We're just under a month away from the release of Total War: PHARAOH, and we're excited to share the incredible improvements our dev team has made in order to bring you the best possible gaming experience!
 

• 🏴 Battle standards
  
• 🃏 2D unit cards
  
• ⚔️ A flurry of battle changes
  
• 🌐 UI optimisations

Check out the video for all the details!



We can't wait to see how you'll tackle the impending collapse of the Bronze Age!

—The Total War Team

A spectral procession of phantoms who are fuelled by hatred and seek nothing less than to destroy all life...

The Nighthaunt can traverse terrain quickly, drifting across the battlefield and swarming their foes in great numbers. Emboldened by regenerating ethereal bonds and restorative necromancy, death is but the beginning for these ghostly warriors.


Not even the grave can quell the bitter hearts of those called to serve Nagash.

The Nighthaunt are just one of four factions coming to Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Realms of Ruin. Learn more in our latest instalment of our Faction Focus series.

ETHEREAL DEFENCES
Ethereal magic bolsters their corporeal forms, regenerating their life essence over time and causing problems for any foes foolish enough not to fully exorcise them.



ENGULFED BY DEATH
These craven souls swarm enemies with large squad sizes and engulfing enemies in a horde of ghostly apparitions.

NECROMANTIC ENERGIES
No procession is without its leader; Nighthaunt heroes specialise in restoring themselves and their servants to full strength in a crusade that never ends.



Wage a campaign of brutal conquest in this realm-shattering real-time strategy game set in the Warhammer Age of Sigmar universe.


Our latest trailer reveals exciting new features, including the Map Editor and Army Livery.

Read more in our headline article here and don't forget to stay attuned to our social channels and join the official Discord HERE for more news yet to come.

Take heed and pre-order NOW to reap a selection of exclusive rewards along with up to 3 days early access, as offered in our Ultimate and Deluxe Editions.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1844380/Warhammer_Age_of_Sigmar_Realms_of_Ruin/

Oktober Fest BLITZ has started!🍻🏆💰 Join the fun until September 24th! Complete missions, collect stars, and unlock rewards! ⏰💥

Join NOW this exciting challenge! 🏃‍♀️🏃‍♂️

The Governor of Poker 3 Team

🍎How about to eat?🍎

In the game store you can find a lot of tasty and healthy food to replenish your health. Ripe apples, delicious salads and a hearty dinner (attention: candles and romantic atmosphere are not included in the package)!🍓

Prefer pills and potions? Not a problem! Especially for those who are inclined to solve problems with the help of medicine: small, medium, large and even huge first aid kits.

The Puppeteer has an offer for everyone! And now with a 30% discount!

💊Do not miss the opportunity to purchase medkits at a good price!💊

Attention Coolleagues!

We have important news for you: The Many Pieces of Mr. Coo will be at Tokyo Game Show 2023.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused many events to be affected and most of them had to be done online. Fortunately, this is coming to an end, and we already have one of the world's leading video game events back in a fully face-to-face manner. The Tokyo Game Show is back stronger than ever.

The new edition of the popular Japanese fair is once again present this year 2023. It will take place from September 21 to 24 and will be held at the Makuhari Messe convention center in Japan.

The four-day Tokyo Game Show 2023 will be well packed with major events, including its presentation and the Japan Game Awards ceremony.

Both September 21 and 22 will be devoted entirely to companies looking to close deals and showcase their games to publishers. On September 23 and 24, the doors will be open to all those who want to come to TGS to try out the games for themselves.

And of course, one of the games you can't miss is The Many Pieces of Mr. Coo. If you don't know this marvel yet and you have the chance, don't hesitate to try it out at Tokyo Game Show 2023.

For those who can't attend, you will also be able to watch it through the official channels of the event.

Don't forget that The Many Pieces of Mr. Coo is already available on PlayStation Store, Nintendo eShop and Microsoft Store.

Greetings Guild members!

Is your gear ready? Your skills are set? Scouting and sneaking all mapped out in your mind? Because Trin and Elaj are both eager to start their new missions together since...




Explore multiple levels, steal all the treasures you can take, make a mistake, rewind, fail, try again, find new ways to succeed, change your skillset or adjust the game difficulty at any time! Spirited Thief offers you many possibilities to experience its story.

Wait, did you hear about the Mages?! There's definitely something you'll need to investigate...

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1709870/Spirited_Thief/

We've been working on Spirited Thief for close to three years and we cannot wait to see you all play the game! Enjoy Spirited Thief, fail, succeed and share your thoughts!

Thank you for reading! You can follow the game on Twitter and join the Discord community!

Version 0.6.3 with several, minor improvements is now available
https://buckmartin.de/combine-and-conquer/2023-09-19-v0.6.3.html

As you may know, the World of Pax Dei consists of a few regions (Gallia, Anatolia, Gothia…) split into several provinces (Ancien, Merrie, Kerys…). A province is a very large geographical area with several valleys interspersed by big mountain ranges. In specific provinces called heartland provinces, we have multiple valleys we call home valleys, and those are where you can build your home. And, of course, you also have dark dungeons and caves that mainly exist below the surface of these provinces.

But how do these geographical features map down to actual physical servers, and how do they affect how you play the game?


The first choice you will face when creating a new character in Pax Dei will be the selection of a specific instance of a World, also commonly referred to as a Shard. Even though the world of Pax Dei is geographically vast, it can only accommodate a certain number of players in total. This is why we run multiple copies of the world, each being identical but completely independent of the others in terms of actual inhabitants. Each such copy we call a shard.

We estimate we’ll start with a maximum population in a single shard of around 7,000 players. A single shard is run wholly within one physical cloud hosting center. We will run shards in different availability regions worldwide, e.g., North America and Europe.

The factors that will mainly influence your choice of shard will thus be the following:

• Latency to your main game computer
  
• Seat availability, as some shards might be full
  
• Shards where you have many friends already playing

From a computational point of view, a shard consists of a large collection of various servers and cloud services, each of them fulfilling a specific function. The most numerous ones are what we call zone servers. This is because the simulation of a whole world is much too computationally heavy to be handled by a single hardware instance and is thus divided into smaller computational units that we call zones. A single zone server is a Dedicated Unreal Server that handles the simulation of a specific part of the world, e.g., one home valley.



At any given time, you, as a player, are automatically connected to a zone server. Whenever you move across a zone boundary, your connection automatically moves to the adjacent zone server. This is what we call a zone transition. In most cases, these transitions should be seamless, except for a few important exceptions:

• Transitions between different provinces or into dungeons will typically incur some loading time as the client loads an entirely new map
  
• There is currently no visibility of other players or NPCs across zone boundaries

As mentioned above, a zone server is a dedicated Unreal Server handling the simulation of a small subsection of the world. Eventually, a zone server can also become overwhelmed with too many players.

Currently, this limit is around 150 players, but it is expected to change with better hardware and optimizations. To avoid having to close off zones when the maximum number of players is hit, e.g., during peak hours, we introduce the concept of zone instances instead. The mechanism is such that when we surpass the maximum number of players in a zone, we distribute the whole set of players within a given zone boundary between two or more separate instances of the zone. Each zone instance is actually running a separate zone server for the same zone, but players within a given zone instance can not interact with players in another instance.

This separation only applies to direct player interactions, but the persistence of the buildings, amongst other things, works across instances, meaning the buildings are visible to all. Once the zone population levels go down, instances merge together. For regular operation, after a shard has reached maturity, instancing should only happen in exceptional cases, but it might be common at the beginning.




Apart from zone servers, the rest of the backend handles coordination between zone servers, transactional game logic, communication, and persistence. There are situations where the clients connect directly to this backend through secure APIs, e.g., for authentication. Still, in most cases, the zone servers are the ones communicating with the backend to specific services such as inventory service, resource management, etc.

All of this infrastructure is then deployed, coordinated, and scaled through a Kubernetes architecture running on top of a cloud infrastructure.



A backend engineer is someone who works on any of the services that reside in the backend but also in the interaction part between the zone servers and the backend. Typically, backend engineers define and implement the APIs used in communication between Unreal and backend services. They will also determine the data structures and persistence logic for all persisted data in the master database. Finally, they will also work on deploying and monitoring all the underlying infrastructure.


Mostly, this interaction will go through some well-documented APIs. The API defines all the operations that are allowed for a given service. The backend will also validate and enforce that the API client is authenticated correctly and has permission to call the given function. The API response is then typically data or validation that clients use to display to players through a customized UI.


The biggest challenge is how complicated the tech stack is. The whole tech stack comprises various components, some being 3rd party components (e.g., the Unreal Engine or PostgresDB) and others fully developed in-house. Most of these are not specifically designed to be used in an MMO.

The functions of these components range from physics simulation, graphics rendering, AI behavior to transactional integrity and high scalability of server transactions. They cover multiple programming languages and must be built and deployed in perfect harmony to function all together as intended.

Finally, testing an MMO without actual players is difficult, hence the importance of early user testing.


It is something we want to monitor. We will start with no special language restrictions, but some shards with clear language bias will probably emerge. We will make our best effort to surface this kind of metadata to players to help them make an informed decision on which shard to join.

We also don’t want to force you to play in a specific region. We mean that if you are a European player and want to play with friends in the US, you should be allowed to do so (while accepting more latency).


No, the plan is currently that all shards will be identical.


We will start with a target of about 7,000 players per shard (in 3 to 4 heartland provinces). As we bring more heartland provinces online, the maximum population per shard will grow accordingly.


We can spin up additional shards as needed to accommodate more and more players, but the zone-instancing mechanism will also help mitigate the initial load per shard.


Shards will be available in different geographical regions, so new players should be able to find a shard that is geographically close to them. Furthermore, the combat system and typical MMO interactions are such that they are more tolerant of lag as compared to first-person shooters.


We design our system in a way that they shouldn’t need maintenance except for major client and server updates, but, at the moment, we still need to do some downtimes and sometimes complete wipes of the Worlds. The selected time frame will certainly attempt to minimize disruption for players.


Yes, definitely. It is necessary for players' quality of life and population management.

But, let’s split this question into different cases: moving a character from one World to another is pretty trivial, so that is something we will undoubtedly allow (as an extra service or for free if the goal is to desaturate the population of a given world).

Moving a plot and the building(s) on it is a far more complex beast. We can’t simply transfer the buildings as the space could not be available in the new World, and we can’t easily move the buildings to a ‘similar space’ because the buildings' structure depends on the terrain they’re on. Ideally, we will have a system that lets you save your building structure as a blueprint or at least put all their components in a magical bag (don’t ask about the lore behind this, please).

Finally, when it comes to Clan transfer, we are currently considering it, but because of multiple reasons (priorities, workforce, unfinished features…), we can’t say it will happen before too long. We will provide more details on transfers and their availability later.


When a World becomes overcrowded, it will be locked to safeguard the quality of service.
So, our objective is to strike a balance between preventing overcrowding and ensuring friends can easily play together.
The key here is to be smart about the indicators we will use and how we guide people towards specific Worlds.

In critical situations, we would like to be able to offer character transfers to a populated World for free, as it’s one of the best ways to ease overcrowding. We will provide more information at a later time.


We're open to third-party programs and add-ons (as long as they are not about cheating), as we recognize that these contributions can often enhance user experiences and provide valuable functionalities. However, at the moment, we regrettably lack the necessary resources to offer proper support for them.

We genuinely hope that in the foreseeable future, we will be in a position to provide the support you deserve. Rest assured, we will keep you informed and share more information as it becomes available.

Oh, what a couple of days!
I did some really intensive playtesting at EVA this year, and it went terrific!

Now, we know what we need to polish in order to create the greatest combat vehicle game ever!

Look at all this feedback!


Guess who is raising their hands in the crowd?


So happy, so tired!


Stay tuned!