Hi everyone!

I’m beyond excited to announce that as of this post, we are opening the public beta for the new Earth Empires gameplay experience!

Things are still in a semi-polished state but we’re eager to start getting feedback and seeing how some of our initial concepts are received by the community. This is an opt-in model and DOES NOT impact any of the existing work on http://www.earthempires.com but we hope everyone will start moving their play over to the new UI as we continue to near feature parity with our existing site. Here is the information you will need to get started!

Accessing the beta
You can access the beta at: https://alphaui.earthempires.com

Accounts
The UI (user interface) project uses REAL ACCOUNTS and REAL COUNTRIES. You can log in with your existing username/password or sign up for a new account if you don’t have one, however if you play multiple countries on the same server you will (as always) be picked up by our cheating detection tools.

Logging in with Google
We’ve enabled logging in with your Google account already for the beta. If you already have an account, log into it and visit the “Account preferences” page (User icon in the top right corner -> Preferences) and you can link your account to a Google account instead of needing to log in with a username/password. We’ll add some more options like Facebook when we get a chance.

Mobile vs desktop
The above link is designed to work for both desktop and mobile browsers. Give it a try on your phone and see what you think!

FFA console
This iteration is focused on the single-country playing experience so we haven’t had a chance to explore the FFA console. We’ll look at this in the future (both the API/functionality layer and just making it exist in the new UI)

Providing feedback
There is a button on the top bar called “Feedback” that will launch a Google form to collect your feedback, including screenshots or videos. Please keep the feedback constructive in nature. We’re especially looking for feedback on larger concepts and interactions. We’ll get more into nitty-gritty stuff later. We also have the New UI Project Feedback forum (https://www.earthempires.com/...m/new-ui-project-feedback) where you can have more in depth discussions on features, functionality, etc.

Possibility of bugs, missing or broken experiences
Because this is a beta, things may break or not work as designed so be careful if you’re playing a country you care about. If you’re worried about this, create a country on a server you don’t normally play on to test things out. Some features (like clan admin, standing orders, country search, etc) are not available yet as they are not complete.

So a big thanks to everyone who’s helped make this work possible — especially Jabroni1134 and Bug who have helped me move this work to the finish line since joining the team (not that we should be content with a beta being the finish line! :p).

I look forward seeing what everyone thinks and hope you’re all as excited as I am to modernize the game.

Thanks~!