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Announcement "Release Notes" (April Fools 2019)

Muf-Muf

Elvenar Team

Release Notes



This week Wednesday, we aim to release one of our biggest updates to date, including many new features and some quality of life changes that will improve your playing experience in Elvenar. We hope you like the changes we're announcing. For all details, please see below!

New Features


  • We will enable the rotation of all buildings in the city. As a first step, we introduced the option to rotate all buildings vertically by 180 degrees. We hope you enjoy this change and are looking forward to our next goal: horizontal rotation by 360 degrees.
    rotate_building.png
  • After having to keep quiet for months, we are finally able to reveal our next Guest Race, the Awoofi. After the Amuni, a chapter overrun with cats, we will now have a chapter full of cuteness, fluff, happy tail-wagging and running for all of Elvenar's dog-loving players! More information coming soon! You can already see their icon here:
    awoofi.png
  • A new type of Challenges will soon await you - the Builder Challenge. In the Builder Challenge, you are given a set of 100 buildings that are to be placed in a set amount of tiles. Whoever manages to fulfill the unachievable feat of placing them all, will be awarded with a free City Expansion. An example of what buildings you may see in this challenge can be seen here:
    builder_challenge.png

Improvements


  • The words "Main Hall", "Builder" and "Culture", as well as any abbreviations of those words can no longer be used in city names. This should enable a better immersion into the world of Elvenar!
  • In order to allow for better targeting in battles, the hexagons on the battle field were turned into circles, allowing you to rotate your units as you wish. Be careful, though, to aim correctly, otherwise it might happen that your ranged units engage in friendly fire!
  • Due to popular demand, we're removing all Gold Mines from the World Map. Unfortunately this is leaving some black holes. Please don't enter those or click on them, since that may cause some problems until we fully understand how they work.
  • To make sure that nobody misses out on Elvenar's great story, we will be adding a quiz to progress from one Guest Race to the next, replacing the Chests in the Research Tree at the start of each chapter. You will have to score at least 75% to pass the quiz, and if successful you will be rewarded with the contents of what would have been in the Chest. If unsuccessful, you'll have to re-do parts of the storyline quests explaining the story parts that you answered incorrectly about.
  • Many of you have asked for us to streamline the availability of private messages between the browser and app versions. We have listened, and will now finally remove private messages from browser to accommodate to your wishes!

Balancing Changes


  • Workshops now need Gold Flakes for the production of Supplies. These can be obtained through disassembling Gold Coins in the Magic Academy.
  • Encounters have been rebalanced to become a lot more challenging.
    • We found that province and Tournament encounters were too easy to master. We have therefore enlisted Shady Characters from ancient Greece to provide you with a bigger challenge. You will not only face Chariots and Harpies, but also powerful ships that will take out your Units in sea battle.
    • In order to align negotiation costs with the aforementioned increase in battle difficulty, you will now be asked for special new negotiation items: Wood, Stone and Silver Coins. These need to be obtained in in-game events involving Zeus and cannot be produced in your city.
      new_encounter_window.png
  • Added a quest to the Fellowship Adventures that will give you 1 of each available Adventure Item within that Adventure. The quest will only require you to produce 401 Beverages, which we believe should be a very easy requirement for such a big reward.
  • To make the new quest even more attractive, you will now get 1 permanent Ranking Point for every 14 Beverages collected!
  • Continuing in the theme of making Elvenar a bit more realistic, Population will now be a slowly decaying resource, much like Mana and Seeds. This allows us to more accurately model demographic developments within Elvenar.
  • Disenchanting one of the many Unicorn buildings no longer results in Spell Fragments, but in Unicorn Goulash, a new resource that you will need in the all Robert Redbeard questlines from now on.

Bug Fixes


As with every update, we've resolved a number of bugs, among which:
  • Builders' Hut - Fixed a bug where Builders stayed permanently after having hired them.
  • Tournaments - Washed the sheets of the bed in the Tournaments tent, as that hadn't been done since the Tournaments' first release.
  • City - Ordered new drapes and painted the chimneys for Residences level 1 to 4 for Elves, and 14 to 19 for Humans.
  • City - Fixed a doorbell of one of the Magic Residences.
  • Research - An error in the calculation of Researches was identified, causing Human players to have a significantly harder time finishing Chapters than Elves. Elves will therefore be set back by one Chapter to make up for the unfair advantage they have had over the last years.

Mobile


Note: the app version of the update is released separately from the browser version.
  • Since our Mobile community is so different from our Browser community, a new, experimental gamemode is added to our app. In this mode you have to fight for every city expansion. If you run out of units, or lose a battle, you will lose a city expansion. You can re-gain it by fighting for it once more, and stacking enough units on it to keep it. Should you lose an expansion on which buildings were built, those buildings will be returned to your Inventory. If this gamemode proves to be successful, we'll bring it over to the browser version.
  • We're adding voice support for players using the app, and will make it possible to operate large parts of the game using voice commands via Apple's Siri, Google's Google Voice, and Amazon's Alexa voice assistants. This will allow you to navigate through the game, start productions in your city, give Neighborly Help, and much more! Just tell Siri, Google or Alexa what kind of production you would like to start for each building and everything else will be done for you! A sample voice command: "Alexa, in Elvenar, start producing Beverages in my Workshop with the coordinates 5, 15."
  • Of course, if you prefer, you can also call your Neighbors to provide them with Neighborly Help. This uses a similar technology as the voice support feature mentioned above. For this to work, you may be asked to grant Elvenar permission to your phone's address book.
  • City - Added missing power outlets to high-level Residences, so that you can easily charge your phone or tablet while playing Elvenar.

We hope you like the changes that we've announced today, and are very much looking forward to your feedback regarding them. Let us know your thoughts by leaving a reply in the discussion thread!

Kind regards,
Your Elvenar Team
 

Muf-Muf

Elvenar Team
Dear Humans and Elves,

We will have to adjust the release date of the changes above a little bit, because...

...it was, of course, April Fools!

We hope you had as much fun reading as we had creating these "release notes"! We will adjust the title of the thread and move it to the regular Announcements section of the forums. :)

Kind regards,
Your Elvenar Team
 
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