This update does not have a release date yet. It is coming soon, and everything below is what it brings.
The world has depth now. You decide how much of it your phone draws, every window has been rebuilt, and two new things have arrived to spend on. Update from the store and it is all waiting.
Rolling hills run under the whole map. Mountains are real ranges: chains of peaks with ridges and gullies, foothill ramps, and snow that gathers on the shaded side and dips into the passes.
Cliffs stand where a range meets the sea, beaches blend into grass and snow across half a tile, and the hex outlines along the shore are gone.
Woods grow in clustered stands with clearings, keep a tree-free corridor along the roads, and thin out on the slopes. Ten ground types carry painted textures with real surface detail.
The light is warmer and more cinematic, and merchant ships sail the coastal lanes. On a high-tier device the water reads depth, refracts the shore, reflects the sky and carries a real wave map. Mid tier gets a lighter package of the same thing, so most phones see it.
Five presets, from Ultra-low to Ultra, and the same view in each so you can see exactly what you are trading away.
Ultra-low is for older phones. Decorations and shadows are off, the water is flat and the draw distance is short. It keeps the game playable on hardware that would otherwise stutter, and it is not trying to be pretty.
Low brings the decorations back at a modest density and lifts the draw distance. Shadows stay off. On most older phones this is the point where it looks like the game and still runs like it should.
Mid is where most phones will land. Shadows come on, the water gets the lighter depth package with a readable shore, and the ground textures carry their surface detail. This is the preset the terrain rework was tuned against.
High adds full shadow quality, post effects and the complete water: real depth, refraction, sky reflection and a live wave map. It looks the way this update was designed to look.
High costs battery. Everything in it runs every frame, and on a phone that shows up as heat and a faster-draining battery over a long session. If you play in stretches of an hour or more, Mid will treat your battery considerably better for a difference you stop noticing after a minute.
Ultra is everything at once, at full density and full distance.
Ultra is really a desktop setting. A handful of phones can start it and almost none can hold it at a steady frame rate for a whole session. On a PC, turn it on and enjoy it. On a phone, treat it as something to look at for a moment rather than something to play on.
You are never stuck with a whole preset because of one setting. Pick Custom and the Advanced block opens up every knob on its own: decorations and their density, shadows and shadow quality, post effects, immersive look, water detail, grass, draw distance, render scale, ambient life and flocks.
Every one of them applies live, so you can watch what it costs you and stop where it still feels good. That is the real answer to the battery question above: keep High's water if that is what you came for, drop its shadows, and leave the rest on Mid. Your own preset, built from the parts you actually care about.
If the game ever crashes, the next start comes up on the safe profile once, so nothing you choose here can lock you out. Your profile is stored on our side, not on the device.
On desktop, WASD and the arrow keys pan, Q and Z zoom.
The tech tree is a painted four-column board with a crest per branch, and each tree scrolls on its own.
Gear detail has a painted showcase and icon-only actions in one colour each: Equip green, Upgrade blue, Enchant purple. Loadouts carry a colour rail per tree and a 3x3 overview in slot order, with the star set-bonus badge and the purple enchant badges.
The player window runs edge to edge: a hero header with your banner, overview tiles and a statistics list that scrolls. Your device id is masked, and Show reveals it.
Clans use the members-tab design throughout, with thin gold scrollers, a Buff Sites glyph and a rewards queue that shows a gift box and a timer per purchase gift.
The attack dialog is a heraldic duel: banners on both sides, a gold slider and a sensible 50% default. The shop, clan rallies, confirmation prompts, city skins and city info were rebuilt along with them.
Starter Protection is for Bronze league only. A brand new account cannot be attacked for its first 48 hours, while it is finding its feet. Those cities carry a gold glow on the map, so everyone can see at a glance that this one is off limits and why. It is granted once, on your very first main city, and a new season never hands it out again.
The Shield panel shows exactly how long is left, above your normal shield and auto-shield. Protection does not stop you playing: take neutral cities, move troops between your own, scout, join a clan. All of it is yours while the clock runs. In the final hour the glow turns gold and red for you alone, so you can decide what to do with the time that is left without everyone else watching it run out.
Two things end it early. Attacking another player ends it on the spot, and you stay attackable for the rest of the season. Leaving Bronze ends it too: promotion happens at the season rollover, so a player who moves up to Silver leaves Bronze and their protection behind at the same moment.
You can also end it yourself. Drop protection is there from the first minute for anyone who would rather start fighting straight away, and it asks before it does anything.
A roaming merchant who stays for a few hours. You will know he is here from your inbox and from a wagon button on the HUD with a countdown on it.
Every visit he brings two artifacts of your league, rotating so you keep seeing new ones, and two items priced in Diamonds at a real discount off the Diamond shop, with the shop price struck through. Bronze league has no artifacts, so Bronze gets four items instead.
He also buys. Sell surplus artifacts and selected items for Runes; the sell set rotates per visit and the confirmation shows exactly which stats you are handing over. A piece you have equipped is never sold. Tap anywhere on a card to buy, and every purchase asks first.
Spend Runes to enchant a piece of gear. What you get is rolled from whatever fits that piece: stat bonuses, or about one time in five a rare skill, such as more survivors after a won battle or faster marches home.
A piece can carry several enchantments. The cost per level rises, and the odds of every possible roll are shown before you commit. The enchant is a ritual: the piece flies into the rune circle, charges, and either blazes into an Enchanted finale or fizzles out in smoke. A failed level keeps the Runes it spent.
Runes come from selling to the Traveling Trader.
Rallies now gather at the leader's city first and strike as one army. Join, launch early or cancel from the new rally cards, with a muster bar that fills up to the launch.
A gathering rally is visible on the map as a threat marker, so the city being aimed at knows what is coming and has the muster time to answer it.
You can also station your own troops in a teammate's city as a separate garrison, up to six reinforcers per city, recallable whenever you want.
A reinforced city shows who is standing in it. Those troops fight with the host's own defence stat and the host's walls, never the reinforcer's, and the losses are split across everyone who contributed.
A third tab in Army Movements keeps track of them, alongside what is coming at you and what you have sent.
And when a clan member makes a purchase, every member gets a claimable gift drawn from a pool for that price tier. Purchase gifts sit on top of the normal 45 daily member gifts and stay claimable for 48 hours.
On fold screens at a large UI size, the HUD buttons and the chat overlapped on the square inner display. The HUD now scales to what the display can actually hold, and windows always open inside the safe area.
On Android, a stale shader cache after an update could turn map chunks pink or into a colour mosaic and freeze the game while panning. The game now refreshes that cache itself on every update or driver change.
The gear window reloads your equipment and artifacts every time it opens, so the slots no longer come up empty while the stats still count them.
Starting up on a weak connection now retries the island download with a visible Retrying connection, and starts from the cached island when it can, instead of dropping you back to the login screen.
Settings > Notifications has a health card showing permission, channel and token, with a Send test notification button and a shortcut to your system settings. Pushes rotate their token after a long stay in the background.
Battle reports read the wall and city defence as they were at the time of the battle, and your history keeps 150 reports per bucket instead of 50.
Recall All and Grand Recall honour the march-speed enchant. A bounced army's notification tells you where the troops went. The city upgrade cost matches the server exactly. Fresh Start works as a consumable, so you restart on a new capital and the game follows the move without a restart. Sensitive consumables ask before they are used. And crash reports now reach us per device, so a report in Discord can be matched to what actually happened.