Hi everyone,

First off, sorry it's taken longer than we hoped to get the site back up. Since we took it down we've taken a number of steps to improve matters. Here's a summary:

1. Ticking has changed significantly. At the top of each hour, the main game will be inaccessible while the whole game world is brought up to date with the new tick. During this period, you will be brought back to the lobby page, which gives accurate feedback on progress. This takes 2-5 minutes to complete currently.
By doing ticking in this way, instead of on-demand as kingdoms are accessed, we improve overall site performance considerably. Prior to this, the process of ticking all the kingdoms was competing for server time with thousands of frustrated players hitting F5 in their browsers, which in turn made the problem worse. Now, instead of suffering bad site performance for 10-20 minutes now there is just a few minutes of pure ticking, followed by good site performance.

2. A few provinces' data had become corrupted because there was an issue with training. To fix this in the short term, there is now a cap on how many individual batches of troops you can have in training at any one time. There's a similar new limit on the other schedules, e.g., learning and exploring.

We hope that with these changes the server will stay up during the night. Tomorrow we'll post another update with an assessment of how it went.

Thanks to you all for bearing with us while we work through these difficult teething issues.

Brian & Sean