It has long been announced that GE will be adding levels 6-10. Inno wants to future proof GE so there's a bit of a dilemma. Given how fast power creep has boosted player's abilities if they released GE lv1-10 now we'd be auto battling lv10 by the end of the year. They cannot release levels that are impossible to complete so here is the compromise.
GE lv6 will be released very soon to Beta server. Instead of releasing lv6 as all red fighting and lv 7 as all blue fighting it will just be lv 6 with a mix of red and blue fighting.
We will not see lv8-10 this year.
Lv 6 is supposed to be hard to complete but only moderately difficult for advanced players.
From Dev: "We’ve been giving players potions to make GE easier and now they will have something to use it on.”
Quantum Incursions:
I had thought that QI for EMA was dead. Well, it's alive, it's in a playable state and it's a lot harder than the IA version. Even with more boosts expect to get less progress. All those 3-5% QI boost buildings might be worth placing in your main city at the start of QI. No timetable on when we'll see it but probably not this year.
Space Age Space Hub (SASH) (dear god please change this name)
This age was scheduled for release in the spring of 2025 but we live in a world where investors not game developers have final say and they want a 4th quarter 2024 release.
The age is nowhere near ready. Keep in mind the previous space ages were cookie-cutter/copy paste of previous ages with minor tweaks and art assets. SASH is different. Releasing an unfinished buggy mess is a bad idea. Let's hope sanity wins out on this one.
Hero System now called "Historical Allies"
Scheduled to go to Beta Sept 6 in time for the next QI championship season but it's ready now and could go earlier. We're only going to get a small portion of it while it's being tested so may as well start testing early.
More info on that here.
GbG
The new map using blue stats for fighting has been delayed yet again. It's been ready since November of 2023. Here is the explanation I received as to why. Upon the introduction of GElv5 they made a conscious choice of considering GE complete after lv4 so all quests involving GE would auto complete after 64. The blue stat fighting of lv5 was a bonus with a big reward of the forgotten temple. Well enough time has passed and enough event buildings and great buildings that give blue stat boost have come out and now GE completes with 80.
The problem of introducing a GbG map with all blue fighting is there is no auto-complete mechanism that would allow inno to ease it into the game without shutting out a lot of players who still don't have blue fighting stats in their city. They have given blue stat GbG potions for months now but still feel players are not ready. To me a simple solution would be to have blue sectors in a mixed fighting map but they seem intent on a solid blue fighting map so we're delayed with not timetable for launch even though it's been ready for more than half a year.
Buffing Great Buildings
Power creep has made most GB's obsolete so almost all of them will be getting a buff of some sort. Most will get a boost of what they already give then add an element they didn't give originally. Use the Observatory as an example. It got a big boost by adding blue stat boosts but it also lost support pool when GvG ended.
Some buildings produce "unrefined goods" but as you know once you reach the space ages you no longer use unrefined goods to make current age goods. I would expect to see changes to these GB's near the top of the list.
The problem with updating GB's is they give static bonus. Unlike event buildings that can be scaled by age GB's are static so how do you boost it enough to make it good in Tian and not over-powered in Iron Age? That type of balancing will take a while and we most likely won't see any buff this year.
Changing Event Mechanics
Inno has recognized that they are demanding more and more of your time. With GE, GbG, recurring settlements to get ascending level, QI, 10 events a year and about 25 Rival quests a year that's a lot. People either have or are in danger of just abandoning some systems in order to excel in others. We're all seeing it now right? People just skipping events or not bothering with QI for example.
So some changes have already been implemented. We've gotten the auto-replace troops feature which may be one of the best quality of life changes in this game. Maybe second to being able to add FP to GB without having to add 10 at a time.
We've also seen the timing of settlements and QI change where it makes sense to visit twice a day instead of three times a day.
The other major changes will be seen in events. I was talking to a dev about the St Patrick's day event in particular but this applies to other more time consuming events like the card games and the candy crush mechanic.
Dev: "We don't want players to have to tend to their cities as if it was a nursing child"
Everyone who's played St Patrick's day event can feel that statement right in their bones.
So they're looking at ways to speed these events up to a point where we only have to tend to them 1-3 times a day. One proposal was an option to automate tasks for a small diamond fee.
FoE Hard Mode
This is still at the concept stage which means even if green-lit we won't see it on Beta for 2 years so don't sweat this one too much. So I'll explain the problem and what they may try to do to fix it.
Before GbG changed to remove zero attrition some top-end fighters would only put red attack in their city and not worry about FP or goods because they were farming GbG. When the new GbG came out top fighters were maxing about 10k fights a season as compared to 20-30k per season. So what has happened is players have prioritized FP and goods production in their city once their fighting abilities were sufficient.
So now we have players with hybrid cities that can produce a lot of FP, goods and fight both red and blue at a high level. So how do you challenge these players?
Well the idea was floated to introduce a hard mode. How would this work? Well take a game feature like GE. A player could at the start of GE be given an option of regular or hard mode. The hard mode would be a lot harder but also provide much better prizes. What was talked about was creating a challenge so hard that a player would have to shed everything in their city that didn't give attack boost to meet this challenge. Then if they beat the challenge they are rewarded with a forgotten temple like building that more than compensates for the loss of FP and goods from city collection. How do you make the reward worth the risk? I see all kinds of problems with this but we'll see. I was also against using blue stats for GE and I was wrong about that. It's worked out great.