the changes coming to empires to set player expectations for the new system, to give us feedback, and to start planning how they want to organize themselves in the lead up to the wipe that will bring these changes.

With these changes we are aiming to take the first major steps in rectifying some of the issues we’ve identified with the Empires system. I would sum up the core issues as:

• Empires have a confusing identity between being a paid cosmetic and an endgame gameplay system.
• Empires being very monotonous to maintain (Supplies often being limiting factor, too slow to craft, too many watchtowers to supply)
• Challenges with our ability to enforce fair play (especially with respect to blocking watchtowers)

In addition to these issues there is also an identity problem of player groups of varying sizes trying to compete at the same scale of empires leading to a bad feeling on both sides of one-sided wars. This is something we’d also like to address in the future, but haven’t yet solved meaningfully.

Hexite Energy

The replacement of Hexite Shards in empires with Hexite energy seeks to redefine empires as a totally non-premium system, which rewards a mixture of game resources, player strategy, and in-game manpower instead of the size of your wallet. With this change it also allows us to expand empires from being purely cosmetic to being more connected with the other scales in terms of gameplay impact.

Hexite Energy is a new currency item which can be used to both create an empire and donate to an empire to increase its energy balance. This energy balance can be thought of as the energy reserves of the empire, which exists in the capital. This energy balance can be spent by empire ranking members to craft hexite capsules using a combination of supplies (from the capital claim) and energy (from the empire balance). You’ll note that the only difference here is that the balance from the empire being spent is energy instead of shards. From there, the capsules are used as they were before, to expand, maintain and siege other empires.

The big question is what will be the source of this new hexite energy? We plan to have several sources to yield it, but will be starting out with the ones we think are the most core to the empire system functioning the way we want it to. These are:

1. A baseline prospecting skill which can be done repeatedly to act as a guaranteed farmable source of hexite energy for all players. This means that any player, of any progression level, can farm this currency to help their own empire OR farm this currency to trade to empires in exchange for whatever they are offering.
2. The Second is “wonder”-style static resources in the world which can be gathered (with no profession requirement) by any empire noble of the empire who’s territory covers that resource. These resources will be depleted after a certain amount is gathered, then go on cooldown for a set amount of time (on the order of a few days to a week). This means that whichever empire controls these nodes when they become active can collect a certain amount of resources each cycle. This creates valuable control points in the world, which empires can battle over. We see this as functioning similar to a gold mine in a Real Time Strategy game (RTS) in terms of the dynamics it will create, especially in that you can spend resources to siege and take away an income source from an opponent and have that investment pay itself back if successful.

In the future, after the launch of these changes, we also plan to add more event based sources of this new item, but will be monitoring how the base implementation plays out before we lock in any decisions there.

Balance Changes to Empires

We always wanted empires to be something that require manpower of many players working together to create and sustain, but it’s become clear that the current design and balancing place an undue and uninteresting burden on a few trusted players to fuel many watchtowers. While I believe some of this will be improved by capsules not longer being a premium derived item, I think there is also something that can be done about the balancing of empires to make things both less monotonous and more exciting.

We believe the fun of empires comes down to the strategy of choosing where to send your resources and the coordination of many players in gathering the inputs, not waiting for capsules to craft endlessly or spending hours supplying dozens and dozens of watchtowers as a part of routine maintenance.

With that said, we are looking to make the following changes:

• Capsules will now craft faster at foundries reducing the need to build multiple or have them constantly crafting at the same capacity as before
• Watch towers will have larger coverage to reduce the amount of watchtowers needed to be supplied
• The claim supplies cost of creating capsules is being greatly reduced, to prevent capital cities from needing to choose claim progression or empire expansion, you should be able to do both in parallel

Watchtower Placement and Coverage

In order to address both the challenging and confusing user experience of watchtower placement, and to reduce the surface area for bad actors to abuse the game mechanics to gain an advantage, we are also changing how watchtowers are placed. When these empire changes are made with a wipe, the world will begin completely covered in neutral watchtowers, which will need to be captured to make them yours. The area they cover will still be a set of chunks but will no longer be a larger square of 5x5, instead it will extend more organically based on distance.

This means that watchtowers will all be pre-placed with much larger claims, making blocking them much more difficult, we will also be more proactive in dealing with players and empires griefing towers. This means anything built around a tower with the aim to block or restrict movement to the tower will be removed, and the offending accounts will be held accountable. Additionally, no gaps or overlapping areas in the empire map coverage will exist. This should really improve the aesthetics of the world map, while simplifying a lot of weird edge case gameplay that stemmed from overlapping areas.

Stepping into this new Era of Empires

If you are as excited by these changes as we are please take the time to look at this news post as well and participate in the poll to decide the nature of the wipe that will bring these changes to BitCraft.

Minch and the BitCraft Team