Hello everyone, we’d like to lay out our plan for some of the larger changes we have coming up on CivRealms over the next weeks/months. These are not set in stone, these are big picture directions for the short to medium future:

1) The first one is NOT a change but a reminder: No restarts. We promised no restarts, and we meant… no restarts. Not “No restarts (hahaha wink wink nudge nudge at least until it becomes convenient lol).” Actually no restarts. Even if we were to drop to zero players for a long time, we might at most take a break before coming back with the same maps, the same builds, and a bunch of new content. As is, though, we have more than enough players to stay open while working on new gameplay content. Either way, we will not be wiping your existing builds and investments.

2) Increasing content for more different playstyles at once with “Security Zones”: The civ genre is fractured and has been historically for a long time, with some servers appealing far more to hardcore pvpers, others appealing to peaceful builders, and everything in between. We want more of these groups to be able to coexist, but without any one group being able to easily dominate all of the economy or power structure of the server.

To do, we will be introducing “security zones” with different game rules and mechanics, ranging from high levels of protection and very high difficulty of raiding and griefing all the way down to something much closer to anarchy factions, with traditional pvp, pots, pearls, no RNG, no autopot, no restrictions to obby bombing, etc. These rules and mechanics will change by shard, taking inspiration from “security zones” in Eve Online, the wilderness concept in Runescape, or similar setups in many other MMOs out there.

Realms’ current mechanics and rules will roughly represent a “medium security” level in the future. There will be shards that then have even more protections than now, and ones that have much lower protections than now, in both directions.

3) Economy expansion and stimulation: People have amassed large stockpiles of most goods, building materials are cheap, good armor is cheap, and so on. The economy needs further goals and space to expand into, and stockpiles need addressing.

We will do this by adding higher tier(s) of armor, weapons, and tools. New higher tiers of gear will wreck face when pitted against previous top tier gear, and will be built using various brand new resources that currently have zero stockpiles (because they don’t exist yet). This will also all come after the announced changes to botting kick in, so bots will never contribute to stockpiling of these new resources going forward.

We also plan to double down on our trend of spreading resources over distances on the map by spreading out key new resources between whole shards and security zones as well. In order to make higher tiers of equipment, you will need to maintain a resource gathering presence in multiple different security zones and thus succeed in multiple different playstyles (or trade with others who do).

4) Newfriend Retention: Newfriends have a lot of barriers right now if they aren’t tutored directly by oldfriends. We will improve this by:

• Creating a lobby and tutorial system,

• Removing many of the needlessly alienating features for newfriends like not being able to punch trees, or mining feeling like digging in lag,

• Freeing up more early recipes to being possible to make on crafting benches not just in factories,

• Opening up more land to build (see already-announced bastion decay features),

• And more.

5) Experimenting more with monetization. We will be focusing on aesthetics types of monetization, not subscription routes.

These are big picture changes planned, not the only things we are working on. This is still alongside normal bug fixes, tweaks to existing mechanics, and many minor features like auto muting for extreme chat slurs, soft-culling snitches, or convenience factories, for examples.

Thank you and please make use of our discord for any feedback, ideas, or questions you have. Have a great week!

-The admins