Sneak bandit or glorious western hero? At the sight of the three drama queens from the latest quest series of The West, every cowboy feels sympathy for the ladies. But which of the three one should help? Saloon girl Kiki is in search of her missing husband, cowgirl Mimi has been arrested by the Sheriff even though she seems innocent and the native Indian Lili lost her memory and whole identity.

You can find exciting challenges and lots of variety behind each of the three quest lines. I am for example just about to find Kiki’s husband and somehow I have the vague feeling that Kiki did not tell me the whole truth… Nevertheless, I will continue to keep my eyes open, as I get a brand new itemset per completed quest series. Hope you will have fun as well, see you in the game!

The year 2003 – do you remember? Michael Schumacher wins the world championship in F1 and the Concorde has its last flight from Paris to New York. But for about 50 million players from 190 countries one really special event is happening, one that is even more important than any other: The brothers Hendrik and Eike Klindworth and their friend Michael Zillmer create the first version of Tribal Wars. It started as a hobby project but became an awesome success in what felt like the blink of an eye: Ten thousands new Tribal Wars players each month, crowded forums and constant new world openings asked for a lot of time and work. After a good deal of thoughts and long discussions, the three friends made a decision: We will found a company named InnoGames!

Now, after ten years of constant development and improvement of the game, it is time to look back. Starting as a classic browser game without any graphics, we now have a modern cross-platform game with apps for iPad, iPhone and Android smartphones, which attracts new players even after this long time. Whether newbie or old veteran – first of all we have to thank you, the players! You have been with us for the last decade and your great feedback gave us the ability to continuously improve the game and to introduce new features. Thanks a lot!

In order to celebrate the birthday, we have two great presents for you: First, we produced a very special video in which former and current Product and Community Managers remember the early days of the game and talk about the frequent offline activities:

Furthermore, we have created a very special in-game event for you, which will bring you back to the beginnings of Tribal Wars. It starts on June 17! The event is divided into three phases: In the first phase, you play on the original village overview of one of the first versions and get the chance to start a special birthday quest. Here you have specific tasks, such as an attack with only one unit type. After the first phase, the village overview will become a bit more modern, but the tasks will become more difficult: Even old Tribal Wars veterans will have to show their best gaming skills with exactly timed attacks and tactical espionage. In the last phase, your village is aglow in a very special birthday design. After you successfully solved the quests, you will get great rewards: special bonuses for your resource production and awards. But you must hurry! Each phase will only be available for a certain amount of time. If time expires, you can no longer complete the tasks and the bonuses are lost. So be sure to add the start date on June 17 to your calendar.

We definitely hope that you like the video and the in-game event and that you will stay with us for the next ten years! See you in the game!

Now that I have told to you so much about the design, the different ship classes and quests in the world of Kartuga, I will this time take care of one of the key points of the game Pirates: The PvP! And we start by introducing Domination:

As you probably already know, you can choose between the Kartuga PvP modes “Domination” and “Destruction.” In both cases, two teams of four compete against each other – this is where the similarities between these two modes already end. First, I would like to bring you closer to the Domination mode here. One thing I can already tell you, however: Groups that don’t play as teams won’t stand a chance, no matter what level they already achieved!

Once you have queued for the Domination mode, the matchmaking system will look for suitable opponents. Shortly after, you find yourself on a special multiplayer map. On this map, five ghost ships are distributed, which players have to take control of in order to win. Two of these points are located in the vicinity of your starting position, two close by your opponents and one ghost ship is exactly in the middle of the map. If you are close by one of these ghost ships, a progress bar will start filling. If it completely fills itself without you being disturbed by an opponent, you have taken over the point for your team. Then your score ticker is steadily rising. The more ghost ships are in your possession, the faster your score will increase. It is always a pleasure to see when your team has taken all five ships and the points display almost rolls over – check it out in the video! Once you have reached 2500 points, the game is won and you get some team and also personal statistics. A game usually lasts about 10-15 minutes.

That’s the theory. In practice, the relatively simple gameplay of Domination, however, turns out to be guaranteed fun. You have to constantly be aware of the map in order not to miss any attempt to conquer the enemy. At the same time you also have to try to exert pressure on the opposing team by holding your points and constantly pushing for theirs.What me and a lot of other players already learned the hard way: If you do not play together as a team, you have no chance of succeeding, even if single players of your team are are superior to the enemy. battles therefore show the great balancing of the three classes : Teams who cleverly cooperate can provide excellent support for each other and defend key points of the map effectively. If your group has rather fast and maneuverable ships you can constantly show up in different places of the map, attack, steal points and retreat, and avoid direct confrontations. Or a heavily armored protector intercepts the damage aimed at the weaker engineers who then again support him with repair drones. Even higher-level opponents can’t do anything against teamwork and interaction between the classes, unless their team is also working together. So you see, there are a lot of tactics and ways you can be successful in Domination mode.

Soon we will tell you more about PvP in Kartuga and we will also introduce the second mode, Destruction, in the near future. Maybe I can still share a few tricks with you =)

Your city is thriving, you can bathe in your gold and your armies make short work of any enemy you encounter? Then we have a real challenge for you!
After a completely new campaign and world map were presented with the industrial age, there are now a number of generals who conquered all the provinces and completed all the quests. Just for those player, we opened up two brand new bonus areas with the last update.

These lands, located north and south of the known world map, are extremely difficult to conquer and even the most experienced generals will give it their all to prevail. The enemy troops are led by the French General Barthelemy Philipeaux in the north and in the south by powerful bandit El Hacha Gonzales. But not only those clever strategists will make you suffer, but also a very special new unit type, whose morale and power is rising with each lost ally. After you almost destroyed an entire army, facing heavy losses, these units are starting to really gear up and make your battered troops’ life a living hell.

I now fear for my experienced, but also very expensive units, but the fight will be worth it in any case. Apart from very rare and valuable resource, more unique rewards wait for victorious generals! In any case I already brought my army into battle position and am just waiting for the right time to attack! And what about you? Do you accept the challenge or do you have too much fear of the impending losses?

Wow, when I first saw the changelog for the current Kartuga update, I was totally stunned: So many cool new features and improvements to the game design – I could not wait until the new version would go online. Now it’s finally here and I can’t decide what to tell you first. Let’s start with the new reward system: From now on you will be rewarded for regular play. To do this you will receive a little more gold and experience points every day for your respective first PvP victory. On the fifth day you will not only get more gold and experience points, but in addition, also 30 gems! Great news for those, who regularly roam the oceans of Kartuga and love to fight against human players. Speaking of fighting against human players: the matchmaking has once again been improved and the level of each player character will now more important than. As a result, the battles are more balanced and unfair teams belong to the past!

But those of you who prefer to fight against NPCs can also look forward to the update: If you found loot in the past that required a significantly higher level than you had and thus was virtually unusable, this will now change with the new update. The loot from NPCs will be no more two levels higher than your own character level and thus clearly useful. So you no longer need to clog your inventory by items that you can only after you leveled up several times. Also the minimap has now been improved. This informs you about the level of NPC aggression, so that you can see at first glance which area you maybe you should avoid and which one provides safe passage. How often did I escape with an almost destroyed ship from a battle, only to cluelessly sail in front of a hostile pirates’ guns … This now belongs to the past, thanks to the improved map overview!
You can already see, we’re working hard on almost all areas of Kartuga, and the changes described above are only a tiny part of the whole update. The complete changelog can be found here.

So, thank you once again for your great support and extremely useful feedback to us. Only because of this we are able to further improve the game and add new features. Stay tuned, we see ourselves on the high seas!

Although Central Europe currently doesn’t look like summer, I’m sure that at some point, there will be beautiful weather attracting us to go out into the open. Since we don’t want to stop playing our favourite games because of that, our developers have created opportunities to play while being on the move – The Tribal Wars App for example, or the Grepolis Toolbox. The toolbox, however, did so far not offer every aspect of the browser version of Grepolis on the go. This is exactly what is about to change now! Our team has worked under high pressure for the recent weeks and months to develop the Grepolis App, which is now nearing completion.

The App provides you the full functionality of the browser version, so from now on you will have all opportunities to expand your empire and destroy enemy armies at your disposal – wherever you and your smartphone are! Of course, the Grepolis App will be available for free download for both iOS and for Android phones, and is optimized for the touch control of smartphones and tablets. So it’s great way for those who like to play games on their mobile phone and cannot (or don’t want to) spend as much time in front of the computer.
I’m looking forward to the insane Grepolis App and of course keep you posted here on the blog about the current status. But one thing I can promise you already: Come Summer, you will be able to enjoy Grepolis to the fullest!

Just as the celebrations for Forge of Empires first birthday ended, the next update is coming up. Version 1.01 brings you a bunch of improvements and minor bug killings by our fellow devs. But first things first: As you have noticed, many buildings and factories in Forge of Empires have got smoking chimneys. This is especially happening in the Industrial Age, for obvious reasons. Some of you told us that the smoke graphics cause problems on your computers, though. That’s why our developers had a look at it. With version 1.01, you can now decide for yourself, whether you want to activate the smoke or just keep the virtual air fresh and clean. Just check the option in the game settings menu. Another change applies for the after battle reports: The unit tool tips are now also displayed in this view. This helps you to check out the pros and cons of each unit and to prepare for the next battle. Besides that, if you are going to choose your game world, you can now also see tool tips which explain the general world system for beginners.

To improve the gaming experience even more, the new update also eliminates some minor quest and translation bugs. As you can see: even though we had some quite eventful weeks after winning the German Computer Game Award and the celebrations around the first birthday, the development team continues to work vigorously at the game and I can promise you that even more fantastic features are already waiting for you! Have fun with the new update and see you on the battlefield!

Ahoy Pirates,
We were so excited when we officially started Kartuga’s Closed Beta at the end of February, and the first players started exploring the oceans. Since then, our development team has continued to work diligently on the game and incorporated new features, improved existing ones and applied lots of minor bug fixes. All this would not have been possible without your active support! Whether in blog comments, on Facebook or on the official forum, you have always given us useful feedback, brought forth new ideas and reported bugs in the game. For this, we want to thank the entire community of Kartuga!
Let’s talk about the update we just published – In short: It resets all server data. For you, this means that all of your characters start at level 1 again, with an emptied inventory and your current rank being deleted. Crucial to this decision was mainly the idea of fairness: Many of you have already played one or more characters extensively, reached a high level and obtained powerful items. Furthermore, from now on, you’ll be able to purchase gems, which was also not possible before. Therefore, it would be unfair to all new players who were not yet lucky and couldn’t participate in the closed beta. In addition, some of the changes that we now made, were much easier to implement for the programmers, because of the reset.

Your login information, social contacts and friends lists remain, of course, so that you can get back to normal immediately after the reset. In addition, I can promise you that this will be the only time we reset the server and your characters. Everything that you earn from now will remain! Therefore – Anchors Away! From now on, it counts!

Some time ago I presented the new island quest of Grepolis to you. These offer you a variety of additional tasks and provide moral choices. In order to cope with these tasks in addition to your daily fighting and world-domination aspirations, Grepolis naturally needs a well-functioning and modern interface. For this reason, our designers and graphic artists have composed many meetings and checks each element of the interface in detail. It is always the question of how to optimize the individual buttons even further and make more appealing.
The result is this draft, but the first one should only make the new arrangements of the individual interface elements. Graphically, there were no changes.

As you can see, we have made a number of slight improvements. The appearance of the minimap has changed, for example, and upcoming features like the heroes and trade relations are already inserted as symbols (“H”, “TR”). Another important innovation is the gold icon in the upper right corner of the interface, which now displays any time you how much gold you currently have. Quest Notifications are now displayed on the left side of the interface, much clearer visible than before. After those minor changes, our designers have started to implement those ideas into a new interface. You can check out the result here:

As you can see, over the course of development, more things changed in the layout of the interface. In the upper right corner, the heroes have their own area to be displayed. At the same time you can now just visit your cities by clicking on the large upper left icon. If you have a city overview open, the icon changes, and with one click you can get back to the strategic overview. I personally like the design very much already and I think it offers many useful improvements. However, this is not the final design and we’d love to hear your thoughts about the new interface.
How do you like it? Maybe you’re even missing important features? Do you still have more suggestions for improvement? Our development team would be happy about your feedback, so don’t be shy and tell us what you think of the new design!

Finally, one of my favorite events is back up: The InnoGames Game Jam! For the sixth time we gather professionals and beginners of game development and have them create completely new games within 48 hours. Divided into teams, everyone who has the desire to create games is invited: from game designers to graphic artists, sound specialists and programmers.

There are no technical limitations to what is possible – You decide which platform you want to program or what language you use for it. The only requirement is your software must free to use and freely available. During our past Game Jams we already had a lot of cool games emerging. The winners of the fourth Game Jam created the entertaining Jump & Run “Hans and Jamal”, which you can try for yourself here. Last Game gave birth to the Tower offense strategy game “Frankenstein”.

Now you wonder where the whole event is to take place? As with the last Game Jams, we will once again open the hallowed halls of our Hamburg office and sponsor with greasy food and lots of energy drinks. The only thing you need is your hardware, lots of creative ideas and of course perseverance, because you will hardly sleep!

The Game Jam will take place between June 21 and 23: Gotten interested? Then just send us a mail to gamejam@innogames.de with a short introduction of yourself and an explanation why exactly you would like to participate in the Game Jam. We look forward to your applications!

Guys, exactly a year ago we have been so nervous and excited at the same time – because we showed you Forge of Empires for the very first time. Sure, we had already tested the game internally before and had quite the fun with building up our cities and checking out our colleagues´ empires. But it is always interesting for us to see how the players from “outside” react to a new game. Luckily, you loved it! Forge of Empires was successful from day one and the masses of players really challenged our servers. Thousands of new players every day, lively discussions in the forum, great feedback all in all: Not only the development team was running through the InnoGames office with a constant smile on their faces. After only eight weeks, we were able to tell the world about one million players being part of Forge of Empires, which was the first step to make the strategy game one of the most successful browser games worldwide. Now after one year, more than nine million people are part of Forge of Empires and a lot of new stuff has been implemented: Besides many small improvements we created two new ages. Those gave the game a complete new campaign, modern units and buildings.

But these improvements are not the main reason why Forge of Empires is so successful: you are! You guys are still very active in the game forum discussions, you give us exciting new ideas and helpful suggestions. Only with your help it is possible to keep the game successful and to give you the best possible gaming experience. Thank you so much for that!

In order to celebrate the birthday in a proper way, we created a whole bunch of new features for you. From May 8 to 21 there will be a completely new quest line: A mysterious fortune teller will visit you and has some tasks, which will maybe tell you some secrets about the future of Forge of Empires… When you completed all tasks, there will be a unique new building, which you can only get in this quest line. We also want to celebrate our award as “Best Browser Game 2013” at the German Game Developer Award (Deutscher Computerspielpreis) with you. That´s why we handed the precious award over to our graphic guys who integrated it into the game – you can now use it as a nice decoration.

So long, may Forge of Empires remain one of the most successful browser games worldwide. A toast goes out to you, best community in the world!

Fans of our strategic browser game Grepolis are generally immune to stress. Building and fortifying your cities, founding new colonies, and permanent warfare with unpleasant neighbors – piece of cake! Therefore, our developers decided to add another challenge: Version 2.39 will contain the island quests. But what exactly are they? Depending on your score, new island quests appear every 2-4 hours on those islands where you have a city. You can recognize them by this symbol here:

Clicking on this symbol will open up a window containing information on the quest. Generally you will always have two very contrary choices. Which way you will pick is entirely up to you, but you have to live with the outcome.

You can have a maximum of 4 active islands quests at once. You can see your active quests on the right side of the interface – after 24 hours they will expire, unless you make progress in the quest.
After deciding how to proceed in the quests, a second window opens and you can see the progress already made.

Additionally you can click the “Challenge”-button, which opens a window with detailed information on your task at hand.
After making some though moral decisions and finishing the quest, you can pick a reward. It will depend on your current total score – so veterans will several cities will get tougher quests but their rewards increase also.

So you see, island quests are useful to beginners and more advanced players alike – go check it out!

A computer game is a very complex thing with many different parts. Starting with a general idea of what kind of game it should be, the game designer thinks about what could be fun and what not. After many discussions, ideas and preparations, the programmers will create the first playable version of the game. They are the guys who write the code and make sure that there are no bugs which would destroy all the fun. Sound designers create the background music as well as the sound effects with the goal of an appealing atmosphere.

For me, the graphic design of a game is the most important thing, though. The game could be really good on the programming side and could have an awesome sound, but when the graphic is bad, I won´t play longer than a few minutes. That´s why I am so happy with Kartuga´s great and piraty graphic design. Our designers wanted a style between realism and fantasy. They wanted Kartuga to be a world which is absolutely plausible in itself, but the players should also be able to explore mysterious places and beautiful paradises.
The guys did indeed a great job with this, as you can see in the area trailer, for example:

With every game start, the slightly caricatured look, the bright colors and nice textures let me sink into another world. Besides that, our graphic guys were able to integrate many different graphical facets into the worlds of Kartuga. Because of the great design, I always know if I am in the oriental waters of the Empire of the Sun or shipping through mysterious Kartu. I am still fascinated by the beautiful world and sometimes I lose myself in dreams of the beautiful beaches…

Howdy Cowboys,

Time sometimes flies, right? It seems just like weeks ago, when I saddled my stallion for the first time, and explored the vast landscapes of the Wild West.  In fact, it’s been five years by now, and I still experience something new whenever I log into the game. Some of you might feel the same way: You’ve experienced the development of the West, encountered new features and discussed new ideas for the game in the forums. Here you can see a graphic with some amazing stats about the game:

For your amazing loyalty and activity, and for simply being the best community in the world, we wanted to provide you with something very special: The birthday celebrations won’t last just one day, but an entire week! Our goal is to reward veterans and newcomers alike, and please everyone with some cool gifts. This is why we have four (!) independent events running:

1. There will be a special birthday questline active from april 30^th until the 7^th of Mai. If you complete the birthday quests, you’ll receive a party set as well as another item for the holiday set. Further item for the holiday set can only be received on other special occasions, like Christmas, easter or Halloween.
2. On the birthday itself, april 30^th, there will be an experience bonus (20%) on every job in the game.
3. Everyone that logs in on april 30^th, will receive a special achievement “Took part in The West’s 5^th birthday,” and a titel.
4. Depending on the date your character was created, you’ll get a specific amount of bonds:

• 5 years = 3000 bonds
• 4 years = 250 bonds
• 3 years = 100 bonds
• 2 years = 50 bonds
• 1 year and less = 25 bonds

So you see, taking part in the west’s birthday week is rewarding in many ways – Happy Birthday The West – Already looking forward to its ten year anniversary!

Many have already asked for more, now you’ll be getting what you want:  An extension of our “Board the server Days” – we aimed to bring the server of our action-packed pirate game Kartuga to its limits and that’s what we have done! Many of you have taken the chance and followed the call of the Kartuga’s oceans.

We think that’s just great! Never has there been more action-packed matches in Kartuga and the game has grown a lot. Since the “Board the server Days” turned out to be really popular with you, we have decided to extend them until 29^th of april! So you still have the whole weekend to bring our server to sweat and your enemies to despair. Have fun!

When we found out that our strategic browser game Forge of Empires won the German Computer Games Award (Deutscher Computerspielepreis) in the category “Best Browsergame”, a loud cheer went through our hamburg office! Especially our Forge of Empires development team is pretty proud of their efforts – but they won’t rest on their laurels. With the Great Buildings, the Easter Event and of course, the new Industrial Age, we already offered a whole bunch of new content, and that’s how we’d like to continue in the future: The team’s already working on new ages, bug fixes and features, all of which will make Forge of Empires an even better game in the future.

We look forward to your reaction on upcoming updates, and, as always, appreciate feeback very much!

Attention Kartuga Fans: From the 24^th until the 26^th of April we will deactivate our Kartuga Closed Beta Key System. Therefore, everyone will able to test the game without a key – simply register, or if you already have, log in and you can set sails in Kartuga’s beautiful pirate setting. This way we can test our servers the hard way and see how many players at once we can handle without performance issues. So, everybody wins: You as players can try out Kartuga before the official launch, we will gain valid info on our system’s stability. We are also interested to see what will happen with the newly introduced rankings, when so many new players at once start the game. We noticed that some of you already appreciate the rankings very much and love to add just one more PvP-session to improve their rank. But the newbies don’t need to worry – our updated matchmaking will keep all sessions as fair as possible, with everyone having similar skills and levels of proficiency. ‘Cause the beautiful thing about Kartuga is that not only the level of yours and your teammates’ ships defines if you win or lose, but rather your abilities and the way your team cooperates. More than once I’ve experienced teams with higher overall levels loosing, because the seemingly weaker ones showed great teamwork. Well, during the “Board the Servers” days week, you can see for yourselves – have fun!

Before some time we have already published a video about the quest system of our pirate game Kartuga and exposed some information about the story:

Now it’s time to focus again on the PvP part of the game:
Cheers of victory or crushing defeat – a round of Kartuga’s domination mode can evoke a wide spectrum of emotions. Matches are often decided within the last few seconds. You’re not paying attention for one second, and the enemy team takes over a control point, shifting the odds in their favor. Sometimes I felt like biting my keyboard, because my team lost a seemingly secure victory. Exactly those situations we’d like to capture in our first Kartuga community event: We want Screenshots of your closest game results. It doesn’t matter if you were the ones that managed to snatch the victory or if you had to admit a close defeat against your opponent – what counts is the difference between the teams’ scores, which should be as low as possible. If you have a screenshot of such a result, please visit our Kartuga forum. Here you have to post your screenshot in this thread. The closest three games posted will be rewarded with gems: 1500 for the first place, 1000 and 750 for the respective second and third. Only conditions are: Only one screenshot per player and the game took place after april 16. Our event ends at April 26^th – so go out, play domination and take screenshots, there are diamonds waiting!

What a run onto our Forge of Empires Forum and the Facebook-page. Recently we asked you to send us suggestions for Great Buildings in the next Age of Forge of Empires. Thousands of names and pictures were sent to us, and we were really amazed by your dedication. After looking through your ideas, our team had the difficult task of choosing six buildings out of the mass of great suggestions. After all, we wanted you to be the ones that decide on which buildings will make it into the game in the end. Hours of discussions followed, but in the end we decided to put those buildings up for the vote:

Royal Holloway, University of London
Château Frontenac, Québec
Teatro Amazonas, Manaus
Alcatraz, San Francisco
Palmenhaus, Wien-Schönbrunn
Monumento Vittorio Emanuele II, Rom

In our Facebook-gallery you were able to give us your vote for the final decision. And we did not expect what happened then: in a short amount of time, almost 10.000 votes had been cast, and every single building was subject to heated arguments.  Thanks a lot to everyone who participated. It’s always great to have a community that’s so passionate about our game and it’s future development. And now I have the honor of presenting the victorious buildings:

with roughly 2400 votes, our winner is the marvellous Château Frontenac from Quebec!

Runner-up with 1.800 votes is the world-famous Alcatraz from San Francisco!

Thanks again to everyone who participated, we appreciate your interest in and passion for Forge of Empires and to the Wiki-Users Bernard Gagnon and David Corby for making the pictures available under the Creative Commons License!

Regardless if you rather duel in heated PvP matches or like to do missions for NPCs, our pirate action game Kartuga offers both. You probably have realized by now, that some of the quests are quickly finished, and invite you to try out some of your skills, while others are longer and turn out to be part of a larger story. Those main quests; or story quests, will lead you through the five large PVE areas of Kartuga. Passing remote islands and beautiful beaches, aspiring pirates shouldn’t lose focus for their goal: The lost treasure chest of Kartuga!

According to rumor, it contains a mysterious item, which might stir the balance of power on the oceans. But be warned: searching for the treasure won’t be without danger. On several occasions, you will get caught in the crossfire between enemy factions. The Ithosian Trade League, the Empire of the Sun and Kartu Qucha are trying to get their hands on the powerful treasure. On your travels you follow the tracks of infamous pirate John Greybeard, last known owner of the chest. Further and further you’ll sail, meeting new allies and foes, experiencing wild sea battles, power struggles and vicious treason. During your wild hunt over the oceans you’ll encounter powerful elite enemies, like Robert the bloody or Gondom the Shipwrecker. In order to defeat them, the right tactic and lots of skill are vital. So, better pack lots of ammunition, equip your finest cannons, and get ready for treasure hunting!

In this Video we show you how the quest system of Kartuga works and fight against one of the elite enemies: