Today we launched Alpha Test Stage 5. This new version of the game features the addition of a whole new Renaissance Age, totally new Snowy Tundra climate, and a lot of smaller additions.

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

Renaissance Age

First of all, a short disclaimer: Totem Tribe II: Jotun takes place on planet Teya and not on Earth. Therefore, we are not following historical accuracy here and the Renaissance Age is not necessary exactly as the Renaissance from human history. It contains bits of Victorian times and some other historical periods as well.

The Renaissance Age has a whole lot of new technologies, buildings, units, upgrades and so on. You will have to explore them on your own, but I will describe the key ones:

1. Ships. The Renaissance Age could be called an Age of Sail here and I have made exclusive news post about ships in this age which provides more details.
2. Gunpowder! This tech changes everything, but not for everyone. Gunpowder allows you to train units and build constructs that are very powerful. However, it requires access to a strategic resource - sulfur. The sulfur is the horses of Renaissance - you will need a lot of it if you want to use Renaissance units in warfare effectively.
3. Aerostatics. The first air units, like aerostat, will allow you to explore the world map via air - and the dirigible will allow you to deliver resources.
4. Paved road. Replaces regular road and allows units to move faster on it.
5. Bank. Allows you to make some profit on your market transactions. Effective traders will love it!
6. Museum. Scientists will be able to use it to speed up research.
7. Conservatory. Helps mitigate corruption penalties towards culture, making your domain larger.

Oh, and the prices of some Medieval Age technologies have been reduced.

New World

The Renaissance Age is just around the corner and we feel it is a perfect time to tease you just a little bit with things that will be released with this new age and Alpha 5 launch.

Like always, this will be a bunch of pictures and music exceprts. Below you can see several Renaissance Age hero outfits, along with some buildings and units. Furthermore, you can listen to the music tracks that will be released in the game when you reach that age.

We plan to launch Alpha 5 version of Totem Tribe II: Jotun in August. Unless something unexpected happens that will force us to reschedule the release date for later, the August timeframe is pretty do-able. Alpha 5 is a major update which releases big features, but also will wipe all of the progress. Let me guide you through what will happen.

The Features

• Renaissance Age - the biggest feature will be the release of a whole new age with all the new tech, buildings, units, and so on. I will not go into detail here, as there will be separate news post, along with sneak peaks like this one.
• Tundra Climate - say goodbye to jungle and moderate climate for a while - Alpha 5 will happen among snowy landscapes.
• Puzzles - there will be 10 different puzzle types added with 6 difficulty levels each, which will result in a total of 60 different puzzles. This is something to look forward to if you have been missing puzzles since the original Totem Tribe days (beware, some of them will be very tough). We even added a whole new achievement category under "Adventure" to keep track of the puzzles. You can see it even now.
• There are other changes that will be made, but they will be announced upon Alpha 5 release.

The Wipe

Those of you who have been with us for a while are probably aware that each alpha stage begins and ends with a wipe. However I will go into detail again for those who are new and only started playing in Alpha 4.

The wipe means that we will clean everything up - all countries, heroes, and achievements will be removed and you will have to start anew. This is necessary so we could test the big new releases with all the major changes naturally in a clean environment.

While you are waiting for the Alpha 5 launch and the Renaissance Age which will come with it, we are presenting a short preview. This time we will tell you about ships.

The ships you have seen in previous ages are only appetizers to what will come in the Renaissance. This new age will bring you five entirely new ships - along with the ability to upgrade them!

The images of the ships below are the following:

1. Brigantine - A new transport ship. It will hold significantly more units than the Classical Raft.
2. Schooner - A new trade ship. It will replace Trade Ship and will be able to carry significantly more resources.
3. Caravel - A small and fast battle ship of the new age. It will be a perfect choice for pirating.
4. Frigate - Medium battle ship. While it is slower than Caravel, it is also more powerful. Additionally, it can act as Siege Weapon if attacking using Onslaught, destroying enemy towers and wall. The priority target is units though.
5. Ship of the Line - The almighty flagship of the sailing fleet. This one is very slow, very powerful, and furthermore can act as Destroyer unit - destroying structures when attacking using Onslaught.

   

   

   

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Our latest update is a first step toward implementing War Victory. The Trophy Hall building is now functional and you can earn war trophies and view them there.

For those players who want to win the game with aggression toward others and reach War Victory, the first step is to build a Trophy Hall. This structure serves two purposes:

1. It allows you to obtain war trophies - a special type of items that can be earned when you attack other players from the town which has the Trophy Hall present. There are various conditions that need to be fullfilled in battle in order to earn a trophy. You may earn multiple trophies in one battle.
2. Trophy Hall also stores your trophies after you earn them in battle. More advanced war trophies may require higher levels of Trophy Hall to acquire and store. Keep in mind that once this building is destroyed, you will lose your accumulated trophies in that building.

Once you fill up all of the required trophies, the condition to reach War Victory is met. We have not yet implemented victories, but we are working on it to include them in the Alpha 5.

Neither the required number of trophies nor trophy conditions are final, but we will be reviewing them to improve their difficulty. So please post in the comments your experience with the trophies - how many do you have, how hard they were to obtain, and so on. Thanks in advance.

Today we added item manipulation features to compliment the new Artifacts and Treasure Hunting features. The new item system is now fully implemented - as it has been planned from the very beginning. Now you will be able to to craft new items, enhance artifacts, repair your gear, and disassemble spare ones to get materials.

Let's do the breakdown of new things in today's update:

Item Idols

There are 4 new idols added in today's update. Each one of them allows you to do one of the four features - crafting, enhancing, repairing, or disassembling. We will let you find them on your own. However, I will mention that each of them is on one of four quest locations: Herald's Home, Opposition Hideout, Keepers' Village, and Ruins of New Kyiv.

Item Perks

Since we have recently added artifacts, we are now able to expand on this and add a whole new side to the game - Treasure Hunting! Similar to fishing, you will be able to excavate for treasures here and there.

Let's do a breakdown of new things added in today's update.

The Archeologist

This is where it all begins. If you go to Keepers' Village you will find a new character there - The Archeologist. There is a small quest that you need to complete for him and then he will teach you how to dig for treasure at various spots in the world.

The Treasure Spots

We decided to distract ourselves from bug-fixing and optimizations for a bit and work on new stuff for a change. Therefore, after releasing random caves, we began working on the item system. Today's update is the first glimpse at it - Artifacts!

What are Artifacts?

Artifacts are similar to regular equipment items wearable by your hero, except they have extra stats (up to five). The stats will allow you to make your hero even stronger if you can gather up powerful gear. 

Artifact Traits

Artifacts add additional prefixes and/or suffixes to the regular item name depending on their power and traits. There are almost 100 different traits that could spawn on an artifact item, varying from a simple stat increase such as strength, to something more exotic - like a chance to pick up two items instead of one during your adventures. Not all of them are working though, so expect bugs.

We have been working on these caves off and on for almost a year. Finally we are ready to release them. This started as a little quirk to have something for people to do while they were waiting for the tasks to finish, but grew bigger and bigger with various features as time flew by.

This is the  "surprise" I was referring to months ago. It was originally planned to be released with Alpha 4, then by New Year's Day, but was completed only now - since we had to rework our quest system to get it running.

So what exactly are those caves?

There are number of quest locations scattered around the world map that can be found in different ways. Some of the caves 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 caves are not related to the storyline, there is only one quest associated with them and it is optional. They are more like "Lonely Iceberg" level in original Totem Tribe - you can safely skip them, but you can explore them for fun.

Why "Random"?

It's Sneak Peek time and today we are going to reveal some Totem Tribe II: Jotun Industrial Age work-in-progress.

While the programmers and I have been busy with boring tech stuff, our artists and musician have been working hard and have created some things that can now be shown to the public. The artists - and especially the musician - are always ahead of others in terms of content. So don't be surprised to hear they are already working on Industrial Age.

Below you can see several Industrial Age hero outfits, along with some buildings and units. Furthermore, you can listen to the music tracks that will be released in the game by the time you reach that age.

It has been a while since we released our last update because we have been heavily reworking the tech behind our game story/quest systems. Today we are releasing new quest functionality along with a lot of changes accumulated since the last update. This is what prevented us from working on Karfaree and more quests.

This new quest system is very unstable so expect a lot of bugs and weird behavior when testing quests and quest items/objects. Quest objects are all those single-player-like functionality items - chests, animals and monsters inside your town, little activities like fishing, and of course quests and conversations. So please pay attention to these and report any bugs sighted here on the forum.

Once again - for those who do not read that much text:

TODAY'S UPDATE IS BUGGY, SO DON'T BE SURPRISED - REPORT BUGS ON FORUM

Another thing you will inevitably notice - the fog is back almost everywhere and you have to clear it again. This is a known issue and a side-effect of today's update. You have to clear the fog again.

Quite some time has passed since we announced that more invites would be going out to new players and we have finally started sending out invitation emails.  It has been over two months since we made the announcement, but we are only now getting around to sending out the invites. 

Unfortunately, for those waiting for their invitations, we will be sending out fewer than we had initially planned. This is due to the fact that the game code turned out to be less stable than we had thought.  Because of this we will be inviting new players in smaller groups to ensure the game can handle the load.  The good news is that you can see a lot of new settlements in the western part of Abenia.  The bad news is that there should have been a whole lot more.
At the moment invitations are being sent out to those who registered on our website back in 2009/2010 - back then we had no idea if or when Totem Tribe II would be released.  It will be a little while longer before we can start inviting those that have registered more recently and players of our other games. 
However, if you really really cannot  wait a minute longer, then leave a post in the comments below (please don't start a new thread) and I will let you in.  But do keep in mind that this is alpha so expect bugs.
P.S.  Dont forget to say hi to one another in the comments below.  Veterans welcome our new players, the tropics will be getting pretty crowded quite soon! 

Just like we promised in our Alpha 4 deployment news, we have delivered refund bonus items to those players who donated earlier and decided to play Alpha 4 again.

Unfortunately, these items require an existing country on the server so we have announced the refund on Alpha 4 deployment and gave over a month for players who wanted those items to create their countries on our new server. Today we are delivering those items. Because we have to do it manually, the procedure will be one-time only. We are sorry, but you will not receive the items unless you already started playing Alpha 4 before today.

Also we are unable to provide gift Lada's Wards this way. So, instead of giving one regular and one gift Ward per each $30 charged, we are giving you two regular Wards. As promised, the upper limit of bonus items will be $100 so you will receive a maximum of 3 packs of items.

Speaking about other news and current game development process - Things have been going slowly lately because of the season's holidays, changes in the team (someone left, someone joined), and a number of technical tasks that unexpectedly popped up while we were sending out massive invites and a flood of new people were joining in.

We hesitated to invite a lot of new players because we needed a proper moderator reporting system in place so people can have abusers reported and punished promptly without their spoiling the fun of the game. (Especially considering that already there were several incidents of newcomers, not accustomed to our friendly atmosphere, behaving aggressively and insultingly). This kind of behavior is unacceptable, but also inevitable with a large number of players. All we can do is react as fast as we can. Hence, the requirement for this system.

The launch of the Alpha 4 and Medieval Age went well - without critical crashes - although there were plently of bugs related with medieval buildings, units, techs, etc. Today's update fixes a large number of those issues, as well as shedding some light on our current progress.

Today's update changes

• Huts/Houses/Cottages - There will now be 10 buildings allowed per age and their bonus is 1% per level. However, the reduction of construction time capped will be as low as 50% (was 20% before)
• Hut and Tower construction times and prices are roughly reduced twice
• Awareness ability now gives +2 cells per ability and has a proper description (icon to follow soon)
• Population has increased for Medieval buildings to compensate for the large amount of huts and their bonuses
• Seminary requirements for Theatre and Opera House were swapped
• Palisade level 10 wood price is reduced to fit level 18 Lumber Shed storage limit
• Communality has been renamed to Collectivism
• You can no longer hide resources from plunder with traders. When the enemy attacks and there are no resources to plunder, they will rob your traders standing in the market.
• Descriptions have been added to medieval buildings
• Fixed bugs for various Medieval buildings like storage which were not recognized in various requirements, Seminary hiding tech tab and allowed to be built along with Library and so on.

What are we up to now?

Currently we are working on a proper moderation system which will allow players to report abuse/insults with a single click - which allows us to punish the offenders quickly and easily. This ability is the only thing standing in the way of the team sending out a large number of invitations to those people who have registered on the website and our past players from our other games. If you are one of those waiting for it - hang in there - we are working on it.

We are still working on the long-promised "surprise" that should have been a Christmas present, but it was too complex to have it ready  in time. So the Christmas present is the Alpha 4 launch like we had initially planned :) The "surprise" update will come after the New Year.

Today is launch day for Stage 4 of Totem Tribe II: Jotun Alpha-test.  One of the major features of this stage is the introduction of a new historical era  -  the Medieval Age. There are a lot of important details about today's update so you need to read on (especially if you are experiencing new stage start for the first time).

As is the case with the introduction of every new Alpha stage, the game has been wiped and all of your progress, including your heroes and achievements, are lost. Unfortunately this is necessary because when we introduce new dramatical changes to the game (like the addition of a  new age) we have to start the game from scratch in order to test it properly. We have had to do this for the previous Alpha stages and this will be repeated in the future. However, the Enkord Cash that you have spent so far is now back in your account. You can read more about this at the bottom of this news post.

So what is Alpha 4 all about?

Medieval Age - We have added a whole new age to the game which you can access as soon as all of the Classical Age techs have been researched. Just like the previous ages, it has a lot of new features, like buildings, units, tech, upgrades, global resources, and so on.  However, there are also a number of unique things that we added that were not available before the Medieval Age

Priests and town capturing mechanism - you will be able to train a unique unit - the  Priest. Priests will allow you to  capture your enemies. Once captured, the town will belong to you forever just like the one you built from scratch. The capturing process is very complicated, because the reward (and damage done to your enemy) is huge.  It will be way harder than capturing a new town on your own, but it is too lengthy to explain it in this thread, so I will more than likely start a separate thread with a detailed explanation on this subject.

1. Catacombs -  we have had a lengthy brainstorming thread on an idea about how to defend your country when you are away and catacombs were the result of it.
2. Pirates! - this new privateering feature will allow your sailing ships (no rower) to plunder anonymously under pirate colors - your victim will never know who it was that attacked them.
3. Wonder of the World. Because of the upgraded capacity of the new medieval storage buildings and with the ability to have 2 world resource sheep in your domain (which is simplified by the fact that your neighbors can lend you resources too) you will be able to build a level 100 of the Wonder of the World which is a necessary  condition for  the Wealth Victory, however, the victory mechanic itself has yet to be implemented . But hopefully we will be able to implement it by the time you get to level 100 (which, believe you me, is not an easy task).
4. Courthouse - this allows you to reduce  the corruption (inefficiency) in any particular town.
5. Chaika - a new ship which can not only explore, but also spy on  port towns.
6. Pilgrim - a medieval age settler which can both walk and swim thus allowing you to settle on islands.

There are numerous smaller things that I haven't mentioned here and I will leave it up to you to find them on your own.

New Big World Map

We have decided to launch Alpha 4 next week. Hopefully we will release it next Monday.  All of your progress so far in the game will be lost, so if there is anything that you haven't tried yet in the game, now is the time to do so.

So if players  want to go mad attacking other players, now is the perfect time to try it before the wipe.

An important note to donators - all  Enkord Cash will be refunded after the wipe for the Alpha 4 launch.  So for those who have any Enkord Cash laying around in their accounts, now is the time to treat your hero to some extra blueprints or speed ups. 

As for new features in Alpha 4 - for those who haven't been following our news posts there will be some major additions. We will be adding the Medieval Age with new techs, buildings, and units. There will also be a completely new world map and the plan is to make it hundreds of times bigger than the current one. A single continent will be comparable to the size of the current world map of Alpha 3.

We did not think we were going to do additional serious updates until Alpha 4, but we have changed our minds. We added two new features - Protectorate Mechanic, which allows one player to become the protector of another, and an Invitation System, which allows existing players to invite their friends into the game RIGHT NOW.

Let's talk about them in detail.

Protectorate Mechanic

If you do not belong to an alliance you can ask another (stronger) player to become your protector. This is a relationship between two players, not between alliances. When in a protectorate relationship, players cannot attack each other and the protector can collect a levy from the reinforced town of the player in protection. A levy is collected as a percentage of that player's resource income in that town. Collection is not instant and continues until the reinforcing army's baggage is filled. Afterwards, protector can recall their troops to deliver the collected resources to their towns and send fresh troops for further collection.

This mechanic will allow players to establish a profitable relationship between weaker and stronger (or aggressive and peaceful) players, where one player is providing troops and another is paying for protection. Plus this relationship will be in a  format which will allow everyone to see it and it may act as a warning sign for  plunderers and attackers to beware.

This update introduces Resource Lending to the game. From now on, players will be able to lend resources on the world map within their domain to their neighbors. This should allow new ways for players to interact, as well as additional diplomacy around those resources.

What exactly is resource lending?

If you have a global resource within your domain on the world map, you will now be able to lend it to any of your neighbors. A neighbor is any player whose domain shares a border to yours. There should be no space or other players between the two of you.

Once you lend the recource to someone, it will act as if the cell with the resource is provided to that other player, and that player can do with it as if it were his or her own resource (i.e. build a structure on it and supply to their towns). Lending is instantaneous, although building the structure on it is not, just as if it were a normally owned resource.

You can also reclaim any lended resource instantly, although if the other player has supplied it to any of their towns, it will take 24 hours for the supplying structure to be deconstructed. It will be exactly as if you captured the cell with the resource from someone.

This update is much larger in comparison to previous ones. We have finally completely redesigned the espionage system, which will actually make full use of your spies and eliminate a cheat that allows you to figure out the whole enemy army with a single spy unit.

The spying mechanics are now built similarily to plunder, except instead of resources, spies accumulate "intelligence points", which after the spy battle determine how much information they are able to get.

• Spying for Buildings: Each spy can gather information to reveal one level of buildings. This means that if you send one spy, you will be able to see one random Level 1 building of the enemy. However, if you send 100 spies, you will be able to see random buildings totaling up to 100 levels. Multiple spying attempts might reveal different random buildings. You will not be able to get all the buildings with one spy anymore.
• Spying for Resources: Each spy defines the maximum amount of resources he can detect. For example, if you send one spy, and he can only detect 500 resources max, any additional resources the enemy town  has will show as "over 125" (500/4 resource types). If you want to know how much more, send more spies.
• Spying for Army: Again, intelligence points will determine the total price of spying the enemy army. If the intelligence points are enough to cover the whole army cost, you will see the whole army. If the intelligence points only cover a fraction, but not less than 75%, you will see rough estimates instead of hard numbers (few, many, etc.). If they cover 50-75%, you will see a percentage of units, one against another, for instance: Brave = 75%, Hunter = 25%, but it could be either 3 and 1 or 300 and 100. For 25%-50% you will only see unit types without any information about quantity. If it is less than 25% you will not be able to get any information at all.

I did not post a specific amount of "intelligence points" spies actually gather and specific corellation between those points and the actual information received because this type of information is subject to change. I don't want to be obligated to updating it each time in public.

Furthermore, battle reports now have similar information grades as espionage - if your army was very small and everyone is dead, you will not be able to know what killed you. This will also eliminate a "one explorer attack" cheat.

Another important change in this update is the game interface change. Since Alpha 1, people have been asking for the ability to collapse parts of the interface to have more visual playing space. This time it has been implemented. Let us know if this is what you wanted.

Exactly one year ago today we launched Alpha 1 of our game, Totem Tribe II: Jotun . Now it is time to look back and reminisce about things that have taken place over the last 12 months.

• ALPHA 1 was launched on the 22nd of October 2013, and only a couple of dozen players were invited. The game was far from what it is now - it had only Herald's Home, no other quest locations. There were no advisor quests, the Cash Shop was not available, and in general a lot of things were far worse than they are now. Those who played it, please leave us some comments about what other important things were not present :). Here is the old news post about Alpha 1.
• ALPHA 2 was launched on the 23rd of December 2013, two months after Alpha 1, and just in time for Christmas. We were able to release it so soon after Alpha 1 because most of the new features that were added were partially ready when Alpha 1 was released. In Alpha 2 we added Opposition Hideout, advisor quests, Cash Shop, and most importantly for some people - more horses! There were only a couple of horses in entire Alpha 1 release. There were more people invited to participate as well, maybe up to 50. You can read about it in: news post about Alpha 2 launch.
• ALPHA 3 took us significantly longer to release (2nd of June 2014) because there were so many additional features to be added. We added a whole new age - Classical, and an entirely new payment system which includes various rewards and bonuses.  The new Jungle climate zone was added, and random monsters were also new to this phase. The inhabitable space was doubled because of the new climate zone. We invited even more players this time - we now have over 200 players.  Here is the Alpha 3 news post with details. More importantly though, is the work that has been done behind the scenes. We can tell you that we have started to rework our codebase, which in the long run will allow us to do things faster and better..
• On the 11th of September 2014, we did not launch a new alpha stage, however we did add 2 new quest locations - which is a big deal for those players who have been fans since original TT1/TTG and who wanted more of the old-school experience.

It has been a landmark year for us.  We have been working very hard on this game for almost 4 years now and we have been flying blind.  However, this past year has finally allowed us to touch base with players and embed our belief that this game serves its purpose and is appealing to both its present and future fans. Now that we have support - the future of the game is more certain.

I almost forgot to mention that everyone receives a Supporter's Key, a Thank You Package, and 3 Lucky Coins as a birthday treat!

Now everyone go post your most memorable game moment of the year! :)