Developer Roadmap - Winter 2015

All Roads Lead To Rome RoE

We have many exciting projects in the works for Realm of Empires - enough to spawn a blog post to tell you about them!

Update: New Village List!



New Chat System

You can finally stop relying on pigeons and smoke signals, because the new chat system will soon be here. You may have already tried the first part of it in the new Throne Room chats, but that's just the tip of the communication iceberg. We have so much more on the way!

Soon you will have fully controllable chat in and out of your realms. 
  • 1v1 - Need to work some diplomatic magic, get a report from your sleeper agent, or just shoot the breeze with a friend without cluttering clan chat? Done! Open a private window just for them.
  • Battle Chat - When it's time for war, real time communication is often the key to victory. Soon you will be able to create private chats for clan mates and allies. No more wandering through long email chains in the middle of battle! 
  • Clan & Diplomatic Chats - Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Or just have fun talking with your friends! Either way, it will be easy to set up persistent chats for your clan, for allied council - basically for anyone you want to keep in touch with. Group chats are also visible from the Throne Room, so you can keep the band together between realms.


Throne Room For Mobile

It's good to be the king! And soon, all that kingly goodness will be easy to pack up and take with you on your mobile devices. We've been working hard to polish all the cool TR goodies into a mobile-ready interface, and the results will be coming your way very soon.

Our development wizard DarkGeneral is working his magic to pack in all the great features. View your history, bask in past glories, look up other players, and chat across realms... all from the comfort of your favorite phone or tablet.








War Room Version 2.0

The Warlords Rising interface was a big step up for RoE across the board. It's impossible to list all the little ways it improves over the old UI both visually and technically. One thing we've wanted to update for a while now, though, is the War Room you use for battling and defending.

The War Room does a lot of things right, and it makes certain kinds of play a lot easier than the attack screen from the old interface. But we've heard your feedback loud and clear, and we're committed to adding in some awesome new features - and bringing back some favorite old ones! 
  • Landing Times - One of the greatest strengths of the old attack screen was being able to see the landing times for every possible attack at once. This made planning large scale operations a lot easier - and now it's coming to the new War Room too! Huzzah!
  • Unit Filters - As part of the Landing Time update, you will also be able to filter the villages in your War Room by unit type. This makes it easy to plot attacks by siege, to find governors, etc... super cool, and super convenient.
  • Single Click Attack - Whether you're farming, or you're trying to blitz an unwary foe with rapid-fire attacks, there are times when you just want to be able to hit send and be done with it. Soon you will be able to do just that! Imagine being able to instantly switch between the traditional attack mode and a single-click speed version, whenever you want to!
  • MORE - We have other goodies in the pipeline for the War Room that may come later. Things like Attack Memory (so you can instantly re-use common attack formations), or customizable information windows to keep you fully in control of the battle.



Empire Management & Mass Features

We've been wanting to redesign mass features for the new UI since roughly the late Cretaceous period. And now, finally, the dream is happening!

First off, we'll be making massive updates to the Village List. New features will include the option of viewing troops or building levels, and other important information.

You will also be able to rename villages and open village menus right from the list. More importantly, you will be able to group villages and filter your empire according to those groups. So if you only want to see your attack villages, or to bring up villages that are still under development... however YOU want to group your villages, you'll soon have the power to do it!

That leads right into our last, long-awaited update for both mobile and the Warlords Rising desktop UI. Mass features! We're bringing the ability to set empire (or group!) wide upgrades and recruitment queues to both the mobile app and the new interface. We think these changes are going to make the game more fun and easier to play, especially on mobile where navigating large empires could be difficult. No more! Soon, an organized machine of conquest will be right at your fingertips.



Final Thoughts

As you can see, we have a LOT coming up. These new features will be rolling out in waves of the next month or two, so you'll be seeing many, many updates. We hope you enjoy them as much as we enjoy making them for you! Please let us know what you think - and what you want to see next.

Happy gaming,

Vacation Mode, Throne Room, Servants Rescue and more...

HELLO FELLOW STRATEGISTS!

As you know, we launched a new interface last Christmas. Updating it has kept us busy since then, thanks to your feedback.  Besides that, we launched RoE on Wild Tangent and  Kongregate last spring, made a couple of classic realms due to popular demand, and developed Tactica (our own login system) to allow platform-independent login.

Since spring, besides doing a heck of a lot of under-the-hood improvements, we've been working on some exciting new features that we are launching now. Let me take a moment to talk a bit about those.



Throne Room

There has never been a way to view your entire Realm of Empires history. With the new Throne Room you can now do exactly that, as well as chat with everyone in the game, check out a leaderboard from very old realms which not only includes players left in the realm, but shows everyone who ever played with their best-ever score in this realm. You can even chat with old friends you might have lost contact with. It's already pretty awesome, but the Throne Room is in its infancy. We will be adding more cool stats and functionality to it!



Powerful new chat system

Debuting as a beta feature in the Throne Room, we are working on a super-chat. When we're finished this will be a flexible chat system that allows you to chat 1on1, as well as create completely custom chat groups. Think about it - you will be able to create a battle group for one particular operation, or a chat for trusted friends, or a chat for certain clan leaders, or a chat for an alliance leaders across realms etc... No need for long email chains, or forums that are hard to get to. I am personally very excited about this. If all goes well, it will be introduced in-realm before the end of the year.

Vacation Mode

As you no doubt already know, Realm of Empires is an intense game. It is not fun being attacked while relaxing at a beach sipping on that Corona - man, those commercials work! First thing I think off when I see a Caribbean beach. Anyway, the point is, it is nice to be able to take a break and know that your empire is protected, even without a steward. Well, Vacation Mode will allow you to do just that! As you gain more XP, you gain more vacations days. We've structured it in a way to prevent abuse (running from attacks), and we'll be tweaking it as needed based on your feedback.

Servant Rescue

In our never-ending quest to be historically authentic, we thought that besides silver, there should be some human loot when you raid rebels! (Editor's Note: Greg is joking. Humans are not loot. Now if you'll excuse me, I need a stiff drink.) And since you and I are nice people, when we see servants in need - we rescue them! And make them work for us. So debuting in the new realms opening in November, you can now rescue servants when you raid rebels and abandoned villages.


More Tournament?

We had a great tournament season 2!  Congrats to all of our winners, especially to our two perfect-score achievers Special_K and The_Gray_Avenger!

After a month of over 20 RXs, surely everyone is exhausted no? Well, we are already getting calls for another tournament so we'll be looking into that! I admire your stamina guys!





Thank you for playing Realm of Empires, and we hope you will enjoy the new features and realms coming out now,  HAPPY GAMING!
Greg Bala