Patch 1.16

It’s almost time for Patch 1.16! We are so excited for leagues and have some other great new features and bug fixes coming in the update.   Patch 1.16 is coming Tuesday January 19^th at 9:00 AM PST (5:00 PM UTC).

Remember that Leagues will be starting Wednesday January 20th at 9:00 AM PST (5:00 PM UTC), so please ensure you are in the correct alliance ASAP.

We recently gave you a preview of leagues, but we’ve got the official patch notes for 1.16 ready for you below!

Check out the patch notes for 1.16 below!

New Features:

• Leagues: a brand new tournament that divides players and alliances into smaller groups to compete against each other for in-game prizes. Players will now easily be able to compare themselves to other players without having to be in the top 200. At the end of each competition season there will be amazing rewards given out to top players and alliances in each league!
• Wonders Boost grace period: there is now a 3 day waiting period before activating Wonder Boosts if players are new to an alliance.
• Improved connection logic when enemy players are previewing your castle for potential attack. Players will now have priority to their own empires and have improved access to the game.
• Added the option for bigger buttons in game on all mobile platforms. Players will now be able to switch the size of in-game controls.
• Added a new submenu for “Country and Region Flags” under Honor Items to further organize the market place.
• 

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed the bug where some players were getting connection errors when purchasing or collecting Gold.
• Fixed the bug where the brace the walls boost was not updating the total health of the wall. The game will now include boost in calculations.
• Fixed the bug where notifications would sporadically appear for some players.
• Fixed the bug where players would occasionally be disconnected during alliance chat. Alliance members will no longer get disconnected.
• Fixed the bug where some Windows 10 users received a “failed purchase” message upon logging in and completing a battle or watching a replay.
• Fixed the bug where certain achievements were not showing when some players upgraded from Windows 8 to Windows 10.
• Fixed the bug where a few players could not see their Friends List when using Surface devices.
• Additional UI polish.
• Improved stability and performance fixes

Acronyms and Abbreviations Glossary

There are many newer players, or players new to the AoE: Castle Siege and AoE Forums, that do not understand all of abbreviations. The intent of this post is to be a glossary for all of the acronyms.  We'll start it off.  Some of these are very basic, but I didn't want to make any assumptions about the knowledge level of those visiting the forums.  There are many acronyms that are passed around, so contributions from the community will be useful.

General Game

• PT = Peace Treaty
• Res = Resources
• HP = Hit/Health Points
• PL = Power Level
• DPS = Damage Per Second
• DC = Disconnect
• Civ = Civilization
• D = Defense
• BL = Battle Log, AL = Attack Log, DL = Defense Log
• MM = Matchmaking
• CoC = Code of Conduct
• LV or LVL = Level
• GT = Gamer Tag
• AoE = Area of Effect (damage radius of weapons)
• RF = Relief Force (from watch signal) or Reserve Force (from wonder boost)

Units

• KT = Knights Templar
• TK = Teutonic Knights
• LB = Longbowmen
• RoM = Raiders of Muscovy
• GB = Great Bowmen
• MK = Major Knight
• Mam = Mamlucks
• Gren = Grenadier
• Treb = Trebuchet
• Cat = Catapult
• Cav = Cavalry
• Hals/Pikes = Halberdier
• Champs, Blues = Champions
• Cheiros = Cheirosiphons
• Reds = Raiders
• Yellows = Ladder Invaders
• Purples, XBM, XB = Crossbowmen / Arquebuser

Buildings

• AT = Archer Tower
• FT = Flame Tower (can also be Fire Trap)
• CBT (or XT, XBT) = Crossbow Tower
• BT/CT = Ballista Tower / Cannon Tower
• TE = Trebuchet Emplacement
• CE = Catapult Emplacement
• MT = Musket Tower
• WS = Watch Signal
• GH = Guard House
• PP = Patrol Point
• HoH = Hall of Heroes
• ToL = Tower of London
• BoSV = Basilica of San Vitale
• KP = Kizhi Pogost

Overview

OK, so I wanted to begin my blog with my personal AoE: Castle Siege Overview.
Age of Empires: Castle Siege is pretty fresh game in the world of "Tower Defense" genre of games, released on 17th of September 2014. and, by first look it met with many bad critics. There have been a lot of bad critics about how the game is plagiarism of another Tower Defense game, Clash of Clans.
Personally, I wouldn't agree with those people., because this game has a lot of differences with CoC such as manual control of troops, no magic and graphics.

So, lets see some of game elements:
1) Gameplay: AoE:CS is a good time killer game as you don't need to spend much time playing it. As your army finishes training (which at age 9 lasts for about an hour), you go to battle and retrain your troops. It has a really smooth gameplay, but, when you come to later ages, time becomes your worst enemy as you need to wait for upgrades to finish, which can last up to 10 days per upgrade.When it's about army, this game offers lot of different units and heroes to use in battle.
2) Money: OK, AoE:CS isn't a Pay2Win game, if we talk about patience. As worst enemy here is time to upgrade buildings, many players decide to buy Gold and upgrade their buildings faster. Also, one more big advantage for "cashplayers" is possibility to speed up hero recovery and troop training for Gold, so they can attack every 5 minutes, which lot of players don't like.
3) Balance: Well, currently, if we are watching offense and defense, offense has great lead, because there are (almost) invincible heroes like Charles Martel and Conrad the Elder that turn battle in favor of attacker. so I would say that game is not balanced pretty well.
4) Concept: This game is very rich with heroes, buildings, units and decorations. High five from me :D
5) Civilizations: There are six civilizations (Franks, Britons, Byzantines, Saracens, Kievan Rus and Teutonic Order) and every has its own unique unit and three heroes (tier 1,2,3). Also, they have different environments to play in such as:
Kievan Rus and Teutonic Order-winter
Byzantines and Saracens-desert
Franks and Britons-spring
6) Connection: Well, in some cases, connection is not game's good side. Lot of players experience connection errors in the middle of the battle, what leads them to many loses. Also, due to incompatibility with Windows 10 Mobile, checksum errors in the middle of the battle are way too often. Also, there are various other errors,  we don't know fix for yet.


Pros of this game:

• Beautiful graphics
• Controllable units
• Historic battles
• Real civilizations, heroes and units
• Beautiful UI

Cons:

• Lack of alliance wars
• Connection errors
• Balance of offense and defense is not so good
• Not yet released to Android

So, my final rate for this game (1-10) would be 8.7. This game has huge potential and with some new features, fixes and its release to Android, it would become huge rival to Clash of Clans.