Crash report with possible data loss - 12th August 2025

While we take every precaution to avoid crashes, regrettably they still happen. In the worst case scenario, they cause progress to be lost on accounts.

Yesterday at around 11pm GMT, one of these crashes occurred, causing up to 4 hours worth of data loss. This is pretty much the worst case scenario, so I apologize profusely for this, and am attempting to manually restore data where possible. If you\'ve been effected by this - which is likely if you were playing between 6pm and 10pm server time on the 12th August, please contact me on Discord or by emailing info@takinglondon.co.uk

The cause

While the server normally crashes due to a bug in the code (an \"unhandled exception\"), it can also crash when the virtual machine the server runs on exhausts its resources (usually RAM) which causes the program to shut down in an uncontrolled manner.

This can cause data loss as the server saves data to the database in a \"non-blocking\" process - this essentially means the server puts data it wants to save in a queue for the database to handle when it has time. The server doesn\'t wait for this queue to be processed, which means if the server crashes when this queue still has data to be saved in it, that data is lost.

The database is optimized to ensure this queue never gets too big, but if there is some external stress on the server that causes the database to slow down (previously we have had this caused by cyber attacks on the database, but it can be caused by issues with the data center where the server is located or during intensely busy server times) this queue can get quite large and if there is a crash (sometimes caused by the queue itself becoming so large it consumes all the available RAM) then data loss can be quite damaging.

Compensation

While having your hard work undone is understandably devastating and alienating to players, I have assigned everyone extra construction, research and troop speedups, resource packages and mayor XP / buff items to give you the best chance of repairing the damage caused. I have also upgraded buildings in satellites that had automation set up to the maximum level. If you would like anything in particular restored, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Stopping it from happening again

While avoiding crashes completely isn\'t possible, reducing the likelihood of data loss is, and I apologize for not acting on that before, since this isn\'t the first time this has happened.

The server now routinely checks the database queue, and will enter a controlled shutdown if it detects it becoming too large, where it will process every item in the queue to ensure no data is lost, before restarting.

If something like this happens again, the database may start to repeatedly have outages due to this mechanism, so an underlying cause needs to be found and mitigated against, but it should limit progress loss - which is the worst case scenario.

New features:

• You can now open or close your city gate to allow your troops to defend your city, or avoid attackers, respectively.

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• Closing your gate will allow other players to freely loot any unprotected resources you have without having to win a battle against your troops.

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• Your troops will always fight to defend your city during conquest battles. Consider launching a conquest against a stubborn rival who only wants to hide behind their gates!

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Balance changes:

Population capacity changes:

• Active troops no longer count towards the population of your city, meaning you can have theoretically infinite troops in any city.

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• Troops in training still count and will reduce your \"idle population\" and can contribute to an overworked factor.

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• This change has been made to prolong the end game, and also allow players a fighting chance at punching above their weight, as high-level cities that could support a much larger population capacity such as London were extremely difficult, if not impossible, to win wars against from smaller cities

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Troop stats:

• The maximum range of ballistae has been increased at maximum technology levels to be approximately 90% of that of cannons, where previously it was around 50%. Ballistae are meant to be a cheap, well performing variant of the cannon, but were almost useless relative to their firearms equivalent due to the range disparity.

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Bug fixes

• A bug with the new battle mechanics where troops would not move forward if the legion in front of them was killed off has been fixed

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Next steps

The next planned major update relating to battle mechanics and PVP is reworking scouting, so - if an opponent has their gates open - you must win a battle against their scouts to successfully obtain a report. This allows players the choice to invest heavily in scouts in an attempt to avoid being scouted, allowing them to hide their intentions from nosy neighbours...

Taking London 3.0.0 is here, with completely new battle mechanics!

After the first few PVP spats, it\'s become clear the battle script - while technically complicated - lacks a practical depth, meaning the game has essentially devolved into a numbers game surrounding the infamous \"cannon-phract\" meta. Despite the predictable results, the battles were taking a significantly long time to process, ruining the flow of some of the PVP action. So, it\'s time for a shake up!

New battle mechanics

The battle mechanics have been totally reworked to solve some of the issues - namely that it was almost impossible to get a good result against an army significantly outnumbering your own, and that the vast majority of troops were irrelevant due to the power of cannons and cataphracts. The main reason for this was the \"1-to-1\" model of the battle script:

Troops attack each other on a 1-to-1 basis, meaning each individual troop you send will attack a single individual troop in your opponents army. While a cool idea, it was computationally intense and did not add much depth to battles; since damage received would be spread evenly across all opposing units, durable troops such as cataphracts could become effectively immortal in large enough numbers, as no single cataphract would ever receive enough damage to die. The only solution was to use troops that did high damage to individual units, namely cannons - however, since cannons require 4 times the population of a cataphract, so a given city can only have 1/4 of the number of cannons as an opponent might have cataphracts, there was no real counter to the \"phract smack\" from a similar or larger city than your own.

The changes to alleviate this are as follows:

• The fatalities are now calculated simply as \"total damage dealt divided by health of the target unit\" - guaranteeing even the strongest troops take some fatalities from a decent sized opposition

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• The reload mechanic has been replaced by a \"damage per second\" system - the reasons for this are complicated and boring but the long and short of it is that you couldn\'t get decent value from a \"cannon tradefire\" against a city, such as London, that had a huge fleet of cannons that you could not simply outnumber.

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• Troop stats have been tweaked to make each better at their intended niche and encourage smart army compositions; all ranged troops have been nerfed, infantry have been buffed and cavalry and cataphracts have been adjusted so cavalry may be the more viable unit in some scenarios

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• The army max troop cap has been reduced, to encourage smart warfare and not simply winning by superior numbers

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• The cap on maximum march speed bonus from mayor combat has been significantly increased to allow \"hit and run\" attacks and encourage defenders to set up a defense rather than simply hide troops from an overwhelming force

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This is a large shake-up - perhaps the biggest since the game launched - so naturally there may be teething problems. I aim to monitor the situation and work closely with the community to fix any major issues (be that bugs or balance patches) as soon as they arise - please get involved by joining the discord, the link for which can be found in-game under the \"Forums\" button on the main menu!

Good morning London Takers!

The maintenance window has been growing egregiously long, especially due to the launch of the second server. After realising there must be something wrong with this as other, much larger games do not have the same loading times, a breakthrough was found! The approximate maintenance window has been shortened to 20 minutes, and crash recovery should be along the lines of a minute or two.

This has involved a total rewrite of the way the server loads data in from the database on launch, so while every attempt to test and ensure data constistency has been made, there is a higher risk of data load bugs. If you feel like something has gone missing from your city, don\'t panic - message the devs on Discord or at info@takinglondon.co.uk and we\'ll sort it!

Happy London Taking!

Hello London Takers!

The server is currently offline, and is likely to remain that way until around 4PM GMT on 4th July; apologies for not posting this announcement sooner!

This is a planned outage as the server busies itself creating the fresh world for tomorrow's big reveal!

New features:

Alliance portal:

The functionality to join, create and otherwise interact with your alliance has been moved out of the Military Command and onto a screen accessible in the HUD, exposing much more QOL features (such as the ability to search for and invite players directly from the alliance screen).

Currently this only includes functionality that was already implemented in the Military Command version, but it is due to be expanded with:

• Applications - you can apply to an alliance rather than wait to be sent an invite)

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• Battle reports - the ability to see your allies battle reports

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Aesthetic improvements:

• The city backdrop now changes dependent on the level of the city

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• Some of the relics have had minor graphic updates

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• The game client has been renamed "Taking London" (instead of "TL Client") and been given a proper icon on Windows

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• Fixed some issues with scaling to larger monitors in cutscenes

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Bug fixes:

• Fixed an issue where selling resources was prohibited if it took you over your gold storage capacity

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• Fixed an issue where extreme troop queue times could show as negative or 0 due to an integer overflow

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• Fixed an issue causing incorrect building timers to be displayed on the upgrade screen, and glitchy troop queue behavior. Unfortunately this has meant reverting a change designed to improve lag, so responsiveness of the troop queues and building upgrades may suffer.

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Misc changes:

The guide screen has been removed in favour of a fandom.wiki page - https://takinglondon.fandom.com/wiki/Taking_London_Wiki

Known issues:

• Despite its removal, the guide screen still appears in the tutorial, and it is inferred it is still accessible.

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• The client version still displays "v2.3.0" despite this patch.

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The moment you've all been waiting for...

Since the full release on the 24th April, we've seen it all - gold mine-gate, market-gate, the great crash of 29/04, Wyddyrshyns-gate... we even had a cyber attack to deal with.

But after 2 months of hard work:

• The balance has been fixed to ensure a level playing field and no easy wins

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• The bugs and server crashes are (mostly) under control

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• Many of the suggested QOL fixes and new features have been implemented, and a few new ones of my own design have been added to keep the game fresh. A massive thank you to everyone who partakes in the "Suggested feedback" and "bug reports" channels on the Discord server - your participation has been invaluable!

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So now it is time to go again - and see if London might last longer than 9 days this time.

The Discord giveaway

Thanks to the hard work and generosity of one of our players, we'll be running a giveaway event in the discord in the hours leading up to the full release. Get involved by joining the Discord server!

You now have two options on the "Join server" screen! There is no extra cost to joining the second server and you can continue to play on both existing servers if you want.

The server will be available after maintenance on Saturday 5th July (which typically occurs at 7AM GMT), although that maintenance window will naturally take longer than usual - I'm expecting around 2 hours.

New features:

• The automation screen now contains a section allowing you to create "trade rules" to automatically trade resources at the market when your specified criteria are met

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General gameplay

• The "overworked population" multiplier has been expanded out into three different multipliers for overworking your population, running out of food and running out of gold, with each having a different effect

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• A number of warehouses in NPC cities have been converted into farms or mines, as the recent change to warehouse capacity made them effectively unlootable

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Misc

• The server infrastructure has changed to support multiple servers; this should have no visible impact on the client, but as with all large changes to code base this will increase the likelihood of bugs appearing or the server lagging

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The second of two major balance patches, that were agreed by the community as necessary to ensure server 2 does not experience any of the balance issues the first one did.

Balance patches

• The mayor "efficiency" stat no longer grants a resource discount to construction, research or troop training; instead, it grants a resource production buff to the city the mayor is hired in.

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• This is seen as a way to encourage resource production and balancing across all cities, as previously a player could ferry a high-level mayor between all cities to receive troops at a massive discount, and then sell off excess resources in the market which hindered smaller players who must rely on the market to make gold

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• The "discount" system placed a soft cap on how large a mayor could get, since it was possible to reach a point where no further discount could be applied and it was useless to increase your mayor's attributes. This has now been fixed as the resource production buff is theoretically infinite!

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General gameplay changes

• You can now loot items and relics from defensive battles as well as offensive

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Bug fixes

• Fixed an issue where the equipped resource relic would duplicate into the mayor relic slot on server restart, where it would then bug and could not be removed

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This patch now, hopefully, marks a period where all major fundamental changes to the game will stop, and a period of gentle tweaks and quality of life improvements will be made instead. Server two is now very much in the works so watch this space!

Probably high time I started using Steam for patch notes rather than just the discord!

Balance patches:

• Resources are no longer capped by the storage cap defined by warehouses, refineries and stables; instead, the storage cap keeps your resources safe from looters. This is intended to fix the issue where many of the resources in the market were far cheaper than intended, as players were selling off resources to avoid hitting the caps.

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• NPCs will now equip relics to make them more of a challenge, with better NPCs using better relics. Be sure to scout your targets first in case they've found a meaty tier 10!

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• Items can only be bought to be used immediately, and only items won from quests or looting can be stored for later use. This is to alleviate an exploit where someone could mass purchase useful items to hide gold from a potential attacker, retaining those items even if the city was lost, which discouraged defense. This has been offset by warehouses now keeping a portion of your gold safe from looters.

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Quality of life (QOL):

• The barracks now has two toggles that allow you to split a queue amongst all available barracks, or all idle barracks, to prevent having to manually queue troops in every barracks

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Misc

• The overview map on the map view now updates every 3 days. Previously it only updated the very first time you joined the server

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By popular request, Taking London has began the process of supporting MacOS! The game is cross-platform, so you don't need to worry about a lower player base if you're a Mac user.

There will be some teething issues with Gatekeeper, as there is no clear way to notarize Mac builds on a Windows machine - despite paying 79 for the joy of becoming an Apple developer...

It is likely you may have to follow this guide to get the game to run:

https://docs.godotengine.org/en/latest/tutorials/export/running_on_macos.html#doc-running-on-macos

You are interested in the section titled "App is signed (including ad-hoc signatures) but not notarized".

The team also do not have a Mac available to test on, and emulating modern Apple operating systems (e.g. through a virtual machine) is against Apple's terms and conditions, so we are at the mercy of the Godot exports for the time being.

If you're a Mac user and would like to report bugs (either to do with the game failing to run at all, or experiencing bugs within the game) please join our discord to report them directly to the developer:

https://discord.gg/c7PzBHTpZT

Happy London Taking!