New Espionage, Watchtower, Level caps raised and more

Dear Ahaus,

It took a bit longer than expected, but the next update is finally coming, with several improvements and changes that many of you requested up until now. Let me elaborate on what's coming in detail

Espionage

The espionage system has always been comprised of two components: the possibility of being intercepted, what is typically known as counterespionage; and the amount of information obtained. With the new system we are keeping both factors, but they are both receiving changes:

• The possibility of being intercepted will now depend on 1) the espionage levels difference, as researches, between the spier and the player being spied, 2) the amount of spies being sent and 3) the amount of units in the city of the player being spied. The espionage levels difference will have a greater impact, and thus it'll become much harder to spy if the opponent's espionage is considerably higher, even if more spies are being sent to compensate. Additionally, unlike the previous system the new formula doesn't provide a "hard" outcome, but a probability, meaning that for every espionage attempt there will be a certain probability of being intercepted, made better or worse depending on the factors described before. It will no longer follow that certain combinations of espionage levels and spies sent guarantee a successful espionage mission.
• The amount of information obtained and visible in the report will depend, as before, on the espionage levels difference and the amount of spies sent, however the amount of spies necessary to obtain the same information will vary depending on the espionage level of the opponent; simply put, higher levels of espionage will require more spies than before.

Later on we'll make available a guide detailing how these formulas work and how one may calculate them. Overall, we think these changes will make espionage better and fairer for everyone.

Watchtower

As you probably know, the purpose of the watchtower structure is to be able to see the detailed list of troops when an attack is approaching your cities in the activity window. This functionality has always depended on the defender's watchtower level and the attacker's espionage level, however the previous formula was overly complicated, varied depending on the attacker's espionage, and wasn't simple to calculate, so we decided to simplify it in the following manner:

• Attacker: In order for your opponent not to be able to see the details of your incoming troops, your espionage level must be 3 levels higher than the opponent's watchtower level or more. For example, if the opponent's watchtower is at level 15, you'll need espionage level 18 at least in order to stay in the shadows.
• Defender: In order to see the details of incoming troops, your watchtower shouldn't be more than 2 levels below the opponent's espionage level. For instance, if your opponent's espionage is level 21 and he is attacking you, your watchtower will have to be level 19 or higher in order to see exactly what is attacking you.

In practice we expect that beginner players will have to work a bit harder on upgrading the watchtower to catch up with the espionage of their adversaries, whereas advanced players should rather focus on upgrading their espionage to keep a distance from their opponent's watchtowers. In the long run, we think this system will make things farier and more interesting to all players.

Level caps

As you may know, certain buildings and researches have a level "cap", after which upgrades do not grant a greater bonus than the previous levels. For example, the observatory grants a research time bonus, but after level 25 the bonus stays at +50% and does not continue to increase. Many advanced players asked us to do something about it, so we decided to increase these caps as follows:

These new caps will be applied retroactively, thus if your engineering is already at level 17, you will automatically get the corresponding new wall stamina bonus for this level.

It should be noted, for those unaware, that this kind of limits or caps do not apply to every single building or research; some, such as the quarry or the warehouse, do not have a hard cap and can be upgraded indefinitely.

All in all, this is is a change that will affect mostly advanced players only, but we hope it'll make things more interesting in the long term

Other changes

In addition to all of the above, we are bringing the following points with this update:

• Spies become weaker: spy unit stats will be reduced to strength 1 and stamina 5, down from strength 10 and stamina 50, effectively making it ten times less effective in battle. This change will affect negatively those using spies to perform attacks, but you have to understand that spies were never meant to be used as offending units in the first place.
• Eagle Warriors become more resistant: the stamina of these units will increase from 8,000 to 13,000. To compensate for this change, we also reduced the amount of eagle warriors in barbarian villages level 6 and 7.
• New travel speed modifiers of x0.15 and x3.00 for dramatically slower and faster troop trips will be available under the speed menu in the troop orders window, next to the duration and costs indicators.
• The mission "Send troops" will now officially be known as "Transfer troops" in order to minimize potential confusion. Its purpose remains unchanged.
• Vacation mode will now be limited to 15 days maximum. If a player in vacation mode does not access his account after 15 days, his vacation mode will automatically expire and his cities will be open again to receive visits from other players. This change will be applied retroactively: players in vacation mode for longer than 15 days will lose their vacation mode immediately, including banned players.
• Misc bug fixes, in particular we fix issues scrolling the world map with the most recent version of Google Chrome.

All of this is now available in our multilingual beta server, and will hit other servers within 2 to 3 days if everything goes well. We'll keep you posted in this thread.

We hope you'll like the changes and improvements we are introducing today, and as always we are looking forward to hearing your comments, suggestions and ideas In the announcements that will follow this one we'll cover new features and content, stay tuned

Your Tentlan Team

The update is now available in Mayapan. Uxmal and Chichen Itza will get it later today. Cheers

Now available in Uxmal and Chichen Itza as well Don't hesitate to let us know your feedback, and in particular if you experience any problem with this update. Cheers and have fun