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Some long time ago I've noticed that Spain stats bubble on the map contained some crappy data (don't remember exactly, but I think the way the data was displayed made an impression on me that this might be due to perhaps no players/activity in spain, perhaps some zeroes or n/a, really don't remember). Anyways, yesterday I've checked Spain again and this time, while data is there, there is no button to access leaderboards

This is a highly reproducible procedure for me (like 80-90% times): I click "Track" on FoT Map defaults to wide zoom with base circles visible, keeps loading (buttons invisible) Buttons appear, but tracking does not commence (ie. FoT lands outside my immediate location are not visible) I click "Track" again Map defaults to same wide zoom, but base circles disappear (bases are visible though), keeps loading Buttons appear, FoT lands appear, but my base circles are still invisible After I zoom below base circle draw level and then out, base circles reappear. This happens both with FoT and real players.

Hi, ayone having deeper informations about Discord DE server status please share them with us. @ValarMorghulis? SOLVED: Old server gone. New one here: https://discord.gg/G4k3hW4 Details here:

This came with new Android (9.0). Samsung is calling it OneUI, a set of changes to Adroids defaults. Was released in public beta along 8.0 and is now being gradually deployed to high-end phones along the 9.0 update.

Currently, resource production and collection require player to manually browse through each base and click the button once for each base. This is a real pain, as it requires 2N clicks and consequently generates 2N quite slow server requests, also leading to many weird behaviors (and switching bases left/right is also sketchy when done along resource collection). Would it be possible to implement a button to trigger selected action at once on all buildings of the same type? Same problem exists with replenishing soldiers, but if possible, I'd rather suggest a "Max out" button on each base header (if base has less than max soldiers) and one global (max out all).

Samsung's recently introduced One UI slightly revamped the way Android displays message boxes - these are now displayed on the bottom of the screen, along the philosophy to make everything accessible with one hand on large-screen devices. This kind of conflicts with notifications that are popped by DE along message boxes, because both appear in the same place, making message box content unreadable (check screen below). This will be more and more an issue as Samsung currently introduces One UI along Android Pie upgrade to existing devices.

What do you mean by "event"?

@Ruvox I was trying to avoid turning the discussion against players that use the "wife swapping" technique, pardon the pun, but contrary to my desire, my previous post forced the issue to begin appearing along some Discord conversations. Thus, you may be right with putting the issue up for discussion until it is still early and the rift among players is still not wide As for my opinion: 1. I do support the anti-couch measures. For two main reasons: firstly, the game should be about travel and then also, with couch-expansion too easy, the game becomes unplayable for fresh players. 2. But I also think that maintaining some couch-enabled features is important in the long run. Unless the game mechanics drastically change (abandoning the growing lands feature), the gameplay tends to deteriorate with time, as you literally have less and less to do, unless you wish to waste some gas, travel to some really uninteresting locations and, well, couch-expand from your car at best. To be clear, under "couch-enabled" I think of: primarily, the ablility to play around your neighbourhood and town, with your actions having some real meaning despite the lv1000 land hovering above the player, to some extend, as explained before, the true couch play, that still does keep you in the game, but does not affect the game environment significantly. Without couch play, the game will quickly turn from every-day amusement, through perhaps something like "will play when travelling outside the city..." up to "...unless I forget playing while on travel". And then yet another player abandons the game. In light of this: 3. I would support banning or severely limiting land swap abuse, intramaritial or otherwise, but only if a decent solution to playing inside one's own "backyard" is provided. @Mr. D I sincerely think there might be a misjudgement in the interpretation of the statistics. I would attribute the big peak and following fall that you describe to following factors: the game attained significantly higher internet media interest than does today, mostly because it was something fresh back then and ceased to be fresh with time, the media-influenced gamers influx often evaporates strongly over time, as most of contemporary players get bored quickly with anything (save for breathing, perhaps), the game is seriously simplistic in terms of graphic, branding etc., making it less atractive visually and thus discouraging many players. the game features regarding welcoming new players and explaining the gameplay are virtually nonexistent; when I was beginning, the tutorial implemented was hard to find and completely unhelpful, also the game, perhaps along the lines of No Man's Sky, offers no narrative to lead the player along and gives player no clear aim; this tends to push many players away; in virtually all areas the players feel completely lonely, and this is significantly worsened by the lack of ingame communications. Simplifying the gameplay works for some specific games, but there are lots of other games that are really complicated and yet popular, if only to call upon the Civilization you yourself named. The games which fail are the games that feel overly complicated, but this is where UI/UX planning most often fails, not the game idea itself. I'm not arguing here that the feature I suggested is technically proper in UX terms. But I feel the idea behind points in the right direction. Allowing the players to benefit from their travels and to convert local production into external growth (within previously visited areas) does reduce the effects of local overexpansion, does provide incentive for lategamers and it will, I believe, reduce that complete loneliness the fresh players feel, because of the higher chance of some other gamers presence in their area. Allowing the lategamers to play in remote lands will densify the game environment, and then I feel all you need is just a proper balancing, promoting "davids" in ther local area against remote, imperial "goliaths", making it a harder to overexpanded players to maintain their superiority over small, distanced players, thus making fresh players more engaged. And I feel we, as current players, want to travel and expand, but also want to have a decent reason to do it, and we want to compete. The travel-based expansion is fun in itself, but offers little reward afterwards. You have few lands abroad, you can fight more FoT and find more players to talk to via Discord, but other than some rare situations that allow for some growth or action, these visited lands are as good as a numb limb. As for simplification, If you turn to simplify the game and turn away from Civilization-style gameplay, it will become just a differently painted conglomerate of Strava and GPS-oriented social media, social-part excluded. I believe that the only right direction is the Civ one, and if followed by proper UX softening whatever complicated mechanisms the game hides in the trunk, and new gameplay possibilities that encourage interaction, then with introduction of UI 2.0 it has a huge chance to repopulate and keep running well

I wouldn't like this idea to be just about coach upgrades. There are still many places we visit every day that are outside the 750m range, and it still sounds way funnier than doing 15km outside a city to some middle of nowhere field, with nothing else to do but waiting. Think of it as a same effort that was fun to commit to where you were growing your land in lv150+ range. It was still rather rapid and enjoyable

In terms of limiting what has been called as "couch expanding", I think the outlined idea leaves quite a lot of space for additional restrictions. To think of few examples: limiting the distance between SE structure and land center (eg. 750m), this way even if you were to plan the land in such a way, that a future SE structure lies within a couch range, then you would not be able to couch-upgrade it to the required level in the first place, limiting the settlement action to apply only to the lands originally founded by you (ie. you could not settle the lands that have been traded to you, but you could still buy such lands and merge them with yours), adding additional resource cost to trigger the settlement action, adding the need to sacrifice home land levels - such that the home land will shrink equally to the growth of the remote land - this will be quite an emotionally wrecking cost for some but... the shrinked home land will be just get a little bit more easy and joyful to expand again! The last one seems quite interesting, it sounds a bit as in Civilization games, where training settlers reduces the size of the home city

Yeah, and we have once found a popular game, some clicker, actually digging ETH on the player's phone. And the game did it, like, for months

Thinking again about providing players with any decent incentive to keep clicking while in school/work, and also about somehow easing growth for lategamers and keeping them in game. Let's say we could implement an additional, special utility structure. I will call it "Settlers Expedition" (SE), and describe it's features as follows: SE will behave as any other utility structure. Grow 1lv per capture up to lv1000. SE has special feature, unlocking at lv100, called "Send Settlers Expedition": upon activating this feature, you may select any land that is within any remote* base radius (ie. other than the one that is linked to the land the US is built in), upon activating this feature, SE is discarded (destroyed) the selected land gains levels equal to the SE level, divided by 10 and rounded bottom; this makes it minimum 10 levels and maximum 100 levels surplus levels (over lv100) should still count, given the amount of effort one needs to build up SE, but should still require additional resources to complete (as in merging lv100+ base with other bases), land level gain should increase the remote base level points the same way as local upgrade would do (or perhaps with some modifier, if it would otherwise sound too powerful). Such feature will offer players additional possibilities and game choices, especially to those players that are otherwise covered under their lv1000-or-so home land: sufficiently grown players would be able to expand remotely, yet still only within areas that they have previously visited, players could spend the SE right away or could store them for emergencies, like when being attacked over remote territories, since this would allow several offensive options, like: growing the land that is adjacent to enemy lands, dealing damage, growing the land further by takeover of intersecting enemy lands and merging them into own, growing base capacity and thus the amount of soldiers that could defend the remote territories; players would have a larger variety of choices when settling remote bases: they could, as they used to, build lands in constellations that allow them to merge them with highly evolved buildings, and thus rapidly upgrade remote bases (focus on expansion), they also could focus on building single strong bases and build up SE to spend on growing their main land in their home base, that is otherwise really hard to grow (focus on home strengthening), such players would be encouraged to settle and travel to remote bases to grow their own, and given the statistical distances, it will much more likely be some interesting city, not dangling in a middle-of-nowhere for several hours on the edge of their current land , remote trading players would have an additional incentive to trade, as this will give them a better possibility to merge the traded lands in future and also to have some gain over remote base lv. This feature could also benefit from the one discussed before, especially if the radius of remote utility structure were adjusted enough to allow for a maximum of 2-3 structures being grown in parallel. This is by far a wild idea and I will off course fully understand if it gets discarded especially since it would likely require quite a lot of UI improvements (to make remote land selection easy enough). ---- *) This is to still encourage players to move - they will not be able to indefinitely grow their base while sitting home.

Never published anything via Play Store, so I've got a question: are they, well, negotiable? Explaining them the reason behind this (GPS game) and showing user requests should make them more understanding. Especially since, for example, Niantic games offer such feature and are, well, enormous juice suckers

There are several Android applications that are able to prevent the screen shutdown and lockdown. Thus, I understand, there must be an API that allows application to temporarily suspend this. Would it be possible to implement such feature (even if opt-in) to prevent phones going dark after few seconds of inactivity? I understand that there are several workarounds. I personally use the "don't lock while on external power" developer option. But if a simple and native option exists, it'd still be easier and also more available to less-proficient Android users.

One of the daily chores of many DE players is searching for nearby FoT or enemy players. Currently, the task can be performed only via a combination of player tracking and slow, manual map browsing, plus perhaps map filtering on slower devices to make things faster (had a few weeks on some old Galaxy A5 and it was pain). I wonder, if it would be possible, perhaps within 2.0 UI schedule, to include a feature that would serve as a reconnaissance report. My first idea of such feature was to enhance the current base list screen with following elements: an indicator that would display the number of FoT lands and enemy lands in range of the specific base, upon a click, an expanded view showing the list of FoT lands and enemy lands in range, with a button for "attack" action and perhaps also "offer purchase" action This way we could quickly browse through and strike enemy FoT encampments, as well as monitor enemy activity without spending much time on scrolling through the map.

1. Base renaming button Currently, the only way to rename a base would be (I presume) to find on the map the land corresponding to the base and press the rename button there. It would improve visibility, if an additional button pointing to rename options was placed in the base list window. 2. Name restore option This might be an issue that does not affect many people, but during the period of location data provider switchover, I've made several bases which received names based directly on land names, and those name are still highly incomprehensible, like "cafe UCEN" or "Lakeside Fire Department". Since the rename feature was introduced, I could off course "purchase" an option to rename the name to the default value, but then... It's weird to pay for just restoring the "default" free name. This made me to think: would it be possible, regarding bases only (!) to provide a free option to "restore" the name of the base to either a "default" name (the one provided by current algorithm) or even better, one of the choice of "default"/"free" names that are based upon the geolocation data (like "City", "Region" etc., whatever the service provides). This way, the "premium" feature would only relate to the fully customized name, while "regional" name would remain a free option.

@Ruvox

@Eerienkah He obviously meant, that the base ranges DO intersect, but the base centers themselves are not within range of each other

It seems that the game did not increase the raising upgrade cost of the base lv and you were awarded with 44 levels for 15 base points each. 44×15=660

(tl;dr: a message box to confirm land merging action would be lovely) One annoying thing I've noticed on my latest trip: In current game conditions, when travelling to remote locations, there is a useful scheme to build several lands, fill them up with structures and only then merge them to maximize the base level growth time-effectively. This works positively both for players, who are able to have more fun while travelling, and for game economy, as it forms a heavy, but positive resource sink, especially for more advanced gamers. This scheme works both during trip (while you have resources) and after trip (when you manage to stage several lands in correct positions for future merger once resources are regained and structures built). The problem is that staging such setups is really hard due to the way the merging tool behaves: when lands are nearby, there is no way to tell if they are mergable (close enough) or not, when you click "merge", it's just either working or not when you try to set new land really close, it's really easy to upgrade existing land by mistake (eg. by sudden GPS drift...), thus merging it with other already staged satellites and ruining the whole setup. Since merge operation is not really that common action, I think it wouldn't suffer if an additional confirm questions was added here, or at least an opt-in for such message, configurable in the profile options.

Yup, that's it, thanks

How does that math work against the information popup, that claims the shared resources are "2x"? Like, it wouldn't change the outcome in the scenario above, but does that 2x modifier still come into play, eg. against the shared 50%?

Yeah, as far as I'd love to be outside 24/7, most of players do have some obligations that keep us pinned to a single place for most of the day. The thing that most location-based games lack is taking the duller parts of our days into account and allowing some part of gameplay to work while you're stuck in school, home chores or boring work meetings @Mr. D Thanks for your fast response, as always

Also, it's completely not fun having to deally other players just because they are less active. I think I'll have to put some plans and decisions on hold until this thing gets either resolved or settled.

The new update drastically diminished my resource gain: firstly, sharing all my resources equally leaves me a really low share due to the number of allies and the fact, that I felt to be the more active player, thus receiving far less than I share (excluding Ruvox perhaps), secondly, separating capture action from resource grab action removed one of the important source of income I had: using capture action on utility structures performed a resource grab with the range matching the parent land radius, thus allowing me to gain resources continuously when sitting within the main lands/locations. I think this new update, at least in terms of resource sharing, will have a negative influence on gameplay. It will deincentify players from allying or being active in resource collection, promoting a more parasitic approach instead, and also make large alliances unattractive. I'd like to propose a fix that might bring back the balance: upon each resource grab, split resources 80:20%, share 20% of resources with all allies, regardless of distance, share 80% of resources with local allies only (the previous range limit), apply perks after sharing, not before. This will still allow you to share resources with all your allies, but in the same time will diminish the negative effects.