Mr. D

Thanks, glad to hear that it was found helpful! Hold on, what about the single Unobtainium (1) package? As far as I remember it's somewhere around $2/£1.50 (depending on your country & its taxes!); we literally couldn't go lower (App Store doesn't even have smaller package options). Yup, in the last 5 years we've tried (or thought of ) pretty much every option there is! Flamefrost actually started as a Kickstarter campaign. But crowdfunding is a lot harder & less rewarding than it seems; it requires an insane amount of time and a lot of money to be successful, and crowdfunding campaign management can actually be a full-time job (if I start doing it there will be no updates in months ). As for Patreon in particular, it may be great for freelance artists, but it is an accounting hell for businesses. We are a registered company with VAT and stuff, so the same tax laws apply to us as to anyone else (e.g. Sony or EA). Any form of donations/charity in this industry is a bit of a nightmare in general (you can't just send an envelope of money to Sony, for example ) and it would take a huge amount of efforts to make it work for us (same as general crowdfunding). So I'm afraid direct donations to myself are not an option, despite the fact that I'd most definitely prefer to not say "no" to money. Very much so indeed! Team meetings are quite enjoyable (and fast) though! Yeah, we're most likely not going to go open-source, sorry. It would be very nice for players if all our favourite games uploaded their source code to a public repository (I'd definitely play around with the code of World of Warcraft!), but there are reasons why this doesn't happen. We too are not in the business of helping our competitors (or creating new ones). Despite the fact that the majority of our players would unlikely want to "steal" and re-use our intellectual property, there's still a whole cloud of vultures floating around every IT business and waiting for it to leak the source of its products. In short, if I ever see a "Dictatorship: Terra" app or a "Firecold MMORPG" with parts of my code in them I will be very, very unhappy.

Hi all, I've spotted an interesting conversation in Discord a few weeks ago about "us" (Epic Dragon) with lots of strange assumptions, so I've decided to clear the air and explain our history / "who we are" in a bit more details. Epic Dragon as a company launched in the UK (Norwich) in 2013 (5 years ago) and until the beginning of 2017 our focus was primarily on building & maintaining the Flamefrost MMORPG (www.flamefrost.com). Our team has always been quite small and initially it was just me (I have built both of our games from scratch), then a freelance artist joined us temporarily along with our CVO (the source of many incredible ideas and a QA for mine ). Sometime around Flamefrost's launch we even made a video illustrating who does what exactly. In 2017 thanks to the launch of "Domination: Earth" we've been able to expand some more and invited @JennyTerritory to take over the marketing aspects of that game, as I just couldn't do everything on my own anymore. So any posts you see on Facebook & Twitter are most likely Jen's. Same as with Flamefrost, our current graphical assets were made by a freelance artist (a different one this time), but we don't have a permanent artist in our team and usually find one whenever we need some new materials. Unfortunately, the reason why I started "Domination: Earth" was that Flamefrost wasn't successful enough as a business product: although I do love that game with passion and would be happy to work on it for many more years it has been deemed to be too "niche", i.e. aimed at a too narrow audience, which led to problems in acquiring new players and keeping them interested; we have invested £££,£££ in advertising and after 2 years of operation the game still continued to generate more debts than income (we haven't recovered most of our investments). Because of that we've shifted our focus to "Domination: Earth" completely, which (thankfully!) is doing a lot better than Flamefrost (that remains a free community-driven & community-maintained game). "Domination: Earth" has achieved 50,000+ downloads in the first 3 months after launch and is now supporting its own and Flamefrost's hardware financially. I'm currently still burning through my personal savings to keep the team together (I am literally the only person in the company who doesn't get paid ), which is why I occasionally engage in fundraising (or just have a 2nd/3rd job, so if I'm inactive online then I'm probably looking for a way to pay my bills again ), but I'm hopeful that this is only temporary and DE's growth in the last few months supports that theory. There are no plans to build new games in the near future as "Domination: Earth" is doing incredibly well and I am completely in love with it (as well as with our community ); my task list is full of great ideas and I believe that the project can & will grow further, while our team expand in the next couple of years (so if you are interested in working with us and have any game-related talents make sure to let me know! ). So that's pretty much it! As always, please do not hesitate to ask questions; I'm always happy to talk and provide you with more accurate information than Discord rumours.

That is impossible. Do you really think I'd rather go to someone else's office daily to build products I have zero emotional investment in? I am juggling a million things though (and doing a bit of fundraising for the project; as you can imagine this is quite important!), so I apologize that there hasn't been an update in a while. There is no date yet, but I am working on several large features in parallel, so whenever it happens it will be fairly exciting!

Hi! I've responded to you by email, but will replicate my response here for everyone's sake: I've reviewed this account manually and believe it to be a genuine victim of a GPS lag (it has been unbanned). However, if your GPS lags are that bad when you enter the game and there are hundreds of kilometers between the initial position and the second update, please let the game focus on your actual position for a few seconds before performing any action. The anti-cheat can distinguish between you using Fake GPS and having a GPS lag, but actions like that are still listed as illegal as it is apparent that you can't capture land & pick up a resource 300km away after that within a couple of seconds. I'll have a think about possible ways to adjust the game (automatic blocking/unblocking of the ability to capture land & pick up resources while your GPS focuses...?) to avoid such situations, as you can probably understand why I just can't allow these actions to be performed even without Fake GPS in play (this is almost equal to me promoting devices with bad GPS chips to allow remote land capture ).

There's no arguing about the need of some sort of a communication system/notifications to join Discord, it is indeed very high up my priority list! I'm still torn between the new alliance system, this (any version of in-game comms) and one other update I can't disclose just yet, but I'm positive that if it won't be the next thing I do it will be the 2nd or 3rd at worst.

You are correct! Do you remember what sequence of actions led into this particular situation, by any chance?

I understand your point completely and will most certainly have a think about what can be done with these ideas of yours. I'll share a little secret, I've promised it so much in the past that the new alliance system has been promoted to join the Top 3 new features that I plan to build (it could very well be the next one, but... No promises just yet :)). I'll definitely try to include something similar to what you're describing!

Hmm! Thanks for letting me know, I will investigate.

Right, took me a while to find what's causing this! But a fix has been released just now; please let me know if the same issue reoccurs (and you're able to capture multiple lands in the exact same spot).

No problem! Ok, it should now be safe to merge your land; all invested Unobtainium into removed structures will be instantly refunded upon merge. Please let me know if that doesn't happen or if there's anything else I can help with.

Thanks for pointing it out, this does sound like an unfair situation indeed! I'll see if I can release a fix today refunding your Unobtainium from any merged structures (otherwise they will indeed be considered as extra base levels, just like from sand walls etc.). Please don't merge these lands until I post again saying that it's done.

Don't worry @Bourgie, I have reviewed your account manually and can confirm that the anti-cheat made a mistake; I've made the appropriate adjustments and released a fix just now, so it shouldn't happen again. Is it hanging on the "Retrieving GPS coordinates..." pop-up? If yes, it could also be an indicator of a bad internet connection! In any case, please try using the "Log out" button from the upper-left menu and log back in again; that does help with some issues! Finally, please make sure that you're using the latest version of the app by going to the Play Store and checking if any updates are available. The server load only affects the delay between the aforementioned "Retrieving GPS coordinates..." message and the map appearing for the first time, as it is waiting to retrieve all lands & objects from the server. However, the actual "blue dot" precision isn't connected to the server in any way and is moved entirely by Google's Location Services (something I don't control, unfortunately ). It is possible that Google released some sort of a bad update if nothing's changed from your end!

Sorry! We're doing our best to get into the "Business as Usual" mode as soon as possible, but right now it's still a bit of a nightmare!

Hi all, Just wanted to let you know that we're currently experiencing some infrastructural issues in the office due to which our internet access has been severely crippled. There probably will be no releases within the next few weeks while we work on sorting this out, but things are planned to get back to normal on the 13th of June. Accordingly, my response times on the forum & via email are also likely to be affected, so if I'm not answering to a particular email or forum thread please don't be offended; I am not ignoring you, just can't see the question. My apologies for inconvenience!

This is enough indeed; none of this is helpful or productive in any way. I think we all got each other's point, let's not continue this conversation as it's turning into a wave of personal insults. Only ideas and responses in favor/against the proposed ideas from this point forward please, or I'll be forced to lock this thread.

Sorry guys, I will investigate; there isn't supposed to be a blank timer in any case

@Republic of America is correct, you have nothing to worry about unless you start abusing it on purpose. An occasional check-in in an inaccurate location is permitted and the anti-cheat knows to ignore them (as long as these are not generated by 3rd party software). But yes, it takes a second or two on average for the location services to pinpoint your location on any device when the app starts, there is nothing I can do to speed it up.

No problem. Yeah, when I said fair I was more referring to the fact that the AI doesn't aim to wipe you out and relentlessly pursue its revenge day and night. But yes, I've been meaning to ramp up its difficulty for high level players... As you know, it's only been reduced to its current level due to a number of complaints and "1 star" reviews claiming that the Ai was too hard. * shrug * Hard to please everyone these days!

There's still the Ai, which is always a fair fight, playing only when you are active (unlike some overly active players), so disabling combat altogether wouldn't be right (nor interesting). The game's possibilities change with all the new features, but identity remains the same; travel & world exploration will always continue to be a number 1 priority, while pvp is a fun extra. But of course, both sides continue to be improved. Back to the original subject: from what I heard so far I get the impression that your current war problem can either be solved by a penalty/restriction on surrendering that applies *only* to the attacking party (i.e. whoever started the conflict) or by synchronizing it with the (new) alliance system, e.g. so that the war actions such as Surrender applied to a group of players at once (i.e. either the entire alliance surrenders or it wins). Accordingly, surrendering to an alliance would be a much more significant defeat (and there will be a leaderboard of losses :)). But of course, this does require more thought and balancing not to create issues for "new" players being bullied by an alliance. There is very little benefit to making invisibility temporary as that essentially forces a player into a potentially unwanted pvp again (which is what I'm trying to avoid), while the truce system allows for some flexibility in your decisions. As for the game population, I wouldn't consider this in any core game mechanics as it's only temporary; we are still growing globally.

@Republic of America I think we're going a bit off-topic with the alliance system discussion. I believe I've promised in a couple of other threads to implement a "chat-less" communications system (i.e. ability to chat using predefined messages like "please talk to me in discord" that will be automatically translated into your language), as well as a more traditional MMO-style "guild" model. Unfortunately though, I really have too few hours in a day, which is why these things aren't done yet (not because I disagree with you). So let's keep this thread related to war issues.

Right, where do I begin! I appreciate all of your input, but I can't help but feel that you're trying to resolve one isolated scenario without considering a bunch of potential side-effects. As far as I understand, this whole idea arose as a result of a war in which a number of high-level players are unable to defeat another player who is abusing the surrender mechanics to fight each of those players selectively. First of all, I have to agree that I'm not entirely happy about the surrender mechanics used that way and it is very likely that I'll be addressing this scenario in one of the alliance updates. But! Please remember that "Domination: Earth" is not "Monopoly" in which to win you have to make all other participants lose all that they've got. This is not a PvP arena and there are other ways of dominating the world (primarily via travel, i.e. establishing more bases, accumulating more lands & resources and having circles of your colour cover the globe :)), which means that if a player doesn't want to fight anymore or engage in PvP at all there has to be a way for them to do that and still continue enjoying the game. I know this is not "realistic", but consider this whole situation from a "business" perspective: if players are getting wiped out *and* penalized for trying to avoid combat (paying for any kind of "underground" mode) they'll quit. I've lost a number of devoted fans who ended up next to a "persistent" neighbour with enough patience to destroy/capture all of their lands in the region by attacking almost 24 hours every day. I spoke to a couple of them personally and know that they loved the game for its motivation to cycle and/or hike, not because of the combat aspects (which they didn't care about at all). So my goal is to accommodate both types of players and provide them with an option to not engage in PvP if they desire to do so. Finally, I'd prefer not to postpone other developments (there are some really exciting features in my list, some of them are planned for June!) in order to implement a really complex system of "paid disappearances" that only helps in one potential war scenario. To sum things up: I hear what you're saying and I will have a think about ways of preventing the "Surrender" abuse (I do hate it whenever anything in the game gets abused) via new features. But it is unlikely that there will be penalties or restrictions for anyone who wishes to escape PvP with a particular player at any point (as if they can't do that using in-game means they'll do it via "Uninstall" ;)).

Yes, I'm not saying that the OS itself is unstable, but it does consist of thousands of system packages & libraries that the 3rd party components depend on and since the OS is that new not all of them got the chance to be updated or made compatible with every single device. For example, if DE and Google Maps both crash it could be a symptom of a location services driver glitching. Or it could be the fact that the Google Play app (used by the apps to connect to Android's internal services such as location) was too old in a development environment that compiled an app, so it doesn't interact with the new features correctly. The first issue is likely to go away as the device manufacturers keep updating their software, the second one simply requires an app to be recompiled with the latest SDKs in place (as, for example, when our last version of DE was released there was no Android P altogether). So the situation is unlikely to improve crash-wise on its own, but I'm definitely going to ask you to "try again" after the next DE release (once you download the update). As I mentioned above, I have obtained an Android P emulator and installed the latest OS SDKs, so after the app is recompiled in a new environment most of these issues are likely to go away on their own. So stay tuned for updates!

Sorry @Republic of America, but I think @Eerienkah is a bit closer to the truth! I do have an Android P emulator and it hasn't experienced any crashes, so if you're saying that even the Google Maps app crashes on your device this means that the beta you're testing lacks certain drivers for your phone or some system libraries are out of date / incompatible with the app's platform. "Domination: Earth" is hybrid app, which essentially means "it's a glorified website running on your phone". It consists of nothing more than JavaScript, HTML and CSS; all of that is fairly lightweight and the only bits that can potentially crash are the native plugins performing the "website rendering" and providing access to camera, location etc. (the ones we didn't write as they're the same for all hybrid apps in the world ). So either the native bits will require updating with the latest Android system libraries / SDK later (although that seems unlikely since the Android P emulator doesn't crash!) or it's the Android P beta itself that is not fully compatible with all mobile devices yet. I appreciate the report though, it's certainly something to watch out for! As soon as I'm on the lookout for a new phone I'll make sure to get one running or compatible with Android P upgrade.

There's indeed too much going on with land trades; @Ruvox has also posted a number of issues in the past that I'm yet to address. However, the intention is to prevent any trades during wars and for attacks to cancel currently pending trade offers, otherwise there are too many weird scenarios to consider. I'll do my best to include these fixes in one of the upcoming updates!

Not a glitch, no! 2 hours is the limit, which is 12 rounds in total.