Thursday 2 May 2013

goodgame empire

I am so happy to announce that my blog, Pixurai II's GoodGame Empire Blog, is the number one blog about GoodGame Empire (in English at least). How do I know this? If you search "goodgame empire blog" or even search a topic in GoodGame Empire that I have blogged about, such as "goodgame empire outpost," and my blog will appear on the first page most of the time. Sometimes, my blog is even the third search result, right under the GoodGame Empire website and the GoodGame Empire forums website. Surprisingly, this is the first blog I've ever done (not including academic blogs forced on me in school), so I'm really proud and would like to thank all of my readers for reading my posts and  supporting me with every single one of your views on my blog.

Even though this is my first blog, I still want to try something new, which includes having multiple people help me with my blog so that I can get more posts and more information for readers of my blog. I will be creating a tab above for anyone who would like to help my blog as an author. Of course, I don't have anything to give or any way to pay anyone who wants to help me (including myself). So at least for now, people who want to become authors won't be able to receive any salary or anything, but I myself don't receive any money from this blog either. For anyone who wants to help with this blog, please email me at pixurai2gameblog@gmail.com. Lastly, I am about to launch an editing session, where I am going to look through all of the blog posts that I have typed for this blog and I am going to edit them to remove the grammar mistakes and confusing sentences that I often find. For the next week or so, I won't be posting a lot of posts, only the ones that are urgent or important, so that I can spend my time making my old posts better.

After that terrible leader of PATRIOT kicked my out of his alliance, I decided that I would never join another alliance. Instead, I would create my own. So that's exactly what I did. My alliance is called Dragon Blade, which for some reason isn't taken yet, which shows how little number of alliances exist in the game. I've already have one recruit to my alliance, even though she says she's only 10 years old. She does kind of act as though she's ten, with her ignorance of many of this game's features and strategies and the way she chats. Anyways, if any of the readers of my blog would want to join my alliance, simply message me. Like all other alliances, I made requirements for joining my alliance, which are you need an outpost (same thing as saying you need to be level 13) and you need to pay a daily taxes of 500 wood, 500 stone, or 50 coins. The tax thing might change, but I don't plan on following the footsteps of the terrible leader of PATRIOT and keep rising the required level. I've built a ton of Dwellings, my total population is close to 300, so I can rebuild my army in a few days even if that bug appeared again and I loss my entire army. No one is attacking me, so I am able to safely and steadily level up


s soon as you get to level 25, you will be able to get into Ever winter glacier (Let's call it EW, it is shorter). Now few things you need to keep in mind.

WAIT TILL YOU GATHER THE FOLLOWING:

1. Have extra Iron and wood 10000, coin and food 15000
OR 1500 Rubies + 5000 food & coins, 3000 Iron & wood.
That is the cost to enter the EW + Your basic survival strategy.

(Resource required to unlock EW are 7000 iron; 7000 wood; 5000 food and 5000 coin. The rest above have been added for your basic survival)




2. Minimum 50 defense soldiers and 200 Attack soldiers. You will regret if you don't have them and there is no way to recover. 

Let me explain: In EW, the game allows you to capture 5 food villages and maybe 5 wood and stone villages, I am not sure as even I cannot capture any more of them. Stone and wood villages are rare, food is abundant. If you do not have enough attack soldiers or resources to support them, other players will take over all the resource villages that were generated for you and you will have nothing else than Food villages.

3. Enter EW when you have all the things mentioned above and Select North as your location,that is where all of us will be. As soon as you reach EW, build a Loot Warehouse (Costs around 3500 wood and stone with building time of approx 9 hours.). Build a loot warehouse.

Now immediately send troops and supplies to EW. (It takes them 2 hours to travel but you can make it instant by paying 228 rubies.) If you pay rubies good, otherwise start building food supplies at EW castle.

4.  As soon as you get your troops, immediately start attacking the resource villages, Do not send an attack out less than 120 soldiers. Start with Stone and wood and lastly food. Food is abundant. Maybe you can add 1 or 2 food to begin with. But keep in mind that you should get maximum of your resource villages on day 1, otherwise other players will take resource villages that were generated for you.

5. Build the barracks in EW and start building defensive units. Build the Defense workshop and start building defense Tools.

6. When you acquire a Village, recall your attack army to your main castle except 1 soldier, leave 1 soldier there as otherwise the village can be occupied by someone else and at the same time send defense units to that village. 10 defense units, melee and ranged should be ideal, add some defense tools also.

TIP: Try to enter EW when it is your holiday and you can play continuous 10-12 hours and maybe it is not a weekend, so that other players are not playing that day and they don't take away your resource villages. Not a bad idea to play at Indian Night time, as very few players are online at that time.

 This is my Castle: (Below)





Ice Fortress Espionage Report



As we know our most of members are more than level 25 so i will not describe EW more because they already know about it........


  You better have good reason for attacking castles. Don't attack for nothing. And, attacking just because of "he assaulted first" is not a good excuse, and may cause serious headaches after.

       1. Plunder : At levels below 20, attacking for plunder (including gold) is a good reason. This will help you upgrade your castle quickly. But after level 20, the gainings start not be worthy to attack because you already start to produce more wood, stone, food and gold.  
  
       2. Tournaments : Another good reason is the tournaments. In personal tournaments, ending up in the first 100 is not so hard. I already have been two times (at levels 25 and 28 I guess) and the benefits are great. Even if you don't reach 100th, there is still the chance that you get the attendence rewards. 

       3. Dark One(?) : The dark one's offer is tempting, too. She suggest 1000 gold and 100 rubies per attack to the castles she addresses for a period of time. The more you attack in that time, more you gain gold and rubies. Don't miss this chance and attack as many castles as you can. And there is the chance to chance the addressed castle for 30(?) rubies.

       4. Honor and glory :

       5. Convincing : 

       6. Combination  :   

s I mentioned in my Kingdom Rush mini-review a couple of weeks back I have played Goodgame Studio’s Empire game quite a bit over the last few weeks.  This is my first browser game I have played for more than a few minutes.  Normally by this time i’m closing the game down (or in this case closing the browser tab) and writing the game off as just a lot of repetitive clicking.  Goodgame Empire is a bit different.
Goodgame Empire is a browser base castle building game where you build things in real-time.  No it doesn’t take two years of real-time to build your castle wall, but it does take some time for it to complete.  What this means is you don’t spend much time actually playing the game.  I tend to log in the morning and collect taxes, read any messages and start building.  Then I log out.  I might come back at lunch time and check progress, etc.  Each time i’m logged in for 5-10 minutes only before I go on my merry way.  This makes it a great game for people with limited time to play for whatever reason.
Your castle in Goodgame Empire with a number of buildings and a castle wall.Graphics are cartoony and easy on the eye.  The interface is a little clunky but most of the basic stuff is intuitive to use.  Make sure you click on all the buttons on your main screen at a some stage as you might discover as I did after a few weeks of playing that there are alliances and a chat system in-game :)
You accumulate resources such as wood, stone and food over time and then spend this building stuff and feeding your population and army.  There is some limited functionality for sending resources to others and therefore trading.  Goodgame Studios have also recently introduced outposts, which are like mini castles you can capture and build up from scratch.
Its not all random building though.  You receive quests, which are the only way to get experience, and they direct you to build certain building.  Gaining experience means gaining levels.  Gaining levels means more types of building and better soldiers to recruit.
Besides building stuff you also recruit armies and build siege equipment.  This means, of course, you can make use of this for attacking other players.  The combat itself is automatically resolved, but the setup and combat reports are complex enough to be interesting without being daunting.  Beating up other players gives you honour (a strange name for it IMO).  Ranking within the game is based on this honour.
Overall i’d give this 7/10 and recommend this game to those who are time poor or instinctive turtlers The interface could use some love but still a decent game.
Gobble gobble.

you   want  to   play    googame    empire   click   on   this   link  goodgame empire

Goalunited dev blog of goalunited next

Hello everyone!


What an exciting moment this is! Because today we want to share a first glimpse of goalunited „next“.  We are aware, that for some of you it may come as a bit of a shock. So much has changed in regards to the look and feel of the game, but in the end we believe that we have found a great mixture of modern look, intuitive user interface and practical arrangement of the features.
goalunited has grown so much featurewise over the last years. This makes it into an immense challenge to rearrange all of its features and possibilities into compact and intuitive screens. The screens we are showing you today are of course still a work in progress, and many assets like buttons and icons are still placeholders. While we keep you updated in this blog we will keep working on further improving the layouts.

The Home and Profile Screen



The home and profile screen (Work in progress) serves as home screen for your own club and at the same time as profile screen for other clubs. It combines elements of the current overview screens with almost all aspects of the actual contact page. This screen is meant to both present and inform.



The player screen (work in progress) shows the changes to the general look and feel pretty clearly. In the player list on the left side you get the overview of your complete squad. The bright part of the list is vertically scrollable (swipeable on a touchscreen) to navigate through all players. The dark part lets you scroll horizontally through skills and other information. This lets you target all relevant information individually. The player screen allows it to focus more on each individual player and “play them” more actively. (We will introduce the complete player screen at a later time) 



We know that the new layout might take a little getting used to for many of you. Just let the screens sink in a bit, maybe revisit them over the next days, and simply get a bit of a feel for the new layout.

We hope that you like what we are working on and that we will be able to show you all the advantages the refactoring of goalunited will bring. Originally we also wanted to give you more information about the timeline and team structure in this post. But we believe that the screens are too interesting to share the spotlight. So we have decided to make this the topic for one of our next posts.


Best Regards,
Jules (Game Director)



Coming up next:
goalunited goes green!





Friday, 4 October 2013


Friday, 4 October 2013

goalunited 2014 Update


After several months of intense work on goalunited next we can tell you that we are making good progress. The new design and all of the new features are taking shape. But there is still a lot to do and a big part of the work is still ahead of us.

But this does not mean that nothing will happen in goalunited 2013 and we are happy that we can announce the yearly update to goalunited 2014.


40 new Achievements

New Achievements are waiting for you. Some of them will be relatively easy to achieve while others will take patience and good management skills. We will also add counters to old and new achievements in which a certain amount of “something” has to be collected. With this you will better be able to monitor your progress.


New goal wall variation

With the update we will add different new goal walls with more attractive prizes. Main prizes will include talent packs, ultra-rare youth scout cards and much more. All in all a goal wall shot will always be worth it.
We will also give you free goal wall shots. You can then all try your luck and win attractive prizes.


Extensive blog entry about changes in goalunited next

Just in time for the goalunited 2014 update we want to present you something like a temporary changelog for goalunited next. As far as it will be possible at that time we will list expected changes and new features. This should be a very interesting entry in our dev blog for all managers.


And a small surprise

We also have a small surprise for you.  Just a little hint: It will be an item.


The update is planned for some time in November. We will announce the exact date beforehand.

Best regards,

Robert (Product manager)

Wednesday, 28 August 2013

Staff: a feature evolution


In today’s Dev-Blog we want to show you what we have planned for the staff in the future. What we don’t like about the current staff system is the constantly sinking motivation that can only be countered by pay raises, which leads to constantly increasing staff expenses. We also want to put the staff management more into focus for the manager.


 GUnext Mental Coach


Efficiency vs. Motivation

The motivation will be replaced by the efficiency value. Every staff member has an ideal salary that is dependent on the qualification and experience. For example, if you pay your coach his ideal salary his efficiency will not decrease and stay at the current level. If you pay him too little, the efficiency will decrease over time. If you want to increase his efficiency, you have to pay him a salary that is above his ideal salary. As the ideal salary increases with higher qualification and experience you will have to keep a closer eye on your staff in the future.


                                                                                  GUnext Coach


Contract duration

Staff members will not stay with you forever anymore. They commit to a contract duration of a maximum of (around) 9 seasons. After that they leave and you have to hire a new employee. Applicants with a high starting qualification however will not agree to a long contract duration and are relatively expensive (as now).


                                                                    GUnext Physical therapist

EDIT: Staff Training

Training will stay pretty much the same. Premium account users will now also have the chance to adjust the training duration. Next to the standard duration of 10 days the training can also be set to 7 or 14 days, with adjusted effect.

The next chance for your veterans 

Like now you can find employees with employment ads and random job applications. There will now also be another way: Player-Coach and Player-Staff.
You have probably had to say a painful goodbye to one or more players that have been loyal players in your team for many years, just because they got too old. For your veterans there will now be a new way to stay with your club: You can prepare them for specific staff roles and then hire them for example as coach.
This is now it works: You can start preparing players from your team for a specific staff position once they turn 30. The player can still play in matches, but he also shows up in the staff section as “aspirant”. He does not have any effect yet, but he can be trained. During the training however he can not play in matches.
The staff skill of the aspirant depends on his player skills. Some personalities are especially suited for special staff positions and receive a bonus. After at least 3 months and at least one training session you can properly move him into his new position, for especially good conditions. Your old staff member on that position will automatically be dismissed.
Overview of the bonuses:

  • Coach
    • Depending on the player position the Coach’s personality is set:
      • very offensive - Attacker
      • offensive – Wing player
      • balanced – Mid field
      • defensive - Defender
      • very defensive – Goal keeper
    • Bonus for personality charismatic
  • Assistant Coach
    • Bonus for personalities aggressive or ambicious
  • Physical therapist
    • Bonus for personality diligent
  • Mental coach
    • Bonus for personalities balanced or fair
  • Goal keeping coach
    • Has to be goal keeper
  • Youth coach
    • Has to have been drawn from the team’s youth
  • PR-Manager 
    • Bonus for personality popular


                                                                      GUnext Fitness Coach


A final word 

Our decision on personalities as you can see above is, that we will keep the personalities. The community opinion was clearly leaning towards keeping them (Choices 1 and 2), plus, for us option 1 (Adjusting flexible and inflexible) is clearly the least labor intensive. This allows us to spend more time on other features. This means, the personalities will stay. However, we are not sure yet if we will perform a complete overhaul at a later time. 


Best regards,
Renke (Game Designer)




                                                                                GUnext Youth Coach
                        

Friday, 2 August 2013

Community Questions






Hi everyone

In today’s blog post I want to answer a few questions that you (the community) have asked in the last weeks. But first I want to introduce myself. My name is Robert and I am Product manager for goalunited. At the moment I take care of goalunited 2013 and make sure the game director can put all his energy into goalunited next. But now to your questions…


1.   Will there still be quadrants/sectors in the match calculation in goalunited next?

Yes, in goalunited next the field will still be split into sectors. Even though players will not be able to be placed freely on the pitch anymore, they will still be assigned to a sector. Here the players will have, as now, the most influence in the matches.


2.   Will the player personalities work the same way as right now?

Kind-of… As many of you have already noticed the personalities “flexible” and “inflexible” will not make much sense anymore with the new formations. Currently we are discussing three options:

Option 1: Adjust personalities

The personalities “flexible” and “inflexible” will be adjusted to the new system and kept. “Inflexible” would receive a bonus on all positions suitable for the player type. On all other positions it would receive a deficit.
“Flexible” would receive a bonus on specific positions in some formations. As this bonus would not be given in all formations, the personality would not have a deficit.
How those positions would be defined we will explain at a later time, if we choose this option. At that time we would also give you the bonus details. We also need to run more tests to make sure the balancing is right.

Option 2: Switch personalities

All “flexible” players would receive the personality “confident”. “Inflexible” would be turned into “aggressive”.

Option 3: Remove all personalities

Personalities would be removed completely from the game. This option would make the gameplay a lot easier for new managers, and help those players that don’t want to pay attention to the personalities.


No matter which option will be chosen, the personality system needs a big adjustment with goalunited next. But we will not be able to find the time to do this before the launch of goalunited next. It is not possible yet to tell you when and how we will adjust this game aspect.

From our point of view it would be best to remove all personalities from the game for now. But here we greatly appreciate your opinion. 

Which option would you prefer for the character customization?


3.   Will the sub-skills of the wing players lose a lot of their importance?

In comparison to the other player types the main skill of wing players has a much smaller effect (for example on the average strength). The sub-skills on the other hand have a much greater weighing. This right now makes it seem as though wing players are weaker than other player types.
This issue will be resolved in goalunited next. All player types will then have a main skill, a secondary main skill and two „sub-skills“, the weighing will be about equal for all player types.

This means that 2 sub-skills will lose their importance, while the main skill will become more important (for wing players).


4.   Which influence will energy and form have? (Those values were not shown on the overview we posted in the blog on April 26)

The influence of form, energy and endurance will not change in goalunited next. The design draft in the blog post only shows part of the screen. In the live version this screen will be “scrollable”. On the tablet you can “swish” the screen left and right, in the browser you can click left and right, to see all values. Overall the game overview will still show all known values.


5.   Will there be changes to the base strength calculation (Especially of the wing players)

In question 3 I have already answered this in part. The base strength will still use the same values. A small change will come though: The base will not go up in 0.2 point increments anymore, but in 0.1 increments.


6.   Will the position limits (no more than 7 players per position effective in training) be removed in goalunited next?

No, the limit of no more than 7 players per position without a training penalty will stay active in goalunited next. This will encourage balanced squads and prevent farm teams.


7.   Will goalunited next be a new game?

goalunited next will be an update for the game and all existing accounts. All of your clubs will stay as they are and can be played on the new version.


8.   Why is there only one trophy? (Shown in the published pictures)

All the screens we have shown you until now are pictures that we use to design a user friendly goalunited. None of them are final. Especially on things like the trophies we are simply using place holders. Those help us see what the design will look like for real accounts, without wasting time on details. So don’t worry, all of the trophies you have earned will stay!

I hope that those answers will help you answer your most important questions. We will keep answering community questions in the upcoming blog posts.

One more thing: in the picture you see the new mentor on the right. He is a forerunner of goalunited next and will soon also offer his helpful suggestions in goalunited 2013.

Best regards,

Robert (Product manager)