Today we would like to show off some of the new features in the upcoming release. Besides the improved map, there will be major changes to the province upgrade system. In the main article, you can find a sceenshot with detailed descriptions of the features.

 1)    Real Time Construction
Production and building times will be given in hours and minutes now. As soon as the order is given, production starts and a count-down shows the remaining time. This means that starting a construction as soon as possible is important now.

2)      Multi-Level Buildings
Fortresses and factories now have several levels, which only take a day to finish. Fortresses have five levels, with level five representing the current fortress.
Factories will have four levels. Higher level factories will produce faster and better weapons. A level 1 factory can only produce artillery units, a level 3 factory is needed to build railroad guns and battleships.

3)      Recruiting Offices
Two new building types are introduced which allow the player to control the rate at which infantry units are recruited: The “Recruiting Office” is a very cheap and fast building, but without one, no recruitment will take place at all.

4)      Barracks
Barracks increase the rate at which infantry is trained but takes away workforce from the resource production. These buildings can be disabled to stop recruitment of new troops.

5)      Deactivatable Buildings
All province upgrades with daily resource consumption can now be deactivated: Recruitment Offices, Barracks and Railroads. This allows players to prioritize certain provinces and a better management of resource consumption.

6)      Building Condition Indicators
Province upgrade icons now show the condition of the building as a status bar next to the upgrade image.

7)      Improved In-game Help
The help panel now shows the detailed properties of province upgrades and weapons, which can be produced in a province. This will help players to choose the right buildings, and marks missing resources and prerequisites in red.

Stay tuned as we are finalizing all those features during in our closed beta. The release date will be sometimes next week when we are confident that everything runs pretty smooth already.