Universal Idle Realm (by Eat the Moon)

I can't seem to replicate that issue on my end. Did you happen to purchase any Building or Upgrade reduction Realm Bonuses when you ended your Campaign? Or are you still running the original game that started up with 1.3?

I did an audit of the structure purchase/upgrade code and it appears that it is not actually using the reduced cost from the Realm Bonuses that might be leveled. So I'm fixing that now and will push out a build for Apple Review in an hour or so.

 

There is a Building Management screen that is unlocked via a Realm Feature once you end your Campaign. It currently unlocks at Realm Level 7, which you need to have earned a total of 900 Victory Points to unlock. With the 1.3 event reward, you'll also need to complete 4 more islands to unlock it.

I was debating having this be a core feature of the game, or a feature that is unlocked as you play. It's a tough balance, because I want to unlock features that change up how you might play the game with repeat playthroughs, but there are also convenience features as well that I would like to add.

I figured that a new player might not care about the Building Management screen until they played at least 7 Islands (in a row, or a couple games of 2-3 Islands). At that point, you'll be wanting the screen and boom, there it is. For existing players prior to 1.3, you might already want it, so as a way to get to you quicker, I made it so your Realm would level up faster with bonus Victory Points at the end of your zombie event, so when you start a new Campaign, you can grab it.

This might be a screen that should just be a part of the Town Hall in general though, so I might just do that.

 

Oh hey, found the resource issue. It's pretty bad, actually, so this patch has a high priority and I'll get it out ASAP!

It was caused by the airship and loot box overages I added, as I didn't want you to lose those resources when you move to a new island ... but it was a little too good

 

Kind of. The way the resources work is as follows:

1) You have a max amount of resources you can have in storage, which is more like the max you can own before you can't produce anymore.

2) You have resources that are harvested/produced (aka Resource Count) and you have resources that are given to you (loot box resources and the airship, aka Overage Count, and don't actually use the Warehouse).

Now, it's a bad experience at the start of the game to have 1k max resources and open a loot box and earn 70k of a resource, as this would in the end only give you 1k of the resource. So, I allow those resources to spill into the Overage Count. The same goes with resources brought over with the airship. 20k resources won't mean anything, if you always only allow for 1k. So, airship can also contribute to the overage count.

Now, you could have 180k resources at the end of the island. 150k stored in your warehouse, 30k is Overage from a loot box. When you end the island, you keep your original overage amount and you take another 20k with the airship which gets counted as extra Overage. So, you start the new island with 0k resources stored in your warehouses and 50k (30k was your old overage, and we just added 20k more).

This would explain your 50k at the start of the next island.

I don't really know of a good way to display that information to players, or to explain it in general. Think of it like an energy meter in lots of F2P games. Depending on your level, you might only regenerate to a max of 20 energy tokens, but you might open a gift and be awarded +5 energy, which will let you go over your max because that really feels good.

The issue I found and fixed was that the Overage wasn't being spent properly, which could lead you you spending a little more resources than you actually have, going negative. I have code in place to convert numbers into smaller text versions (123,456,789 = 12.34M, for example), but I toss the negative sign, so every time you saw that number growing, it was actually shrinking (because it was negative) but you weren't seeing the sign. Normally, the code wouldn't let the number go negative, but when I added the Overage Count, some parts of how that was handled where incorrect and allowed the negative number.

There is a Realm Bonus you can get and level up on your Realm Level screen. It is locked until Realm Level 15 I think. You can level it twice, pushing your Town Hall radius to 5. I'm starting to think that I should let players see the Realm Progression screen without having to wait for a Campaign to be over. This would let players purchase Bonuses with previously earned Victory Points as well as see their bonuses while they play, and help prepare the player for what will be needed next, Realm Level wise. Players can also see what new bonuses or features will be unlocked when I release new ones, without the need to quit the Campaign.

 

Yeah, the more I see how things are turning out, the more I want that screen to be accessible at any time. I would need to do a little bit of work to make sure things like Deep Sand Anchors would actually unlock properly if you bought that feature while playing, but that's an easy problem to fix.

This is a good idea, but it would be another massive undertaking to re-balance the game for this type of mode. The game does feel like it's pushing more and more into a "Civilization" style game, but with timed turns for the enemies when I introduced the Hazard system. I could see a Hazard in the future which is, in fact, an invading army. I liked the way the zombies worked, but the spawning is really crazy and it fills up the map quickly. But moving a single enemy around could work.

Somewhere in my design notes I have a dragon that would move around and scorch the earth, landing occasionally (where this is the only time to actually attack it), then lifting back up and making its rounds again. Or, if I choose not to add fantasy elements like that, it could just be an enemy airship...

Actually, I have a lot of hazards that I want to introduce, and almost all of them use some kind of moving element.

Honestly, before any of that happens, I want to redo the combat system entirely. It's really lackluster and needs more strategy than "My number is bigger, I win."

I'll be adding a way to access this information in the future. You can tap on the End Campaign button and it will pop up a confirmation dialog to make sure you want to do it. It will also tell you how many VP you'll earn when you end the campaign, then you can just close it and carry on.

This is ... undocumented. Each troop provides 10 attack power now, instead of just 1 like in the past. Since I have Realm Bonuses that give +% to attack strength, I increased this attack power number so it looks better with the percentage added. You should still see the correct troop count on the inventory screen.

So, on the first island when you saw those 300-400 strength enemies, you only needed 30-40 troops to take them out. Using 300-400 troops would be very expensive vs the pacifism options.

Could this be what you are experiencing? If so, sorry for the confusion Yet another reason why I need to rework combat in general.

 

Welcome back! I'm glad you're liking the new stuff.

 

Good point! I actually dropped the ball on that one, as it is an important thing to do with major updates. I'll see what we can come up with for the next update's icon

 

I thought I had code in place that will use iCloud for key value storage, which saves important information and allows you to log into iCloud on another device, wait for it to sync up, then let you carry over some of your progress (but not all... whatever progress you made on your current island is not saved). I haven't been able to test it fully, but if you have nothing on your new device, then it isn't working You should have had all your items, moon coins, victory points, etc. on your new device.

If you have your old device, could you go to the options screen and hit Help, then go to the Contact option. It will generate an email that has your player ID on it. Either send that email to me, or copy the player ID. Then, go to your new device and attach your old player ID to the email along with your new player ID and send it to me. Or, if you don't want to use email, just copy both player IDs into a private message on this forum to me.

Once I have your old and new player ID, I can link your data to your new player ID and you'll be able to keep going.

The server stores a lot of information about your game, but it doesn't save off your current island's progress (i.e., any research you do on that island, any buildings built, etc). Once I switch you to the new player ID, you will need to restart whatever island you are on, as if you just landed with the airship.

I will be adding a save data storage feature on the server soon, which will let you save the data to the cloud, then restore it on another device. There is no good way to let you have two devices playing the game at the same time, so this process will simply assign the game to the new device and load your data. That, or I'll send data to the server every X minutes when a big chance happens (other than resource generation), so the save state is stored properly on the server itself, without the need to manually upload it.

This is definitely on my list of things to tackle very very soon! Sorry for the inconvenience right now!