Upcoming Q&A with Game Designers - Spring 2021 Edition (Questions)

It’s time for another highly anticipated game designer Q&A! Submit your game-related questions below by 2021-05-26T06:00:00Z!

Please note that while we may not be able to answer all individual questions, we will try to cover most of the topics raised by the community.

SGG Staff Answering Questions:

  • Tim – Head of Game Design
  • Joel - Game Designer

You can check our previous AMAs here:

We are looking forward to your questions, so fire away! :crossed_swords:


What hero/event/thing do you think is well designed but the players don’t seem to have interest in or understand?

I’d also be curious if y’all went through the top ideas and gave your thoughts on them. Likely? Never? What you may do instead? If it’s easier you could take old examples of ideas that are now in the game and walk through how it went from player idea to in the game the way it is.

I’m also generally curious about Tim and Joel as people. Who are you? Background? How/why’d you get this job?

What feedback from beta players has been most helpful in making changes prior to full release?

How do you decide when ranking is done by top X number of players (monthly challenge events) versus percentage (weekly raid tournaments)?

Are there any player myths you’d like to clear up? Examples include: anything to do with RNG, war/raid/tournament match making, damage formula

What is/would be your war defense?

We appreciate the opportunity! Thank you!


I have a few questions:

  1. The longevity of this game is dependent on being able to attract new players when older players retire. At the moment, with a glut of 5* heroes, emblem classes, costumes and the upcoming ‘Limit breaker’ what are the developers plans to help reduce the chasm and help new players catch up and being able to compete with those have been playing for 3+ years?

  2. Are there any plans to update the Daily Summons Portal? The ‘Elemental Summons’ and ‘Epic Hero Summon’ Portal was introduced back when the game first started before there were Event summons, Ninja Tower, Atlantis, S3, S4, costume, Tavern of Legends Portal. These older portals don’t such much purpose other than to trap newer players into spending gems unwisely.

  3. Why are the developers keen to introduce features like ‘Limit Breakers’ which 80% of the people polled here feel negatively about?


My question:

“What was the biggest constraint you had to deal with while developing Empires & Puzzles?”


Will it be possible, one day, to see (live or replay) how our defense team perform in wars, or in raids to see how our teams manage to resist?

Why did you choose to let us upgrade 3 on 4 food storage to advanced, 3 on 5 iron storage, 1 on 4 house… and so on, and not to upgrade all of them?

Do you think that an advanced training camp, where we could have hope to pull heroes others than classic ones might be doable? Even at a cost of more recruits/food/iron/time ?


29 posts were merged into an existing topic: Upcoming Q&A with Game Designers - Spring 2021 Edition (Discussion)

I have hundreds of questions but I’m going to keep it to my 3 biggest issues that sometimes make me want to quit the game:

  1. What are the plans for keeping the game F2P and C2P friendly, with each year there is much more todo and less catchup mechanics. A player who starts today is easily looking at a 2 year investment to start producing HA10, and with an average of 2 special 5* per year, there’s not that much exciting things to look for (without some luck) - can we expect some guaranteed implements next to the lootbox system? What else is being looked at?

  2. I’ve been tracking the popups a bit. And we get spammed with popups every 2-4hours. Doesn’t matter if you’ve been playing all day or offline. Can we expect an implement of the “don’t show again today” system? I understand you want to fling all these offers at people, but it would be much less annoying (thus, keeping players) if we’d have an option to only show each offer once per day (automatic, first login, 24hours no popups)

  3. I’d rather be playing the game more. Instead, I find myself running down my battery on auto. I don’t get to play the part I want to play sometimes because I’m short on time. So I’m left with the decision: do I want to play the game, or be efficient and autoplay and play the game later. The (very noticeable) decrease of loot tickets makes me think you guys don’t care. What improvements can we expect to reduce the grind time?
    Personally I think age of magic has a great system here. You’d be able to get loot tickets in hard levels so you’d be happy to spend loot tickets on them because you were pretty much guaranteed to get them back. I once did the math and by giving 50x more loot tickets you’d still be grinding autoplay every day. So again, what improvements are in the works?


First of all a big thank you for the opportunity in this Q&A session. It’s much appreciated. My question(s) centre on QOL.

Since the Sneak Peak post from E&P staff on 26th January this year, there have been a high volume of “player wishes / wants” for inclusion under the umbrella of QOL.

From all the ideas and suggestions posted by players in the forum this year - What is your feedback?

Which are the top ten QOL ideas / requests that you have accepted and will therefore implement in 2021?

Which 5 QOL ideas / requests submitted by players do you consider not to be viable for E&P and have therefore discounted? And can you say for what reason please?

Thank you


Will you increase Quintus, Elkanen, Azlar and Vivica skill power ? They are only S1 5* that should get some upgrade but doesn’t get.


The cost of research/storage capacity is so high add that with length of time it’s discouraging…
Any chance to add a low cost building/research event?

Ever concidered a trade portal with alliance members, reset the hero to 0 1 trade for X amount of gems or trade for ascension items would be awesome. Only among alliance members and for set amount of time in that alliance like with mythic titan. I’d pay gems to have an extra chance at getting somewhere with my heros.

Last question
Why allow alliances with 1-5 members? Too many alliances leaves many empty or short members.
An alliance should be minimum of 8 or even 5 IMO
Wasted space. Ever concidered making a min limit


1- When will game chat be upgraded and/or brought to modern standards? This was supposed to be done in 2019

2- Will there ever be an ACTUAL fix to the duplicate 5* issue.

3- All the issues/ideas that @Ultra posted


Firstly, thank you, I really enjoy playing the game, especially during the pandemic! I’ve a few questions:

  • How do you measure the success of a new feature? For example, I don’t like Ninja Tower, but I know many people do. Likewise, other features that I like might drive threads of negativity and I wonder how you as game designers judge whether that commentary is fair and in need of a fix or whether you have other metrics that you can say “Feature X” achieved its goal. An intro into your game design success process would be really insightful

  • Could you give more frequent updates on upcoming features, and the thoughts behind them? Even a quarterly update to say, this is what’s coming, this is what we’ve learned from this recent feature/hero. I feel like we only get snippets of perspective when Petri or Kira reply or you release an update to the app.

  • Would you ever consider a way to unlock heroes as a result of gameplay as opposed to the luck of the portal? Something like a chance to get hero shards when you complete a level for example.

  • What is the current status of doing something to address the problem of duplicate 5 star heroes? The Hero Academy is useful, but once you get most of the season 1 heroes it becomes a weekly recycle. A trade-in system or some way to enhance chances of a hero you don’t have would be really useful.

  • Do you play the game? What are your favourite heroes, combinations, gameplay features?


First off, thank you for a game well done. I have no complaints however I do wish to ask if fifteen star titans will ever become a reality? I understand we have mythic titans which is great, but when your alliance has reached its plateau regarding titans, the same old fourteen stars one after the other becomes monotonous.

Which brings me to a suggestion for a future challenge event or season; humanoid/titan hybrids! This way players have an opportunity to have titan like creatures as part of their roster.

Also, a suggestion from one of my alliance mates. Can you offer multi colored troops for leveling, or at least allow cross leveling of troops? The multi level troops would be an excellent four star draw from the portal.


What’s a hero that you thought would hit it off well with the playerbase but ended up ignored?

What’s a hero that you thought wouldn’t be popular but ended up being in the meta?


Considering the high amount of support for adding 4* Atlantis / event etc. Heroes to hero academy, could this be on the table? Keeping in mind that many long time players still rely on key 4*s for many game modes

And also that there are 4* tournaments and tiers in challenge events


Are there any plans to increase 4* ascension mat drops, or increase the rate of rare quests?
We have element specific rare titans, are there any plans to add rare titans that have a bonus drop chance of tomes/dblades?
Can new quests be added that offer 3* and 4* troops?
Can a system be added to trade/convert iron into ham even at a 2 or 3 to 1 conversion rate?
Add some more options for chat room selections. Peer Support is supposed to be for helping and answering peer questions in the game. Lately it is filled with titan merc requests and alliance recruitment.
Better sorting options for heroes and troops.
Hero Slots… they are far to expensive for most players, and there really needs to be more. Maybe again… a quest added to increase hero slots…


First of all, thank you very much for doing this Q&A.

My question is about exchange rates in the game. Several games (mobile and otherwise) and gaming platforms (steam and PSN just to name a couple) use to adopt regionalized prices, taking into account the economic reality of each country and fixing prices according to their respective market.

Recently (and this was aggravated by the pandemic and other political factors), global economy is a little more unstable than usual, leading currencies from some developing countries to suffer great devaluation, which caused in-game prices to increase roughly 100-150% for some players in a short time span, because currently, all in-game offers costs the same in all countries (direct conversion from the USD, it seems). Is there any plans to tackle this issue (making the game more accessible in developing countries)? If not, what are the obstacles?

Thanks in advance!


Long before the release of the Hero Academy, players of all spending levels have been plagued by the minimal value of duplicate heroes as well as the roster space these duplicates fill up.

  1. Is there a solution being worked on?

  2. What would an acceptable solution look like from SG’s perspective?

  3. How accessible would a duplicate solution be to various levels of players in terms of purchases/longevity in the game?

  4. If (1) is ‘Yes’, is there a goal of when this will be seen in beta?

I ask (3) because if the solution costs 10 duplicates and 3k gems (as an example), it may provide an avenue for duplicate use on paper, but would fail to solve the large scale problem in practice. Folks would be unable or unwilling to use the feature and SG would end up resolving nothing.


Are there plans to build out the friendly/intra-alliance raid system more? I think it’s pretty universally agreed amongst the player base that it would be valuable to be able to use tournament and war rules as part of the practice options.

Also, my main QOL gripe has been the same for literally years: Why not add “max” and “none” (or whatever you want to call them) buttons to training camps, HA, and AL, so we don’t have to hold our fingers down on the + button for 30 seconds every time we want to pull ham from a TC, or every time we want to add to our AL queue, etc.? Extremely tedious, and seems like it should be a REALLY easy addition…

ETA: Actually, I take it back. The roster filtering/sorting options mentioned by @jinbatsu above are my main QOL gripe! That would be an amazing improvement! (But probably much harder to implement, I’d assume…)


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