Releases

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.

Your Commander has stopped being an idea and become a person with a posting. He starts at your main base, and from the Commander page you can send him to any other base you hold.

Moving him is a real decision. He travels across the map at the pace of an attack force, so the page shows you what each move costs in hours before you commit to it — and while he is on the road he is at neither end.

He can also be caught out. If a base is razed while he is standing in it he survives, always: he never loses a level, a skill point or a scrap of experience. He is simply out of action for six hours, and turns up again at your main base once he has recovered.

One thing has deliberately not changed yet: where he stands does not affect your bonuses so far. That is the next update, and it arrives with a free reset of your skill points, so you can re-plan your Commander around his posting instead of living with choices you made when he was everywhere at once.

Account Settings can now do what its name promises. You can change your password without leaving the game, and move your account to a new email address — both from the page itself, under your name in the top bar.

Changing your email is deliberately careful. Nothing switches over the moment you submit: your current address keeps signing you in while a confirmation goes to the new one, and only opening that link completes the move. Mistype the address and nothing happens — the request simply expires, and you can cancel it yourself in the meantime. You are never asked to verify your account all over again, and you never get thrown out of a live round.

The page has also been reorganised. Settings are now grouped by what they actually are — your sign-in details on one side, what Command may interrupt you about on the other — instead of one long panel where everything looked equally important.

Two-factor authentication has a place on the page but is not switched on yet. It is coming.

On a tablet the top bar sat in a narrow strip down the middle of the screen, with a band of empty space on either side, while everything else on the page ran edge to edge. It now uses the full width, lining up with the page beneath it at every screen size.

Phones are unchanged — the bar was already the right width there, which is why this went unnoticed for a while.

Opening the base panel on a phone or tablet left it unresponsive — the close button did nothing, and neither did anything else inside it. That is fixed.

The cause was a guard added a few hours earlier to stop a stray tap from jumping you to the Starport page. It worked, but it also treated every tap inside the open panel as a tap on the bar itself, which cancelled the button you were actually pressing. The bar now only listens to gestures on its own strip, so the panel is free to do its job.

The strip above — resources, queues and the menu — is sticky again too. It had quietly stopped following the page down when the bottom bar was added.

Every base you hold now watches the ground around it. An Observatory sees six tiles in every direction, a Radar ten, a Command Center fourteen — terrain and anything moving through it, drawn live on the map. Every base does this, not just your capital, so an Outpost pushed out into the deep desert earns its keep as a watchtower.

This is a live view, not scouting. It shows you what is there right now and it updates as things move; it does not permanently uncover the map the way a scout run does. Walk away from a base and the ground around it goes quiet again.

There is a new research line to go with it — Long-Range Optics — adding two tiles of range per level, up to twenty-four.

The scan ring on the world map has changed job. It used to sit there permanently, which made it easy to forget what it meant: it marks the distance at which an incoming attack becomes visible to you. It now appears only when something hostile is actually on its way, so when you see it, it means something. It is drawn in red and dashed, to keep it clearly apart from the calm blue coverage circles.

Thanks to Nrgphoenix for the request.

Mail is no longer a pile of one-off messages. It is threads now, the way you would expect: send one message to several commanders at once and everybody lands in the same conversation, replies stack underneath it, and the whole exchange stays in one place instead of scattering across your inbox.

Read state is per person, so a thread you have opened is marked read for you and stays unread for everyone else who has not looked yet. And you can write in markdown — bold, lists, links — the same way the development channel works.

Everything already in your mailbox has been carried across as-is. Nothing was thrown away.

There is also a new achievement. "Last Line" goes to the commander who intercepts a hostile scout or spy closing on one of their bases. It was originally written as intercepting an incoming attack, which sounded good and was quietly impossible — interception has never been able to catch an attack. It rewards what it can actually reward now.

On a phone or tablet, the base you are looking at now lives in a bar along the bottom of the screen instead of competing for room in the top bar. Swipe it left or right to move between your bases, or tap it to open a panel with the full list and the shortcuts for whichever base you are in.

The bar carries the things you would otherwise have to go looking for: whether that base is under attack, whether its queues have run dry, and whether it has an MCV waiting. The most urgent one always comes first. Resource totals stay where they were, at the top — no point printing them twice.

Nothing changes on desktop, where there was never a shortage of room.

Speaking of that MCV: if one is sitting in a base doing nothing, the base now says so and offers to take you straight to the world map ready to pick a site, rather than leaving you to remember it is there. And a convoy already on its way will tell you which base it left from, where it is headed, when it arrives and how much Titanite it is carrying.

Thanks to Nrgphoenix, who filed this one and sat through the design questions to get it right.