Hello players!
We wanted to take some time to share with you some of the upcoming plans from our internal roadmap for 2021. This is something we've done in the past, but we'd love to start doing this more consistently, so we can give some early insights into what we want to achieve, and hopefully use your feedback to shape the changes.
Without further ado, lets take a look at some of what we want to get done this year!
Shortening of events
Whilst not technically a new feature, we wanted to share with you our plans for 2021 and beyond in relation to events.
First and foremost, lets get talk about the elephant in the room. At the moment, we have no plans to add new events to Grepolis in 2021. But as you know we have plenty of already existing events, even some we've not seen for quite some time, and we want to be able to show more of them to you in 2021.
What we will be doing is making changes to the event calendar overall, specifically, by shortening event durations for some events across the year. The reason for this is twofold, really. The first reason is to keep events overall engaging and fun for players to participate in. We feel that some of our events go on a bit too long, and we notice in our analysis of these events that participation drops off towards the end of events. The second reason is that it allows us to reorganize our event calendar to bring you the events which are most liked by the community which we've previously omitted from the calendar because we couldn't fit them in the year! Overall, we won't won't increase the number of event days during the year (or at least not significantly) and only increase the variety.
Ares
Ares is, as many of you have figured out, the next god to be added to our pantheon of deities. We're not ready to give you too many details of his additions, but he is just around the corner for his beta release! Want to know more? Keep an eye on our Beta forums, then, as we'll release him there first!
Check out the artwork for his awesome portrait, units, and spells!
Simulator overhaul
The simulator is something we've not really improved over the years, as we've added, among other things, new spells into the mix. As you'll all know, this tool is an incredibly useful one, helping you as players to predict how a battle will go, but it is missing some key elements of features we've added over the years. When we've considered improving the simulator in the past, we've always wanted to stick to a 1 window solution, which didn't have scroll bars, and was visually appealing.
As time has gone on, its become clear that we can't really achieve this with the sheer amount of different options we've added to attacks. This sounds bad, but is actually great, because it forces us to accept that scrollbars are unavoidable in this window, and actually gives us the chance to overhaul the simulator entirely, allowing players to simulate based on every power available in our game.
The new and improved simulator will add options to buff commands with everything from:
- Olympus temple buffs
- Regular powers such as god spells
- Special spells such as Divine Battle Strategy and Increased Light Ship attack
- Event specific spells such as community goal spells from Grepolympia
- Upgradable powers like Ares' Rage and Soteria's Shrine
Endgame rebalancing
With the addition of Olympus to our roster of endgames and game modes, we wanted to spend some time and give some love to our other endgames. In 2021, we will revisit and improve the balancing of the World Wonders endgame. We're not ready yet to reveal too much details on this plan, and only want to mention it is on our minds as something we'd like to make some balancing changes to. We have a direction we want to head in, but we'll rely on your input at the various stages of the development to let us know what you think about the changes. Additionally, we will also make some balancing changes to Olympus itself, as we've now had some time to reflect on the first Olympus worlds which were run during 2020.
Artifacts changes
Speaking of endgames, in 2021, we want to overhaul the artifacts system. Artifacts are the items won by alliances who win a world on any of the three endgame types. These items are valuable, but we've noticed that they don't encourage players to try hard to win them. What we've observed is a lot of the time an alliance is very clearly going to win a world, and as such, other alliances don't feel engaged to try and win second or third place in a world. We want to expand the artifacts system to be a system which scales with the more worlds you win, as well as making it so not only first place on a world is rewarded for their progress towards the endgame. We hope this will encourage individuals to strive towards helping their alliance to win a world, but not make it so only first place wins a reward for their contributions. But don't worry, we're already keeping in mind players who already won worlds, and we want to make sure the changes are valuable also for those players.
Furthermore, we want to uncouple specific artifacts from their respective endgame modes. This means players who don't want to play, for example, a Domination world, can have a chance to earn themselves additional warehouse space via Athena's Cornucopia on a different endgame. We'll also add some new artifacts not specifically linked to an endgame type to add variety to them, and pave the way for future additions, as well as give even more options to world settings for upcoming worlds.
Check out the artwork for these additional artifacts, more details to come!
Community Requests
One other big focus we want to put on our work in 2021 is community requests. We want to invest time this year into looking into the quality of life improvements that will make your game better, easier to use, and more convenient to interact with. We have a backlog of ideas which have been suggested over the last few years (in fact, the simulator overhaul comes directly from this, as do the new gods), and we will also be diving into specific feedback you've shared over the years regarding new features and events we've added. We really want to reduce the number of actions you need to do which don't add value to your gameplay experience. So, make sure you have a think about what changes you'd like to see, and maybe start discussions here on your forums! We want to work together to make Grepolis better, and we need your help to do so.
Of course, it's important to understand that these are our plans, but we can't guarantee all of what we discuss will be implemented this year, or at all. As you know, things change as the year progresses. We are an agile team, and the features which are good for the community are our priority, but sometimes our priorities have to shift based on various factors as we make our way into 2021. We hope to achieve everything, and more, but we just want to make sure we don't oversell expectations either.
We hope this preview of the next few months is exciting, and we're looking forward to hearing your feedback in the dedicated thread here.
Kind regards,
Your Grepolis Team