Undead Faction Booster Packs are now available for pre-sales in limited quantity!

To pre-order your Undead Faction Booster Packs simply login to the website and access your SAGA Store tab. Underneath the normal booster packs you'll see an option to pre-order these new boosters. Undead Faction packs will not be redeemable until the official launch of the Undead, but don't wait too long as the quantity is limited and you can't get them anywhere but directly through our website! The primary purpose of these faction packs is to quickly balance the Undead population on the servers.

And as a special incentive to those who are looking to start an Undead army on the quick, for every 10 Undead Faction Packs purchased you'll get 1 additional pack free when the Undead launch! Keep checking the www.playsaga.com homepage for more details soon!

Great progress is being made on the new Undead faction. Our artists, modellers, and programmers are making daily progress in adding new buildings and units to the legion of the Undead.

Sharpen your axes. In the very near future we will be adding new undead enemies into specific quests. You will start getting a feel for their exciting new powers and abilities - and learn how to fight against the Undead. Those who are clever enough will even be able to start getting an idea of what Undead nations will be able to unleash upon their enemies.

As the next few weeks go by, the Undead will be slowly creeping their way into the game and into the website. Last week, a couple of Undead unit icons even managed to sneak their way into the fan site kit.

You may have seen a new unit hiding among the neutral troops. The armored behemoth is currently being given to new players who sign up for a free account through FilePlanet, where it replaces the normal behemoth as a starting troop (visit the FilePlanet link for further details).

The armored behemoth is a little slower than the normal behemoth, but because of its armor, it has an increased Defense Rating. In fact, it now has the highest base DR rating of any unit in the game!

If you miss out on the promotion, don't worry. The armored behemoth will be available to all players in the near future, and as soon as it is, we'll let you know.

We're glad to announce that the Refer-a-Friend program has had excellent results. A big thanks goes out to all of you who have sent out invites to your friends.

Additionally, due to popular demand we've made some improvements to the Refer-a-Friend program. You can now access the refer-a-friend page from your SAGA Store tab by clicking on the link at the bottom right. Once you've done this you'll now find a listing of all the player who have joined due to your referral as well as a listing of the free packs they have earned your account!

Also we've added an HTML link so you can add your referral code to a blog or webpage! As usual we thank you for your support in helping grow the SAGA community. Each new player helps us fix another bug and get closer to adding that feature you've been waiting for.

Now is the perfect time to invite your friends and get some free boosters. Registration codes good for a registered Saga account are available at http://www.fileplanet.com/promotions/saga/. (while supply lasts)

One of the exciting upcoming features in SAGA is the addition of structured in-game tournaments. Development on tournaments continues to progress well, and we will be launching Beta tournaments within the next few weeks. Beta tournaments will be an introduction to this exciting new feature, and will allow players to enjoy tournaments without having to purchase event tickets.

The first tournament style that will be introduced is a sealed deck, eight player single elimination format. The cost of entry into a tournament is 3 sealed booster packs (and 2 event tickets, after the Beta tournaments conclude). Event tickets will be available in the Saga Store for $1 each.

At the start of each event players will open their three packs and choose a faction to play. For the purposes of the event, each troop in the three packs will become a full level 10 unit.

Using the above image as an example, if you decided to play the Nature faction you would have an army with all of the neutral units, as well as four Nature units: 1 unit of 4 treants, 1 unit of 12 bear riders, 1 unit of 8 stone giants, and 1 unit of 12 elven archers. All of these units will be at level 10.

Tournaments will allow players to experience playing with full armies at max level without needing to collect all the units and without competing against suitcase players who may own every troop in the game 50 times over.

Players are matched up 1-on-1, and the winner of each battle moves on to the next round, eventually resulting in a champion. The winner of the tournament receives 4 booster packs, the runner-up wins 3, and the other two players who make it to the second round will each win 2.

Regardless of whether you win the tournament or not, you'll get to keep the cards from the 3 booster packs (though they'll be normal cards again, not full level 10 units).

We will bring you more details on additional tournament formats as development continues.

Work has begun in earnest on an exciting new guild-based world conflict system, where guilds will battle each other for new lands and resources in an epic war for global domination. World conflict will introduce many new PvP elements, changing multi-player gameplay as we know it.

We'll be highlighting the development of World Conflict soon, so check www.playsaga.com in the coming week for more details.

The first phase in a series of upgrades to troop behavior was implemented in patch 1.41.0. Troops now move more intelligently through obstacles and re-arrange themselves more efficiently.

Check out our interview with Mark Owen, one of SAGA's programmers, at the Saga Developers Journal at playsaga.blogspot.com.

Interview with Mark Owen

In the most recent patches released, many balance changes have been implemented, and many units have had their stats changed. Here are a few other highlights:

• SAGA has added new shaders, new lighting and optimized various aspects of battle, which not only make the game look great, but increase performance in battle significantly. As a result, players are now able to enjoy larger battles with a better frame rate, and witness it all with stunning new lighting.
• Overhauled the way units flock and make use of formations. They should move much more naturally now. Several additional further improvements are also planned.
• Experience in combat is now distributed proportionately among units causing damage, no longer attributing all the experience to the 'killing blow'.
• Support has been added for larger map sizes and maps have had additional territory added around their borders (maps no longer look like they're floating in space).
• General chat upgrades including the addition of configuration options in the settings menu.
• Gold quests now indicate that they've been completed.
• Rarity of a card is now indicated in game.
• The Graveyard has had a 'Resurrect All' button added.
• Significant improvements to the overall stability of the client and servers.
• Many other fixes and changes have been made, for the full details, check out the links below for information on the last two patches.

Read version 1.41.0 Patch notes

(coming soon)

We spotlight some of the Undead units

An interview with Adam Ellis, one of our quest writers

We unveil a brand new feature that will change how you run your nation forever.