today we'd like to take the time to talk about one of the biggest changes in CATAN Universe 2.0: The in-game currency system. We came up with a more flexible in game currency that will allow Catanians to spend it on exactly the scenario they want to play and which also partly recharges over time. CATAN Suns will replace our old Scrolls and of course these Suns do not only differ in name but also in functionality.
A Sun will allow you to play a single player game in CATAN Universe in any expansion you desire and as you can see in the picture below they come in two forms.
A red Sun is a temporary Sun meaning once you use it is gone. You can earn some of those during the user journey to get you started and via promotions on our social media channels as well as on our Discord server. You can stash as many as 10 red Suns in your account at the same time. The yellow Sun is a permanent Sun meaning after you used it, it will start recharging itself and within 12 hours it will be functional again. Your account starts out with one of those and you'll earn a second one once you reach the new max level 25. These rechargeable yellow Suns are also to an answer to the age-old question by our free to play users that weren't able to play their desired scenarios in CATAN Universe after they spent all their scrolls.
Besides using Suns to unlock single player scenarios it will still of course be possible to play the Free Match and the basic Custom-Match with up to 2 friends after registering an account but we'll go into more detail concerning the future of the account structure in CATAN Universe in another update post.
Additionally CATAN Suns won ́t be purchasable in the shop. Therefore the only currency left in the shop will be Catan Gold which you can use for fully unlocking expansion and to take part in special in game events. Of course there will be a transitioning phase were you can still redeem your old scrolls but again we’ll go into more details about that once the update is about to go live!
Thanks a lot for your feedback in advance and we'll see you on the island!
we are super excited to finally be able to officially announce CATAN Universe 2.0 which includes a full menu UI overhaul, a new more flexible in-game currency system and groundworks for exciting new content in the future. Also from a technical standpoint, CATAN Universe 2.0 helps us streamline our development process tremendously, which will make further updates much smoother. This is also the reason why we've decided to release this update despite the current influx of new users so that we can react to your feedback more quickly. We've attached a couple of pictures to this post to give you a glimpse of the new version but we'll post more details about the update and its release in the following weeks.
Thanks so much for your continued feedback and patience and we'll see you on the island!
- Several improvements for more reliability during the set-up phase
- Rivals theme set games via Automatch will start correctly again
- Reconnects (closing the App completely and restarting it) to ongoing multiplayer games have been temporarily disabled due to technical reasons and system abuse. This feature will be restored in the next update.
Apple and Andriod versions will follow soon! Please note: You won´t be able to play with Catanians using the older Client. As soon as Apple and Google have approved the update it will be automatically released to the Stores.
Thank you very much for your patience and understanding.
we are currently working full speed on alleviating the problems occurring during the start phase of games in CATAN Universe and we are already testing a version that plays promisingly.
Unfortunately, problems of the kind we're currently having, are very tedious to test since they sometimes do simply not occur during our testing phase.
Today we wanted to provide you with a little context on why this is happening:
Usually, we don't test the beta client on the same server that you folks are playing but instead on an identical version of that server. This has 2 reasons:
To properly test the newest version we have to start 100s of games that we have no intention of ever finishing. Sometimes we just start and close games immediately afterward to see how the game behaves during this phase. Were we to do that on the live servers, it' be no way of ensuring that we'd not be matched with any of you folks.
Most of the time a new client version (1.8.8 -> 1.8.9) needs an updated server software as well and that new software is rarely fully backward compatible. And since running two different instances of server software on the same server creates a myriad of problems in and of itself we opt to test on our test server.
So since we did not have the start phase issues in CATAN Universe 1.8.8 on our testing servers, we first had to create a 1.8.9 version that would work on the current live servers without interfering with your folks playing. We were able to test the first iteration of CATAN Universe 1.8.9 yesterday and we're continuing to test today and tomorrow.
We'll, of course, keep you up to date on how our work is progressing.
Thanks a lot for all of your patience and feedback and we'll see you on the island!
Version 1.8.7 will now be rolled out to the Googleplay Store and Apple Appstore. Please make sure to update your App as fast as possible to enable cross play between all platforms again.
You can check the version number you are currently using the lower left corner of the main menu.
in an effort to further reduce the server loads we've just released CATAN Universe 1.8.7 for the Steam and Browser version of the game.
That means that it won't be possible to play cross plattform from PC to mobile at the moment. We are still watiting for the approval of 1.8.7 in the Appstore and GooglePlay Store.
We will try to keep this version discrepancy as short as possible but it might still take a couple of days until things are back to normal.
As usual we will continue to update you on the latest developments through our socials and in-game news so please keep an eye out for more news.
Hi Catanains, As we have mentioned, over the last few days we’ve had the largest rise in user numbers yet. While we’re very happy about the interest in Catan, this has caused severe technical issues with our system that currently can’t handle the increased demand during peak hours.
We’ve already made several updates to the backend systems, but after careful evaluation, we’ll need to make very substantial changes to some parts of the game’s backend architecture to be able to cope with this situation. Therefore we will regrettably have to temporarily disable the multiplayer mode “Free Match” used by non-paying users. We do this very reluctantly and only because there is no other short-term solution that can decrease server load as significantly and without effecting paying users. The function will be restored as soon as other measures have been successfully implemented. We’ve had this mode since the beginning, as we’d like new players to try Catan easily. We want to restore it as soon as possible.
We understand that this will cause speculations if this is just a move to drive sales. It’s quite the contrary. We hate to do that, because it will cause frustration and likely drive off new players. However we feel obligated to our existing customers and need to make sure that we can sustain the current user numbers until the tech team has made the necessary updates.
Thank you for staying on Catan with us during this time. We will continue to update you on the latest developments via in-game news and our social media channels.