Releases

When you file something that needs design questions, you get a form to fill in. If two of the AI maintainers picked up the same request at the same moment, the second one's form quietly replaced the first — so the questions in your inbox could be different from the ones on the page.

That can no longer happen. Whoever reaches a request first keeps it, and the other stands off. One request, one set of questions, answered once.

The soundtrack now has a compact player right in the session menu, alongside the sound buttons — no trip to Account Settings just to change the track. Now playing, previous, play/pause, next, shuffle, repeat and the other-houses switch, all on one row of real buttons. It stays in step with the full player on the account page, so a change in one shows up in the other.

You can now add a second step to signing in. Account Settings has a new Two-factor authentication panel: scan the code with an authenticator app on your phone, type the six digits back once to prove it works, and from then on signing in on a new device asks for a code as well as your password.

You will be given a set of one-time recovery codes when you switch it on — save them. Each one signs you in once if your phone is lost or flat, and they are only shown at the moment they are created.

It is entirely optional, and nothing changes for anyone who leaves it off. Staying signed in on a device you already trust works exactly as before.

The machinery behind signing in, registering, resetting a forgotten password and confirming your email address has been rebuilt on Laravel's own authentication toolkit.

Nothing looks or works differently — that is the point. It is the groundwork for two-factor authentication, which arrives next.

Admin → Appearance has a Download component kit button. It hands over a single file containing every shared piece of the interface in every state, with the stylesheet and typeface built in — it opens in any browser with nothing else installed, and can be given to a design tool as the game's design system.

It is generated fresh each time from whatever is currently deployed, so it cannot quietly fall out of date with the game.

Admins have an Appearance page: the palette, the three house accents, corner radius and overall density, each editable and previewed live against the real interface next to the controls.

Nothing reaches you until it is deliberately made live, and one button puts the game back on its shipped design. Nothing looks any different today — this is the machinery, not a redesign.

The music player in your account settings gains its last two controls.

Shuffle mixes up the order, and stepping back returns you to the track you actually just heard rather than whatever happens to sit above it in the list. Repeat has three settings: keep the current track going, roll through the whole list, or let it stop once the list runs out.

Both remember where you left them, on the device you set them on.

Alongside it, some groundwork you will not see directly: there is now a single page showing every shared piece of the interface — buttons, labels, cost figures, panels — in every state and all three house colour schemes. It means a change to a button can be looked at properly before it reaches a page you are using, instead of after.

Nothing visible changes for you in this one. Behind the scenes there is now a single page that shows every shared piece of the interface — buttons, labels, cost figures, panels — in every state, in all three house colour schemes.

It means a change to a button can be looked at properly before it reaches a page you are using, instead of after. It is also the surface the colour and spacing controls will render into, so those can be judged as you turn them.

Account settings has an Audio section now. Pick a track, skip forward and back, set the music volume, and set a master volume that turns everything down — the announcer included. Music can also go quiet on its own while the game is not the window you are looking at, which is on by default.

The list starts on your own house plus the tracks meant for everyone, and one press widens it to the whole soundtrack. The music button in the session menu opens the player, and still shows at a glance whether anything is playing.

Your choices are remembered on this device, and the track keeps playing as you move around the site.

The game's music is now a library rather than a single fixed track. Admins can add tracks, name them, credit the artist, tag them to a house or leave them for everyone, set the order they play in, and hide one without deleting it.

A new track starts hidden so it can be named before anyone hears it. If a detail like the artist goes unused, it can be switched off everywhere at once rather than showing blank.

The player side — choosing what you hear and how loud — comes next.

Thirteen different things — launching an attack, sending a scout, deploying an MCV, joining an operation, switching your main base, alliance convoys and more — all announced themselves with the same clip, because that was the only one wired up when each was built. They still sound the same today, but each now has its own entry in the admin sound sheet, so they can be given their own voices one at a time instead of all or nothing.

The sandstorm warning, which had been borrowing the attack alarm, has its own entry too.

The button blip, the message ping, the two power alarms and the pick-up thud are the same recording for all three houses, but they had been filed as if each house had its own. That only mattered behind the scenes — nothing sounded different — but it meant replacing one of them would have taken three uploads instead of one.

The admin asset sheet has a Sounds tab. Every action in the game that can make a noise has its own entry — you can hear what it plays now, upload a replacement, listen to it, and put it live when you are happy with it. Voice lines are per house; the shared blips and alarms are one clip for everyone.

Nothing changes for you until someone uploads something. What it means is that the actions currently sharing a single announcement can each be given their own, and the ones that are silent can be given a voice, without waiting for a release.

Redeploying your commander also makes a sound again — it had been asking for a clip that was never delivered.

Moving your commander to another base has been silent since the day the panel shipped — it was trying to play a cue that was never there. It now announces itself like every other launch.

Behind that, the whole sound system has been rebuilt so that which cue each action plays is something we can change without a new release. Nothing else sounds any different today; it means the pile of actions currently sharing one announcement can be given their own, and that buttons and events which are silent now can be given a voice.

Until now, a message sent to a request that was already being worked on sat unread until the build finished — so a correction usually arrived after the thing had shipped.

The engineer now checks the thread twice during a build: once before the work is sealed, and again right before it goes live. A new message from you is picked up at whichever comes first. If it changes what should be built, the work either adapts or stops and comes back to you — and either way you get a reply saying which.

If you ask to hold off, that is obeyed straight away rather than after the current piece is finished.

The Players Online readout above Home has been rebalanced. It had more air above the label than below it, and its hairline rule sat pressed right up against the menu underneath — so the label floated high in its strip while crowding the section heading below. It now sits evenly inside the strip with a clean, consistent gap down to the menu, in the phone drawer and on desktop alike. Same height as before: better spaced, no taller.

A Dev Channel notice in your 3mail now takes you straight to the thread it is about. No more stopping at a near-empty mail page and clicking a second button to get there — one tap and you are reading the conversation, and the notice clears itself behind you.

The menu now carries a live Players Online readout, just above Home — a pulsing dot and a count of how many Commanders are active out of everyone in the round.

Click it for the full roster: who is online, their House and alliance, their score and ladder position, how recently they were active, and how long they have been at the controls this session. A Commander counts as online if they have actually loaded a page in the last ten minutes, so a tab left open overnight will not have you reporting for duty in your sleep.

Your Commander's victory, defeat and downed lines on the Commander page now show in the same angular comms-plate style you already see when setting up an attack — his portrait, his house colours and all — instead of a plain list of text. Lines you haven't written yet are clearly marked so you know a slot is still open.

Opening a 3mail no longer unfolds it inside the mailbox list — each conversation now has a page of its own, laid out the way the development channel threads are. That means a conversation has a real address: you can link to it, bookmark it, keep it open in its own tab, and the browser's back button takes you straight back to your inbox. Sending a new 3mail drops you into the conversation you just started.

The mailbox list keeps its place, with slightly roomier rows that are easier to hit on a phone or tablet, and the 3mail entry in the sidebar now stays lit while you are reading — as do Events, Global Events and the development channel, which had the same habit of going dark.

Open the base bar at the bottom of the screen and each of your bases now says something useful before you tap it.

Every base carries its own Titanite bar, with the figure beside it, so you can see at a glance which one is filling up — and it turns orange when storage is nearly full, the same warning the Bases page gives you. Each base also shows its coordinates, and what it is building or training with the time left counting down live.

The point is not having to switch base just to find out whether it needed you.

The bar itself, the one always sitting at the bottom, is unchanged — your current base's Titanite is already ticking in the top bar right above it.

He has a place on the world map now, and so does everyone else's.

Wherever your commander is posted, his base carries a command mark — and anyone who can already see that base can see it too. Send him out with an attack and the force carries the same mark: whoever watches it coming knows a commander rides with it, though never which one or how strong. That cuts both ways, and it is meant to. Riding out with him is a real risk now, and worth weighing before you launch.

Moving him between your own bases is no longer a private matter either. He travels as a visible unit, the way a supply convoy does, so anyone whose ground he crosses can see a commander is on the road — and can work out that he is away from where he was. Your own commander is always visible to you and to your alliance, whatever the fog is doing.

One deliberate exception: while he is recovering after being caught, the map shows nothing at all, to anyone. His own page still tells you when he is back. Nobody else gets to watch you wait.

It works the same on the flat map and on the globe.

Where your commander stands has started to matter.

Until now his skill bonuses applied across your whole empire at once, wherever he happened to be. From this release the local ones count only where he actually is — at the base he is posted to, or with the force he rides out alongside. While he is on the road between bases, or recovering after being caught, they count nowhere at all. His empire-wide skills are untouched: the whole Command branch and his banking skill work exactly as before, whatever he is doing.

That changes what your already-spent skill points are worth, so every commander gets a one-time free reset. Take it from his page whenever you like and re-plan around the new rules. It is the only reset there will ever be — allocation stays permanent for the round, and this one exists purely because the rules changed underneath choices you had already made.

Posting him well is now a real decision, and so is deciding whether to risk him on an attack.

Your commander can speak now, in your words.

Write him three lines on his page — one for victory, one for defeat, one for being knocked out of the fight — and they reach the other side beside his portrait when a battle resolves. Launching an attack with him aboard? The lines come prefilled and you can rewrite them for that strike before you commit, which is the only chance you get: once the force is away, the words are locked.

He only speaks if he was really there. Riding with the attack, or posted at the base being hit — anywhere else and he says nothing. Send a strike at someone who keeps his commander at the far end of his empire and the conversation is entirely one-sided: he hears your boast and has nothing to answer with.

Choose the defeat line as carefully as the victory one. You will not know which one they read.

Your Commander no longer has to watch the war from a balcony. When you launch an attack from the base he is standing at, you can send him with it — tick the box on the attack panel, or start from the Commander page, which now points you at the right base with the option already armed.

He rides the whole way and comes home with the survivors. Recall the strike and he turns around with it; take the base he set out from off the map while he is away and he simply lands at your main base instead.

Losing the force does not lose him. If the army is wiped he is out of action for six hours and then reports back at your main base, with every level, skill point and scrap of experience intact — the same deal as being caught in a raze.

The Commander page shows where he is the whole time: who he is attacking, when he lands, and when he is due home. While he is in the field he is nowhere else, so you cannot redeploy him until the force is back.

Still to come, and still the big one: making where he stands actually change your bonuses. That arrives with a free reset of your skill points so you can re-plan around it.