One of Imperial Conflict's long standing "quirks" is that there has never been a unified concept of time.  Round after round, everything starts over at Week 1, Year 0 like some sort of cosmic take on the Groundhog Day movie.  This hasn't been a problem before because, unfortunately, our empire histories have never survived beyond the window of a single round.

That changes as of today.  I am happy to announce that galaxy, family, and empire data is now being recorded every tick and stored permanently.

In order for this to happen, we had to canonicalize our time data, meaning we had to unify all time references in the game to a common baseline.  That baseline is May 10, 2000 at 07:53 AM, when imperialconflict.com became accessible.  Our new "Week 1, Year 0" happened 7 minutes later, at 8:00 AM that Monday.

A good way to look at it is that a "Universal Imperial Time" now exists independent of any specific galaxy.  As I write this, the new official game time is Week 46, Year 2811.  Everywhere.

This allows us to look up a galaxy, family, or empire via a common time identifier and receive information that will never go away.  For example, here's the current #1 family in StarBurst as of 1 tick ago:

https://imperialconflict.com/families/v … snapshot=1

That family's snapshot (and all of your families' snapshots) will never go away.  This is an important step in a larger goal to better preserve and recognize the value of our experiences with IC.

The other, more practical, benefit of this is that it allows for analyzing information trends in the context of the game itself.  Imagine a new special operation that allows you to say "hmm, this potential threat seems to be expanding eastward" with an animated visual.  Imagine being able to keep tabs on a new round's exploration phase to see who's spreading themselves too thin.  These features don't exist yet, but now that the data is there the possibilities are limited only by our creativity.

This feature will have updates coming, and galaxy/player snapshots are not yet viewable.  For now though, you can see this in action by viewing a family page and browsing their snaphots.

Enjoy!

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