Greetings Lightbringers!
Here we are one more week! In today’s dev blog we bring you more information about a unique feature in Empire of Ember: sharing and rating cities.
Empire of Ember features asynchronous multiplayer by which players can share their cities for other players to fight and complete missions and then rate their experience with the map they’ve downloaded.
During the game, you will have the option to visit other villages and cities when travelling through the hexagonal map.
Some villages are occupied by enemies and you will need to engage in battle and free them from the invasion before being able to interact with them. Once recovered, you will unlock trade and be able to help with tasks, make improvements to the settlement and borrow men for your army. Helping your subjects with their quests will grant you points of loyalty, which is required to access certain missions and will unlock new types of buildings that provide additional benefits. Also, the only effective way to get more population is by recruiting through villages, so make sure their loyalty is high enough!
Besides villages, there are also cities on the map. All of these will start with a neutral relationship towards you, which will change depending on your choices in the game. If you go to these cities, you can speak to the ruler and either ask if they need help with any tasks or access more advanced missions, for which you may need to meet specific requirements, such as having a certain amount of gold or having attained some level of respect with that city, for instance.
Once you get to a city to complete a task given by other city ruler, you will be given the option to choose the map’s difficulty and the server will automatically download one of the cities from the entire pool of users for you to play.
Some of these missions will have you enter enemy cities. Where that is the case you can either download that city from the server or if you are playing offline, it will use your current city.
You will find different kinds of city missions. Some will just have you walk around, such as talk to a spy; some others will require your involvement in some kind of vendetta between two enemy cities, forcing you to choose a side. Most city missions increase your reputation with the city that gave the mission while decreasing your reputation with some other city.
Cities that don't like you will send armies to attack your base, so be careful who you come into conflict with!
After completing the quest that has taken you to another player's city, you will be able to rate the map. The server considers prior ratings: which city that player has been to before, how new the map is, and other factors, so as to deliver high-quality replayability. The rating system is also a way of making sure that the server only delivers the best maps.
And this all about sharing and rating cities for today! If you’ve liked what you’ve read, and are curious about any of the other varied and unique features in Empire of Ember, give the game a go and give us feedback by leaving us a review on Steam! ːsteamthumbsupː
Your suggestions are very much appreciated at this stage, as we’re working really hard to deliver the best version of the game we possibly can after its release on Early Access. You can make a huge difference and have an impact in shaping Empire of Ember to help it reach its full potential!
Also, please rate other reviews that you think are useful to help other players in the community ːsteamthisː
As usual, we welcome you to join our community on Discord, Steam, and our Social Media channels: Twitter, Facebook and Reddit. If you want to help with the development, please try the game, leave a review on the Steam page, rate helpful reviews, wishlist and follow it, and help the community grow by telling all your friends about it!
We will see you soon! In the meantime, stay safe and have a great week!