WrongThinker said:

Commanders,

First, I want to thank the community for participating in this Q&A session. I’ve always been amazed at the passion you guys show for the game. I want to be completely transparent with you about the technical issues we’re having with the game, and what we’re doing to improve things.

It’s unfortunate that we’ve let sentiment get to the point where our valued players think that we’re neglecting the game. On the contrary, we’re spending most of our engineering effort improving the stability of the game and the performance of our battles.

Without further ado, let’s get to some questions and answers!

Why does it seem like some players aren't affected at all by the lag/performance issues and others are?

Lag during battle can be caused by a number of factors:

1. More expensive battles running on the same battle server that are contending for resources.
2. Lots of building animations cause Flash to redraw the entire screen. We’re working on a way to optionally turn off those animations during battle.
3. Some players have large, crufty bases which contain a lot of now-unused data.
4. Battles that contain a lot of units. Our halloween events, for example, can contain hundreds of zombies, which add a lot of processing and drawing time.
5. Playing on a high-latency internet connection like mobile or satellite networks. Satellite networks, for example, take almost a second for a message to from your PC to our server. There’s nothing we can do to lower that, unfortunately.
6. Geographic proximity to our battle servers. Generally speaking, the lower the ping time between you and our battle servers, the better your experience will be.

Shockwave crash is far too common. Are there any plans to address this?

We’ve also noticed this becoming more and more common. The culprit here is that our game client is using too much memory. As some of you pointed out, the client is allocating upwards of 3 Gigabytes of RAM when fully loaded. We plan to address this by reducing the amount of data needed to load the game, and by compacting the data already there. Both of those efforts are in progress now.

There are reports online about newer versions of Flash Player crashing when graphics acceleration is enabled. You could try disabling it by right-clicking on the game client, clicking “Settings” and disabling Hardware Acceleration.

What will happen when flash is no longer supported in 2020?

In 2018 or 2019, we are going to have to transition to using a different game client technology. The least risky course of action is to convert our (significant) codebase from Flash to the programming language Haxe and use HTML5 Canvas or WebGL to do rendering. That way, we’d be able to keep the game on the web, avoid using another plugin, and take advantage of performance optimizations available in modern browsers. We also want to avoid completely reimplementing the game client as that would take years.