Today we added a new unit to the game called Militia. This unit is available right from the start in the Military Base in Industrial Age and is a basic melee unit which does not require sulphur.

This way players who don't have sulphur will be able to train some military units in Industrial Age, and not just Engineers.

In other news - we have launched a contest which allows you to win some Enkord Cash, so check it out.

Today we added the five remaining anomalies - so from now on you can complete the anomaly-related quests. You will be able to find maps that reveal the locations of those anomalies in chests and inside your towns.

These are the five new anomalies added today:

• Mire Anomaly
• Climate Anomaly
• Luminous Anomaly
• Lava Anomaly
• Deadland Anomaly

We also added another important thing - a detailed world map that allows you to view the entire continent in a larger and more convenient way. If the revealed map is not too big, it will also display icons of towns, resources, and quest locations.

Today we have added the long-awaited features of joint attacks of multiple armies. Most skilled players were able to perform it anyway due to some clock syncing, but it cannot be done by everyone else easily.

In this update there are two different joint attacks:

1. Joint attack from multiple towns of yours - you can send armies from multiple towns to hit the target at the same time. This could be useful when you send land troops from one town and ships from another. There is a chain icon added on the send army screen. The faster army in this case will depart later to match slower army.
2. Joint attack of multiple players - this way the slowest player or the one who is furthest away from the target launches the attack and shares reference to this attack with others. The others can join in with a single click and the army will match the initiating player in time.

Hopefully the addition will not only allow experienced players to perfrom joint attacks easier, but will also introduce less experienced players to them as well.

Let us know what you think about this new feature.

We have also cleaned up the report tab a little bit, adding "Important" tab which leaves out the non-essential events and allows you to focus on important stuff.

Finally - We have redesigned the tutorial and improved it for both new and veteran players. There are also numerous other changes accumulated in this update. So read on.

Redesigned Tutorial

We moved advisors in the bottom right corner so it now allows you to make the most of hints on demand and not so much "in your face". Gromus will only nag at crucial times and the rest can be learned only if you need it. The quest panel was redesigned as well to give clear and straightforward goals, so most of the Gromus popups are no longer necessary. Let us know how you like the new tutorial - if it is in the right direction. The next step will be to change the hints from other advisors in this way (which means eventually Zweistein won't nag about science, etc.)

For existing heroes, Bulat and Zweistein duplicates will appear in dwelling, but for new heroes it should now be fixed.

Redesigned World Map Exploration

This has been in our to-do list for over two years, but was so complex that we managed to implement it only now. When sending explorers you are now able to select the fog bit and the shape in any form - and it can send all explorers from all of your towns in one go. It also shows cells that will be explored by other explorers if you had sent them earlier.

Politics Changes

To ease up politics changes a little bit, the Chaos length is reduced from 48 hours to 24 hours. Republics has also been tweaked. First of all, the bonus was fixed. It was only +50% to resources for first town, while it should be +100%. It is correct now. The culture penalty for Republics is reduced from 50% to 25%, so now it will be a bit easier.

Gem Piles

Rage - this new feature was added to the game in the recent update. Rage indicates how aggressive a particular player has been recently toward other players.

So what does this mean exactly? It means that when some player does destructive damage to another player, his rage meter goes up and this is visible to everyone else looking at the player's towns. This can serve as a warning to other players to beware - or actually an introduction to attack, because attacking an enraged player earns you Colorado Stripes! Those stripes are essential for the War Victory. The more enraged a target player is, the more stripes you can earn! This does not cancel the fact that you can also earn stripes from players of a higher age than you.

That being said, attacking a highly enraged player which is also at an age above you will allow you to earn the maximum amount of stripes!

The Onslaught which targets enraged or higher-age players has changed to Heroes Onslaught and has a different icon for simplified identification.

Today we launched the Alpha Test Stage 7. This new version of the game is focused on story and lore improvements. There are a lot of changes, so read more for details.

Karfaree

It is hard to believe - but it has been over two years since we updated the main story part of the game - when Keepers Village and Ruins of New Kyiv were added during Alpha 3. We had plans to release Karfaree shortly afterwards, but eventually it resembled that Guns'n Roses album which was promised and delayed over and over, but eventually delivered, just like we deliver Karfaree right now!

This is a large quest location unlike any other. It has way more quests, characters, non-liner bits and interactivity than any other location in the game. Actually, in terms of interactive content, it is larger than all story quest locations combined (I am talking about Opposition Hideout, Keepers Village, and Ruins of New Kyiv together).

Ok, I will not take away the enjoyment of exploring it yourself, but will mention the key points of Karfaree:

• The story moves forward - you will meet the mysterious Jester in person.
• The design of the location is multi-layered - you will be returning here over and over because of other quests or something new that has appeared in the city.
• Unprecedented non-linearity - in most cases there are multiple ways to achieve your goal. You will have to play it at least 10 times with different heroes in order to see all of the branches in quests and conversations.
• Two dozen new characters, mostly new, but some you have already met before.
• A dozen new quests in Karfaree alone, not to mention other quests that now can be completed in Karfaree (i.e. Caves of Fear and Doubt) or quests that are influenced by, or have alternative solutions, because of Karfaree (i.e. Impostor Hero).
• The general theme of the game shifts to be more controversal, ironic, and adult. No longer we are pretending this is kids-friendly game.
• You can take part in Colosseum fights!
• You can take part in the Opera play!
• You can be jailed, have people fall in love with you, report a murderer or become one... numerous possiblities are waiting for you out there.

When you have played through it, please complete the survey:

All Enkord Cash spent from the 20th of October, 2016 until the wipe will be returned at Alpha 7 launch, regardless of when the launch actually happens.

So far we do not have an exact date for Alpha 7 deployment, but it is getting closer and closer. So we would like to encourage players to be more active and have more fun with this refund.

The major milestone of Alpha 7 will be Karfaree and progression of the story. Currently, Karfaree is bigger than Herald's Home, Opposition Hideout, Keepers Village and Ruins of New Kyiv combined in terms of interactivity and unique content. It is also quite non-linear. In order to experience all possible outcomes and branches in quests and conversations you may need to play it a dozen times.

Today we are celebrating the 3rd Birthday of Totem Tribe II: Jotun. It has been exactly 3 years since we launched the ALPHA 1 version of the game to the general public and now we are approaching ALPHA 7. Let's look back  and reminisce about things that happened during the last year.

We have had similar threads for earlier Birthdays, so you can browse them here: 1st Birthday, 2nd Birthday.

So - what were the major milestones of the past year?

• Travelling Characters were added. They added some life to your stale towns. Some of them were trivial, while others were deep and even had large quests (think Necromancer). We are going to add more unexpected events to your towns in the future.
• ALPHA 6 was launched on the 23rd of March 2016. This was the biggest event of the last year and featured loads of new content. Industrial Age was introduced along with all those new units and buildings, and a pack of quest locations such as monster dens, a whole new desert climate, Tesla minigame and many more. You can review the news of alpha 6 launch here.
• Ongoing interface changes. This year we finally found time to improve game interface and to make it more convenient and less buggy and laggy. New minimap with icons, new build menu and upgrade screens were highly regarded by players and today we are also adding some more eye-candy to the interface. You can compare how game interface looked back in 2012 at our facebook page. In the future we also plan to redesign how advisors work, so all those annoying Zweistein popups will go away.
• Random Dungeons were evolutionary improvement over Random Caves , which were introduced during A4. The addition is 9 randomly generated dungeons which are different for each hero.
• Numerous balancing updates can be easily overlooked. They are those minor bits that might be hard to notice at first glance, but shape the game's fundamentals and make it fun to play. I am talking about things like Tavern building, prolonged beginners' protection which smoothed out the early gaming for newbies, destruction balancing which made it more reasonable, alliance balancing, improved movement speed of all units which made the game more fun, and finally - the most recent easier recovery from destruction. By the way, in today's update we have increased timers for easier recovery x2.
• Other updates - there have been dozens of smaller updates throughout the year and if you are really curious, you can find the list of all changes for the past 12 months in our update log.

Thanks to your support we were able to make it through another year, and closer to our ultimate vision of how Totem Tribe II should be. Yes, it may look like the game still needs a lot of work, and it's true, but we will do our best to make sure you have fun while we are slowly moving toward the full version release.

To celebrate today's Totem Tribe II: Jotun birthday, everyone receives gifts in the form of a Supporter's Key, Truce Proclamation, non-expirable Thank You Package, and 3 Lucky Coins.

There has been a lot of destruction lately and some players have suffered quite a bit. Therefore we have decided to make it easier to recover from it.

If some buildings were destroyed (completely or partially)  there is now a timer on such buildings which gives you a chance to rebuild cheaper and  faster. If you order the building upgrade until the timer runs out, today's update allows it to take 2x less time and resources to upgrade such buildings.

Let us know how if you were the one who suffered from destruction and tell is if it helps or not.

Recent balancing tweaks which involved Tavern nerf and awareness slowdowns (snails) impacted the overall game dynamics, especially things related to attacks. A lot of people complained about it so we have decided to try something.

Today's experimental update increases all world map unit speed, both reinforcements and attacks. This also involves exploration and traders speed.

• Land and aerial unit speed is increased by x2.
• Naval unit speed is increased too but not as much, something around x1.5
• Awareness effects rebalanced so they provide more in earlier ages and less in later ages
• Snail effect a little bit bigger

Keep in mind that this is an experimental feature to see how it will influence attacks and defense and overall game dynamics. It is not guaranteed to last forever and may be removed in future updates partially or completely. The final decision depends on player feedback - so post it in the comments below.

In other news: Karfaree is coming along, still planned for Alpha 7 launch. You can see the opera screenshot from corresponding Karfaree quest.

After we released random caves I had a lot of ideas for improvement which required re-evaluation of the concept. The dungeons we present today implement these revised ideas. Initially, we wanted to release them with Alpha 6 launch, but decided to postpone it and focus on monser dens instead. We have been working on these dungeons on and off for about half a year. They are now ready for the prime time.

So what exactly are these dungeons?

Dungeons are a number of quest locations scattered around the world map that can be found in different ways - just like caves and monster dens. Some of the dungeons can be found just by uncovering the world map with explorers, while others can be located when you find the appropriate map items in your towns or in the chests. The dungeons are not related to the storyline. There is only one quest associated with them and that is optional - but it is quite fun and rewarding if you complete it.

Randomness

Just like caves (and unlike monster dens), dungeons have different length and difficulty. But most importantly the dungeons are different for different players and heroes. Each player playing the same dungeon will experience different things - one player might be gathering items and another might be fighting monsters. There may be similar parts in different dungeons, but the bigger the dungeon, the less likely you will find exactly the same one again. Also unlike caves, dungeons are not as linear and may have different branches.

What's in them?

A lot of stuff. Despite not having "legit" quests due to their randomized nature, you will find lots of trademark Totem Tribe items . These dungeons were made specifically for the single-player type of players who have beaten the story locations, caves, and dens and are craving for more. However, if you are more into multiplayer stuff, don't dismiss these caves too quickly! There are plently of things in them, including rarer items like Blueprints and Figurines of Enlightment, so you have to give them a shot.

Things that can be found in the random caves:

• Monsters - Ghosts, Skeletons, Zombies, Flying Coffins, Spiders, Worms, Muscards.
• Items - plenty of useful items including Blueprints and Figurines of Enlightment, although don't expect them to be found easily ;))
• Secret buttons and switches
• Collectable hidden objects required to unlock deeper parts of the dungeon - timed for the first time!
• Puzzle sequences
• Secrets! Let's see if you can find at least one on your own
• Gems
• Traps - defused differently than the ones in caves.
• Other quirks put there to block your progression or just for fun.

How to access them?

Today we are introducing the new behavior of town population - your townsfolk will no longer aimlessly wander around their buildings, but instead will be doing their duty.

The workers will go to the resource facilities and deliver resources to storage. Then others will deliver resources from storage to the construction site. Some citizens will work at the construction site, knocking their little hammers. Occasionally, citizens will show their superstitious respects when passing by the religious buildings like the altar or temple. I could go on and on, but it is better to see it than to read about it.

While this feature does not add any functionality to the town and is basically one big eye-candy, it makes the town feel more alive and pleasant to look at. Also - this is the first step toward visualizing battles - so stay tuned for that future update.

Finally, I have to mention that this is the first big undertaking from our recent programmer Spoon, who had before this been busy with minor features and bug fixes. He would love to hear your feedback about today's update - so don't hesitate to post it in the comments. Cheer him up to motivate him for future undertakings :)

Today's update focuses on making alliance defenses more accessible and convenient, but by doing so, it also changes a few other things.

First of all this update fixes the Tavern. The Tavern was so good that players hesitated to report its bugged features and enjoyed it instead. This is bad of course, and the hangover will be significant. From now on, the Tavern will be increasing speed of reinforcements by +10% per level up to +200% at maximum level, making total maximum speed of reinforcements 300% (100% default + 200% bonus), thus basically increasing speed by x3 (not x11 like it was before bug fix). Also, the Tavern will no longer speed up naval and aerial reinforcements.

In order to compensate for the Tavern decrease of power, we looked around and found that powering up the Lighthouse was a natural step. The Lighthouse bonus to all naval armies sent from the town increased from 1% to 2% per level. Furthermore, an additional +10% speed bonus was added to reinforcements, which is similar to the Tavern bonus, except it works for naval units only. This will make seashore towns a little bit more desireable.

Since the Tavern fix made the reinforcements much slower, we added another feature which will give more time to react on incoming attacks. First of all, enemy armies are slowed down when they are detected, not when they enter your domain. This adds an additional 2 to 8 cells around your domain, depending on your tech. This is especially helpful if your country is squeezed from a side by a neighbor town, thus making your domain small and enemies detected very late.

Furthermore, the slowdown of enemies on your territory is increased from x2 to x3, which means they will move slower once detected, giving even more time to react and put defenses in place.

The crafting system and crafting idols introduced a year ago have their share of positive and negative moments - and now it's time to share some thoughts about improving them and making them more exciting.

While we have in some ways succeeded in bringing attention to the idols by adding the shaman/blacksmith and his quest, apparently it was not enough. Lets take a look at each idol in detail:

• Repair Idol - probably the most used one. No matter how you put it, your favorite gear needs to be fixed.
• Disassembly Idol - useful to those players who want to save on ore and crystals by disassembling unused gear to fix useful ones later.
• Enhancement Idol - while its usefulness is debatable and some people may argue that the prices are too steep, this idol can turn useless artifacts into better ones or good ones into exceptional. It's just up to your luck and whether you are willing to take the chance.
• Crafting Idol - actually, the crafting idol is the most useless one and I bet no one is using it apart from completing the quest. If not - please post in the comments, I would love to hear about it.

So the improvement of the crafting system will come from improving the item crafting. How so? By adding some items you will not be able to obtain otherwise!. Take a look at these:

(click the picture to view full size)

Take a look at these Samurai item sets - you will be able to craft these items from ores via the crafting idol! To make things more interesting, some crafting items will be unlocked only after you find the appropriate recipes - and finding more recipes will improve your chances of crafting that item.

These items can be ONLY obtained through crafting and there is absolutely no way to get them in other places. This will motivate players who want unique stuff to use the crafting idol. The items will not only look cool but will also have higher base stats - which will also make them perfect candidates for turning into artifacts to improve even more!

We have reworked Zodchiy town and the Wealth Victory as a whole. We added a new character, a new quest, and new requirements for this victory type.

By the end of Alpha 5 we had significantly increased resource income - which made reaching Wealth Victory too easy. Hence, today's addition of the new quest.

In the town of Zodchiy you will meet a new character - Petro Paton, who is the mayor of Zodchiy. You will need to help him with his town building. In turn, he will give you an essential element that will be required for the Wealth Victory from now on.

This quest is scaled according to your previous success. If you have already reached Wealth Victory with your current character, (i.e. in Alpha 5), the quest will become longer and more complicated. This depending on how many times you have reached the Wealth Victory.

In order to cope with Paton's quest you will now be able to make multiple camps in Zodchiy.

Since the launch of Alpha 6 we have been working primarily on the long-needed interface overhaul, and today we are launching the first pack of changes.

We had already added some minor changes in earlier updates, (like the new upgrade confirmation screen and information panel at the bottom of buildings), but today it is a complete overhaul of what is inside your town.

So what exactly has been changed?

• Build Menu - This is a long awaited change. Now it is more than just a build menu. It's also a convenient summary screen of all buildings you have in your town. It shows what is present and what is not, levels of buildings, their quantity, includes the ability to quickly locate a necessary building, and so one. Hopefully you will enjoy this. Now you will see why the building button has been moved to the right side.
• Minimap -  Have you ever struggled to find lumber income buildings to upgrade them in the new town and instead clicked on stone or iron or food building first before locating the lumber? Well, not anymore. The new minimap helps distinguish one from the other. It may look overloaded at first, but you will get used to it and will find it quite helpful. It shows all the interesting stuff - idols, puzzles, monsters, chests, NPCs and so on. The minimap will also be bigger in the future, so those icons will be even more prominent.
• Buttons Style - Hopefully these are now more streamlined and noticeable, thus easier on the eyes.
• Building panels are gone - There are now brief details underneath the building, and control panel above a selected building, with a detailed info screen about the building when you click question mark button. The new design allows you to order units, upgrades, petroglyph tasks, and so on - with less clicks.
• Unit order screen - I have previewed the new unit order screen on twitter, but now you can actually try it. It allows you to order multiple units in one go.
• Upgrade order screen - This is similar to the unit order screen, but very helpful in showing which upgrade applies to what kind of units before you order it.

Keep in mind - while this is a whole lot of changes - this is far from what we actually plan to do. There is a world map screen which needs even more work, but even the town screen is only partially reworked. We will be adding further improvements as well.

The update is rough and untested so make sure you report all bugs. Let us know what you think about these changes in the comments below.

While everyone is playing Alpha 6 in Classical Age - or maybe Medieval at most - let me show you what goodies are waiting for you in the Industrial Age - if you choose to pursue this hard road. Let's take a look at buildings.

These are Petroleum Tanks and Pyrotechnics Facility. The first one will store the fifth basic resource - oil. The second will construct bombs for your cool bomber planes.

Now these are Radio Tower and Delivery Service. The first will increase the speed of your planes sent from the town, while the second will replace the old market to bring land trading on the next level.

Today we launched Alpha Test Stage 6. This new version of the game features the addition of a whole new Industrial Age, totally new Desert climate, and a lot of smaller additions.

Let's go into detail about everything step by step.

Industrial Age

As always, the new Age adds a whole lot of new buildings, units, technologies, upgrades, and so on. We had previewed some of the stuff earlier, but I will describe the key ones:

1. Oil! Industrial Age adds a fifth basic resource - the oil. Oil is required by a lot of things in Industrial Age. Not only is it consumed when you build some structures, construct some units, and upgrades, but it is also consumed when you move your machines!
2. Trucks and Barges. New resource delivery units will match your increasing needs for resource shuffling.
3. Engineers. This new unit will be able to fix your machines in battle, just like witchdoctors and medics heal living units.
4. Tanks. Unlike rams and mortars, tanks are more than just siege units. They are capable of being frontline fighters.
5. Submarines. Ultimate anti-navy, submarines are very effective against ships, and they can also sneak undetected into enemy towns. They are unable to attack anything except other ships, but they can spy.
6. Planes. Horses are useless in industrial age, but the new strategic resource 'Aluminium' provides access to planes, unlocking aerial combat for you!
7. Bombs. The ultimate weapon of the industrial age - bomber planes loaded with bombs can destroy enemy buildings very quickly.
8. Observatory. Allows you to reduce corruption effect on your research.
9. Railroads. Even better than the paved roads.

You can find out more about the new industrial stuff yourself.

New World

This time around you will be playing in the hot desert climate. It is a dramatic change from freezing tundra of the previous Alpha stage. As always, a new climate is not only the way things look, but also minor things like unique monsters, unique animals, fish species, strategic resources, etc. In this climate you will be able to get camels and build Caravanserai - which allows to train Camel Archers in Medieval Age!

All Enkord Cash spent since 1st of March 2016 until the wipe will be returned on Alpha 6 launch, regardless of when it is going to happen.

So far we plan to release the Alpha 6 and wipe current progress somewhere near the end of March, but this is only a rough estimate and may or may not be changed. It will depend on actual completion status.

Alpha 6 will have at least the following new things:

• Whole new Industrial Age with appropriate units, buildings, and so on.
• Monster den quest locations where you will be able to battle monsters, level your hero up and earn items. Monsters there will respawn from time to time. There will be over 10 of such locations with the majority of them discoverable under the fog right from the start.
• Alpha 6 will happen in a new climate - the desert.
• New minigame like the Wonderful Garden.

While there is still time before the next alpha launch, we are smoothing out the rough edges - and this time our attention is on the destruction part of the game.

Foreword

Ever since Classical Age and promoted buildings were introduced, there has been a feature which made the Level 1 of a promoted building enclose within itself all the traits of all levels of the previous ages from which it was promoted. This seemed fair at first glance because all the effort put into upgrading previous buildings through the ages to the max was not lost. However, in higher ages it caused some problems.

The first level of promoted buildings turned out to be too tough to crack because all of the summed-up health. The health turned out to be so big, that often a single player did not have enough siege/destructive units to destroy even a single level of such a building. This was true despite the fact that promoted level 1's are targeted if there is nothing else to target. It was still unbearable.

This issue was impossible to fix without a deep redesign of the destruction side of the game. And this is what I did.

In short, I added armor to the buildings, however made promoted buildings inherit no armor from it's parent building. This allows promoted Level 1 buildings to still be significantly tougher than non-promoted ones, but became "crackable". This tweak demanded tweaking units, upgrades, and other items as well, in order to be balanced.

Destruction Rebalance