Intercontinental Matchmaking Coming Soon!

We are currently working on technology that will enable Intercontinental Matchmaking for all game modes, and it's possible that it will be ready in the near future.

The first and most direct difficulty to overcome is latency. Even under the most perfect of circumstances, there will be latency between servers on different continents. Secondly, connectivity is affected by different countries, regions, and their service providers, and this might lead to package losses and high latency.

To solve these issues, we're planning on making optimisations on multiple aspects:

• Network node selection: We will compare and analyse the network nodes of the major cloud service providers and choose servers with low latency, high throughput, and high network redundancy for different areas.
• Matchmaking optimisation: Matchmaking will first search your region before expanding to cross-continental search. Our algorithm will be set up so that you are more likely to match against players from near where you are connected, which will lead to lower latency, quicker matchmaking, and more enjoyable battles.
• Network usage optimisation: We will do our best to reduce the amount of data required to be sent and received during battles. We will reduce the number of times network info is sent; some things that previously required ten or a dozen send and receive requests will now only require one to two. This reduces the possibility of package losses.

We will do our best to use dedicated connections to reduce the impact that connections from different countries, regions, and internet service providers have on connectivity, and keep a close eye on how this pans out. Be sure to get in touch with our support team and tell us if you run into any server issues!

South America, North America, and Europe span multiple time zones. As players from all of these continents will be playing together and as peak times differ based on the region, we will make changes to events as well.

We will prioritise launching Intercontinental Matchmaking for game modes that are always available. Once we've ensured that the experience is stable, we will gradually make it available for limited-time events too.

As for limited-time events, we'll prioritise ensuring that the usual weekly events remain unchanged while extending the duration of events somewhat to cover the different time zones.

There are differences in terms of in-game content between the servers on the three continents, and that's a big obstacle to our goal of creating a unified matchmaking system.

The biggest hurdle in this regard is the Epic Leadership Doctrine. This doctrine is available on the South American servers, but not on North American and European servers. A unit with it equipped will require 16% less leadership.

For players on all of these continents to have an equal experience, and considering the time players have already invested, we have decided to make the Epic Leadership Doctrine attainable from Excavate on the North American and European servers. This will bring with it a series of changes to unit compositions on the servers of these two regions, and make for a new experience.

We also want to take advantage of these few weeks before we launch Intercontinental Matchmaking to ask you all for your opinions regarding the changes to Epic Leadership Doctrines via Discord.

Considering latency and time zone differences, our goal is to launch as follows:

South and North American Servers:

• Intercontinental Matchmaking will replace single-server and cross-server matchmaking for all permanently available game modes.
• Single-server and cross-server matchmaking will remain in place for Ranked Battle and limited-time events for the time being and will be replaced with Intercontinental Matchmaking later on.

European Servers:

• Intercontinental Matchmaking will replace single-server and cross-server matchmaking for all permanently available game modes.
• Single-server and cross-server matchmaking will remain in place for Ranked Battle and limited-time events for the time being and will be replaced with Intercontinental Matchmaking later on.
• We will keep one extra cross-server matchmaking entrance for Siege Battle which players on the European servers can use. These game servers are located in Europe and will be better in terms of latency.
• Players on the European servers may choose whether to use Intercontinental Matchmaking or cross-server matchmaking in Europe based on their latency and preferences.