Alliance Improvements

Today's update adds the Alliance Levy system, as well as other alliance features we plan to implement in the future. It has been almost two years since we added alliances as a test feature, but until now their functionality has pretty much remained the same.

Alliance Levy

In our recent update we introduced resource limits. This was implemented to prevent players from receiving too many free resources from other players, and to prevent some players from taking advantage of multiple accounts. However, sending resources for free was heavily used between alliance members to help recover from serious attacks, for retraining armies, etc. This is where the new Alliance Levy features come into place.

So what exactly is Alliance Levy?

Alliance Levy allows all alliance members to deliver resources to another member. It is a feature of the alliance Treasurer which can be used in the following way:

• The Treasurer can announce a town of an alliance member as the levy recepient
• The levy size varies from 50% to 200% of hourly income. More developed players will have to pay a larger amount, as it depends on hourly income and not a fixed amount.
• The levy can be announced at any time and as often as the Treasurer wants, although there is a time-out period before you can place a levy again. The time-out depends on the previous levy size (it will vary from 12 to 48 hours).
• When the levy is announced, a new button in the marketplace panel now allows people to send the levy more conveniently. You may choose to send resources regularly, and it will be counted as well.
• A Levy can be paid in any type of resource that has been researched by the recipient player.
• It is up to recipient to arrange enough storage to receive all of the incoming traders carrying the levy, or to spend it on time. Resources which fail to be delivered because of storage limit will still be counted as a paid levy.
• The Treasurer will be able to see the progress of levy deliveries. He or she will see which alliance members paid, and how much, so it will be easy to track who is paying and who is not. It is up to alliance Leaders to take action based on that information.
• The alliance levy resource limits go beyond the resource gratis limits.
• New alliance members who enter the alliance after a levy is announced are not required to pay the levy.
• It is possible to cancel a levy, although the time-out feature will still be in effect, and must expire before you will be able to announce one again.

Since the levy feature allows alliances to manage their resources in a pretty convenient way, the resource gratis limit has been reduced from 100% to 30% of daily income. This will possibly prevent players from taking unfair advantage without sacrificing important gameplay possibilities - such as redistributing resources within their alliance.

This is only the first of the three alliance features we are planning to implement. The others are Commander abilities - which includes the following two items:

1. Ability to move the troops between alliance members to reinforce each other promptly, along with the ability to see all the marching troops and incoming attacks.
2. Ability to arrange simultaneous attacks via a simple and straight-forward mechanism. This is currently used by experienced players manually - which is tricky to pull off. It will be easier when we implement it in the future.

Let us know what you think about these new alliance features: Levy feature of the Treasurer from current update and new planned features of the Commander.