Dear Players,

it’s been a while since our last message, so today we wanted to give you
a little update and bring you up to speed on all the latest
developments, plus give you a preview of what’s in store for Ikariam.

In our last message we mainly talked about barbarian fleets, achievement
rewards and alliance wars. We introduced the barbarian fleets into the
game a short time later, and the first achievement rewards have been
available to you for some time now. Nevertheless, there’s still a lot
more work to be done here. We’re putting a lot of thought into this
topic, and it’s possible that we’ll make more changes in this area in
the future. On the other hand, we’ve had to put the issue of alliance
wars onto the back burner. It remains on our development plan, but for
the time-being at least, the focus lies elsewhere. There are other
priorities for us to deal with, which partly comes as the result of our
internal restructuring from the tail end of last year.

Our last big change came at the end of last year with the introduction
of our new shop and the associated inventory. The inventory in
particular was an important foundation stone as it enables us, for
example, to work on achievement rewards which don’t start as soon as you
unlock them. We have more shop optimisations and features in the
pipeline, and as you may have already noticed, we’ve been making a lot
more special offers. These are helping us to test out the shop’s
capabilities and ultimately find a sensible balance for events. In this
regard, we don’t want to limit ourselves to special offers, but also
broaden the range of events offered. Our plan is to conduct some
analyses, and gather the raw data we need to fine-tune our events to
suit the communities. Being able to customise events is an important
element for us, and in the future we may even offer certain events
specifically to targeted players or groups, in as far as these are
useful for their current situation.

The next item on our list deals with the issue of server settings. In
our opinion, new game rounds can be of great benefit to the community
when they also offer a variety of exciting options. These game rounds
could provide quicker construction/training times for buildings and
troops, for example, or perhaps faster travel times, higher satisfaction
levels, overall increased speed or lootable gold. More features are of
course possible. This allows us to offer a more varied gaming experience
and give even Ikariam’s veterans something new to try out. At the same
time, we’re also considering how to tackle the issue of server merges.
We haven’t decided for certain whether this will take place
simultaneously, but we’re well aware of the problems of game rounds
gradually emptying, and will explore the possibilities of merging
together different gaming rounds within the communities. Depending on
how things develop, we may also offer the option of merging different
communities together, as long as this seems sensible and the communities
are in agreement.

As already mentioned, the alliance war topic remains on our radar. We’ve
already developed a number of concepts of varying complexity, which may
include both PvP and PvE elements. These range from ‘real’ wars in the
game, including preconditions, custom rules and victory conditions,
right through to new zones which alliances can conquer and hold to
receive handy bonuses for their members. We’re still partially in the
design phases here, but we would definitely start with the PvP side of
things, as we feel these are currently of more relevance to the
community.

Of course, we have plenty of other ideas up our sleeves, including
upgrades for units, entirely new units and buildings, a crafting system,
and even server events which could have a direct impact on happenings
in the game (e.g. earthquakes!).

We know there are a number of areas in Ikariam which have room for
improvement, the long-term motivation for playing being just one
example. But we’re far from finished with Ikariam’s development, and we
intend to stay hard at it!

Best wishes,
The Ikariam Team