Upgrade your units and buildings to Age 9 in Age of Empires: Castle Siege update

Microsoft has updated its action-strategy game Age of Empires: Castle Siege for Windows Phone and Windows 8.1. This update will allow players to upgrade their units and buildings in the game to Age 9 for the first time.

Here's what's new in this extensive change log for the 1.6 version update:

New Features

• Players can progress to Age 9 and purchase Age 9 upgrades for units and buildings
• The Watch Signal is available for purchase in Age 4 and can be upgraded through Age 9
• The Watch Tower allows Alliance members to donate squads to other Alliance members that will help defend the castle if the Watch Signal is triggered during an attack
• Players can store decorations in the Market inventory and withdraw stored items at no cost
• New unit, Grenadiers can now be recruited from the Siege Workshop in Age 7
• New structure, Musket Tower can be built in Age 9 and set to short or long range attacks to create different defensive strategies for players

Stability

• Fixed UI soft lock that occurred when the Friends button and X button were tapped at the same time
• Fixed connection error that would occur if the app was suspended while trying to reconnect to the server
• Fixed frequent crash on phones due to low memory allocation for world rendering
• Fixed connection error that would sometimes occur at the end of battles if the player skipped opponents before starting the battle

Open Attack System

• Players will now receive a message when they are about to become open to being attacked
• The Peace Treaty icon will be red if you are openly able to be attacked
• Players will now receive a Peace Treaty for every attack. If the attack is less than 1 star, they will receive a Peace Treaty equal to one fourth the length of a one star Peace Treaty

Gameplay

• Fixed players seeing a variable amount of scouting time depending on how long it took to load the empire
• Fixed a bug where archers could defeat the tower during the tutorial and prevent player progression
• Players now get the free tech for the civilization when switching to a different civilization, in addition to the hero and special unit
• Fixed a bug where revenge attacking a player would extend the Peace Treaty of the defender

AI

• Hermann von Salza's description was updated to reflect the fact that Shield Wall affects all nearby squads, not just food soldiers
• Squads will now select a new, nearby target when directed to an arbitrary location instead of returning to their previously auto-selected target
• Fixed a bug where some siege units would stall out if a large group of siege weapons were re-targeted at the same time

Chat

• Fixed being able to type more text than can be displayed in the chat window
• Fixed focus being lost from the chat text box when pressing "enter" on a keyboard
• Improved cleanup of old messages in the alliance chat window
• Fixed a bug where having a space at the end of your chat message would make you unable to send it

UI Polish

• Fixed green "move" arrows not looking correct for some buildings
• Removed food resource display from hero recruiting screens as this resource isn't used here
• Fixed "back" button appearing on some screens that shouldn't have it after going back from a screen
• Fixed certain letters popping in when scrolling through lists
• Fixed resource fill bar lengths appearing different for the same capacity
• Fixed loading screen on phones not showing the error popup when the server is offline
• Fixed bug where unit stats wouldn't appear on some screens after viewing certain hero info screens
• Fixed incorrect deploy time shown on info screens for guard houses under construction
• Switching civilizations will no longer select different heroes in the hero selection screen

Thanks to Vishal for the tip!

Download Age of Empires: Castle Siege for Windows Phone (Free/In-app purchases)

Download Age of Empires: Castle Siege for Windows 8.1 (Free/In-app purchases)