Dear Kings and Queens!
The very first version of Guild Expeditions is here for you to try out and test!
Your guild is fighting for power and your goal is to discover hidden treasures in the jungle, to ultimately level up your guild and gain bonuses and glory for all its members!
What are Guild Expeditions?
Guild Expeditions is a cross-platform* cooperative feature where you and your guildmates fight your way through a number of battlefields to get ahold of rewards and guild power.
* Right now only available on browser due to technical limitations, but it will get to mobile for the live release. See the next paragraph.
What is the purpose of implementing the feature?
The primary reason is the fact that we were missing a cooperative feature in our mobile apps, so people playing only on mobile could never really enjoy the great feeling of reaching a common goal. We decided that it should be changed and today we proudly present the first version of our solution to you!
Although you can't really try it out on mobile right away (because the current live version of the mobile app does not contain all the necessary data yet), you will be able to do so soon and until then, you can already check the feature on desktop!
How does it work?
Expeditions begin automatically every Tuesday and last for 6 days (then they start over with a 1-day gap, much like PvP tournaments). Every player who is a member of a guild and has reached the Iron Age at the time when an Expedition begins, can contribute to the success of their guild during the current Expedition (this means that if you join or create a new guild, you have to wait for the next expedition to begin - this happens every Tuesday).
When you enter the game and an Expedition is running, you will see a pop-up telling you about it. Once you have entered the Expeditions map (through the pop-up or through the main menu), you will see a completely new screen that we have developed for the new feature. It looks similar to other maps in the game, but we were going for a 'jungle' feeling:
The Expeditions map is mostly covered by fog: it will disappear as you progress on the 'path of discovery'. The map you can see there, unlike the GvG map, is only visible to you - each member of your guild has their own instance of the map to discover. You have until the end of the current Expedition to complete it (currently you can only finish it once per week - read on to learn what our plans are to improve this!).
What is common for all guild members though, is the Guild Expedition goal bar that you can spot right at the top of the screen.
You can contribute to the progress by solving encounters that are available in the encounter locations. The current encounter location is indicated by a blue arrow. When you click it, you will trigger a battle with the local inhabitants (a peaceful way to solve encounters will also be implemented in the near future). The units age and the overall difficulty of the encounters depend on your own advancement in the tech tree. Some encounters will be harder to solve than others (especially the ones represented by larger encounter locations) and they may contain two-wave battles.
To see your own contribution and the contribution of other guild members, click the progress bar:
Regardless of the result of each battle, you will contribute some points to the guild progress bar (obviously if you lose, it won't be that much). The guild goals depend on the number and era of the guild members (remember: they are set when the Expeditions begin, they will not change even if you gain or lose guild members over the week) and are shared between all guild members.
The amount of consecutive encounter solving attempts is limited to 8 and each time you begin a battle, one attempt point is withdrawn. You can see the amount of attempts you still have when you're about to begin a battle:
When you run out of them, you can either wait for them to regenerate (you get 1 per two hours) or buy them. Unlike Forge Points, the attempts can not be bought with coins, but rather with medals (or Diamonds, if you don't have any medals). The first attempts will be very cheap and then the price for each attempt will rise. At the end of the Expedition it will reset, so you have a fresh start each week.
The power for your guild will be paid out each day, when the daily recalculation takes place.
How does it influence other parts of the game?
Obviously battling is battling, so the fights will normally contribute to your personal ranking.
As the goal of the Expeditions is obtaining not only personal rewards, but primarily guild power - and we are well aware that there are very advanced guilds out there - we also have a plan to raise the maximum possible guild level, which is currently capped at level 50. This will not happen just now, but we can already tell you that you are not going to lose power that was collected in the meantime. Once the higher levels are unlocked, the power you have collected will be reflected in the new level of your guild (so it can happen that a guild being currently on level 50 will advance instantly to the level 54 or so).
What are the plans for the future of Guild Expeditions?
As you can see, Guild Expeditions are not yet a completed feature. There are some 'coming soon' badges here and there on the Expedition map:
What is also worth mentioning is that the balancing is subject to change, and by that we mean really significant changes over the next weeks. We hope you're OK with that, as it's very important for us to make sure that the feature is correctly balanced.
When it comes to the already visible, but still padlocked features, these are mainly two things that we have planned and scheduled for implementation:
1. The first one are so called 'difficulties'. The name tells everything: there will be easy, medium and hard difficulty and it will be possible to play the map again on harder difficulties (and get better rewards of course). Until then, the balancing is mixed on the map.
2. And the second thing is a peaceful way of solving the encounters with the locals (already mentioned above). You will be able to negotiate your way through the unknown territory instead of simply slaughtering defending units. It will not be a simple pay&go solution that you know from the single player map. We have something better in mind that will also be more fun for players who prefer peaceful solutions over brute force. You will hear more about it soon.
But this is not necessarily everything! We'd love to hear what you think and we of course will take your opinions into account when deciding what the next steps are, so please jump right into the game and give Expeditions a try! We're waiting for your feedback impatiently!
Your Forge of Empires Team
