Closing a deal feels like a payday now. After you execute a deal, the result shows the deal’s icon with your cash and XP counting up. If you get a loot drop, it appears as a card in its rarity color with the collection it belongs to. Level-ups get their own banner, with everything you just unlocked.
See your progress at a glance. Deals on cooldown and divisions being upgraded now show a bar that fills as the timer runs. Each division shows its level as a 10-step meter in its industry color.
Your XP and Heat are in the top bar. On wider screens, a small bar next to your CEO level shows how close you are to the next level. Hover over it for the exact XP. Your SEC Heat is now always shown, and it changes color as it moves from Clear (green) to Watchlist (yellow), Investigation (orange) and Lawsuit (red). Click it to go to the Heat page.
Nothing about gameplay has changed. Costs, rewards, odds and timers are exactly the same as before.
v1.20VisualUpdate
New Look: Icons for Every Division, Deal and Item
The game now has art, not just text. This is the first step in making Empire War look more like a game. Every one of the 90 divisions, all 31 deals, and all 40 collection items now has its own icon. Employee titles and specialties, the five deal tiers, and the achievement categories have icons too.
Color now means something. Each industry has its own color: Technology is blue, Energy is yellow, Media is purple, Finance is green, Real Estate is orange and Retail is pink. You’ll see it on your divisions, in the shop, and when scouting rivals. Collection items are framed in their rarity color, from gray Common up to gold Legendary, so you can see what you’re missing at a glance.
Nothing about gameplay has changed. Costs, income, odds and rewards are all exactly the same. The icons load once and are then cached, so pages stay fast.
Thank you to the artists. Most icons come from the artists at game-icons.net. They’re all credited on our new Credits page, which you can also reach from the About page. More visual updates are on the way.
v1.19FeaturePrivacy
Delete Your Account Any Time from Settings
You can now delete your account yourself. You’ve always been able to ask us to delete your account and your data. Now you can do it any time from Settings: scroll to Delete Account and press Email Me a Deletion Link. We email a link to your account’s address that works for 24 hours. Open it, check the account details, tick the box to confirm, and press Delete Account. Changed your mind? Press Cancel and the link stops working, or just ignore the email. Deleting needs both your game login and access to your email.
What gets deleted. Everything: your login, company, divisions, employees, cash, items and collections, achievements, IPO history, mission and challenge progress, PvP history, notifications, saved logins and mailing-list subscription. It happens right away and can’t be undone. Prefer to ask? Email [email protected] and we’ll delete it for you.
If a rival deletes their account. Your battles with them disappear from your PvP history, along with notifications that mention them, and any skim running between you ends. Cash, XP and achievements you already earned are yours to keep. They also drop off the leaderboards.
Fair Play Fixes: Loot Odds, Referrals & Double-Click Bugs
Loot drops now match their description. The guaranteed loot from the daily all-missions bonus and the Drugwars bonus was meant to be a common-tier drop, but it was actually picked evenly from every item in the game, legendaries included. It now uses the same odds as the quiz’s Market Crate: 50% common, 30% uncommon, 15% rare, 5% epic. Items you already have are unchanged, and these drops now count toward completing collection sets and achievements, which they didn’t before.
Referral rewards now pay at Level 10. Level 3 took only a minute or two, so throwaway accounts could still farm referral rewards. Your friends now need to reach Level 10 before you get your 2-4 Energy Drinks, $10,000 and 500 XP. The Recruiter achievement now counts friends who reach Level 10.
Bug fixes. Fast double-clicks or several open tabs could scrap the same duplicate item twice, hire the same candidate twice, pay for a division upgrade twice, or lose XP when two rewards landed at the same moment. Each of these now happens exactly once.
Weekly challenges now pay out. The weekly challenge always promised $25,000, 500 XP, an Energy Drink and a rare collection item, but nothing was actually paid. Sorry about that. Completed challenges now show a Claim button on the Missions page, and challenges you completed in the last few weeks can be claimed too. You also get a notification when you finish one.
Fairer challenges. Empire Builder now counts division upgrades as well as purchases, XP Hunter counts XP from every source (not just deals), retaliation wins count toward Weekly Raider, and you no longer get PvP challenges before you can attack (Level 11). Progress made just after midnight UTC, before your challenge was created, is no longer lost.
Referral rewards now paid at Level 3. The Energy Drink you used to get the moment someone signed up with your code has moved to the Level 3 milestone: when each friend reaches Level 3 you get 2-4 Energy Drinks (the sign-up drink plus 1-3), $10,000, 500 XP and a 10% chance of a Quick Close Kit. You still get a notification the moment someone joins. Friends who play earn you the same total as before; sign-ups that never play no longer pay out. The bonus-employee roll, which never actually granted an employee, has been retired.
Fixes. The low-cash warning bar and the bankruptcy alert now display properly (the warning bar’s button was nearly invisible), and rewards can no longer be claimed twice by double-clicking or using two tabs.
v1.16FeatureMini-GameSecurity
New Daily Mini-Game: Guess the Bigger Company
Think you know the market? A new daily challenge sits under Drugwars on the Missions page. Guess the Bigger Company shows you four real S&P 500 companies and asks one simple question: which one is worth the most? Every answer is checked against live market caps, updated every few minutes while the US market is open, and afterwards you see the real numbers side by side, plus how many other CEOs got it right.
Three questions a day, getting harder as you go, from a warm-up to a head-to-head inside a single sector. Every correct answer pays cash and XP, and getting all three right unlocks a perfect-day bonus with a Market Crate loot drop. Answer all three every day, right or wrong, to build a streak: rewards grow 10% for each day in a row, up to +50%, and every 7th day pays an Energy Drink and a Blue-Chip Crate with rare-or-better loot. New questions arrive at midnight UTC.
Stronger login protection. Repeated wrong passwords are now limited on our servers instead of in your browser, so bots can no longer get around the limit. Browsers where you’ve logged in (or stay signed in) are remembered, so someone hammering your email with wrong passwords can’t lock you out of your own device. If you ever are locked out, reset your password and open the link on the device you want to use.
v1.15FeatureSecurity
Stay Signed In for 30 Days & Smarter Account Security
No more getting logged out every time you step away. Until now your session ended after about 25 minutes idle, so checking in on your empire meant logging in again and again. Tick “Keep me signed in” when you log in (it’s on by default) and you’ll stay signed in on that device for 30 days after your last visit. On a shared computer, leave it unticked: you’ll be signed out after two hours without activity. And always press Log Out when you’re done.
Your saved login is tied to your device. If it turns up in a different kind of browser (say, Firefox instead of Chrome), on a different type of system (Windows instead of Mac) or in a different time zone, it stops working and asks for your password. That makes a copied login far less useful to anyone who isn’t you. Traveling across time zones? Expect to log in once more after you arrive.
New security controls. Settings now has a Sign Out Other Devices button. Changing or resetting your password automatically signs out every other device, and logging out ends that device’s saved login for good. Pages you leave open in another tab keep working after you’re signed back in, and your daily login streak still counts once per day, with no double rewards from reopening several tabs at once.
v1.14FeatureIPOBug FixBalance
Bankruptcy Alerts, Accurate Cash Warnings & IPO Hardening
Two reliability passes this update — one you'll see right away, one that hardens the end-game.
Never get blindsided by bankruptcy. A new low-cash alert now appears the moment your company starts bleeding money or runs low on cash: a sticky bar on every page (amber when cash is running low, red when it's critical), plus a one-time popup right before you go bankrupt and your staff walk out. Each alert shows how much runway you have left and exactly how to recover — collect division income, resolve strikes, or run a deal. It's smart about uncollected income, too: money waiting in your divisions counts toward your runway, so you won't get a false alarm just for not clicking Collect.
Accurate cash warnings. The “Cash Critical” warning used to ignore your income multipliers and takeover skim, so a thriving company could get a scary bankruptcy alert while actually turning a healthy profit. Warnings now use your true net income and clear the instant you're back in the black.
IPO hardening. A full sweep of the go-public flow ahead of more CEOs reaching it. The 12-hour cooldown between IPO Preparations now works correctly (it could previously be skipped), and IPO Preparation is now exclusively part of the IPO Center rather than a separate repeatable deal — its old Titan slot is now filled by a brand-new deal, Leveraged Buyout (real risk and reward, not a guaranteed payout). The deals page also shows your IPO progress and links straight to the IPO Center, so what's left to go public is always clear. Your company is now properly shielded from hostile takeovers during the Quiet Period, exactly as the game promises. Dividends pay out precisely once a week with no chance of a double payment, and executing an IPO is now fully atomic — a stray double-click can never create duplicate companies or duplicate payouts. We also corrected the Quiet Period details (income and salaries pause while you're locked) and fixed the Speed Run achievement being awarded incorrectly after an exit.
Guide
The complete How to Play guide, in one picture
New players kept asking the same three questions: what do Action Points actually buy, why does SEC Heat matter, and what happens when you IPO. So the How to Play guide now opens with a single infographic covering the whole loop — the core cycle of collect, execute deals and build; how AP accrues per CEO level and per IPO exit; the six industries and the management ladder from Intern to Executive; hostile takeovers with their 30 AP cost, income skim, 4-hour shield and free retaliation; the SEC Heat tiers from Clear through Lawsuit and what a PR team does about them; and the IPO prestige reset with its permanent bonuses. If you have been playing a while it is still worth a look — the heat tiers and the retaliation window are the two things veterans most often have wrong.
v1.11Bug FixBalance
SEC Heat Fixes, Power Broker Rebalance & Scrap Values
A focused fix to how SEC Heat is applied and reported. No more phantom heat: hostile takeovers used to announce "+heat" even when you didn't actually gain any — the notification now shows the heat you really gained. Power Broker rebalanced: the collection now reduces all heat you gain by 50% and applies consistently to both deals and takeovers (previously it only affected takeover heat, and its old "immune below 50" effect made heat vanish entirely). Cutting heat in half keeps the risk system meaningful while still rewarding the set. Crossing into the Lawsuit tier (heat 76+) now reliably triggers the SEC fine no matter how you got there — deals or attacks. Finally, scrapping duplicate collection items pays 10× more ($1K common up to $500K legendary), and the scrap button now shows exactly how much cash you'll get.
v1.10Performance
Faster Loading & Behind-the-Scenes Polish
A performance and infrastructure pass. The site is dramatically lighter now — the icon library was trimmed from 602 KB down to 17 KB, the social share image was recompressed, and game scripts now load deferred, so pages paint faster on every device (especially mobile). Under the hood there's also a round of SEO, caching, and security hardening — a refreshed sitemap, tighter security headers, and cookieless analytics — all aimed at helping new CEOs discover Empire War. No gameplay changes here; just a smoother, quicker experience.
v1.9FeatureBug FixQoL
New Logo, Forgot Password, Strike Fix & SEO Overhaul
A fresh look and a batch of important fixes. New brand logo — a crowned dollar sign — now appears across the site, with refreshed favicons, app icons, and a redesigned social share image. Forgot Password is finally here: reset your password from the login page via a secure emailed link (expires in 1 hour). Strike fix: staff will no longer go on strike while you have division income waiting to collect — payroll now auto-collects accumulated income before anyone walks out, so a profitable company stays staffed even while you're away. Achievements fix: many achievements that weren't firing (Full Portfolio, Synergy Seeker, Loyal Crew, Dream Team and more) are now reliably awarded — the game re-checks your milestones every time you visit HQ. Plus retaliation strikes now clearly show the income you skim, and a round of SEO and structured-data improvements to help new CEOs find the game.
v1.8FeatureBalanceQoL
Quick Close Kits, Energy Drink Use, Sortable Staff & Balance Fixes
Big quality-of-life update. Energy Drinks now actually do something — click the cyan battery icon in the header to refill your AP to max. Quick Close Kits are a new rare consumable that clears ALL active deal cooldowns at once — find them in the pink briefcase icon. Quick Close Kits drop rarely from Login Streak Day 7 (25% chance), All-3 Daily Mission Bonus (5% chance), referral milestones (10% chance), and as a guaranteed bonus on every IPO exit. Also: employees are now displayed as a compact sortable list (8 sort options including Skill, Salary, Loyalty, Strikes First) instead of bulky cards. Deal success rate now shows your effective rate including unassigned employee bonuses (+1% per 100 skill of matching specialty). Several deals have been assigned specialties (Sales, Tech, Legal, Security, Operations) so your unassigned staff actually boost relevant deals.
v1.7PvPNPCsBalance
PvP NPCs & Hostile Takeover Improvements
The corporate battleground just got more competitive. AI-controlled companies now populate the PvP landscape — featuring iconic names like Stratton Oakmont, Gekko & Co, and Cyberdyne Systems. NPCs will auto-retaliate when attacked and occasionally launch their own hostile takeovers against you. Income skimming now pays out over 4 hours as bonus income/hr, and your attack rules page clearly shows what you'll earn before you strike.
v1.6FeatureNotifications
Notification System Overhaul
Push notifications now fire for all major game events: PvP attacks, division upgrades, AP full, deal cooldowns ready, SEC audits, cash warnings, and more. A new notification preferences page lets you toggle exactly which alerts you receive. Similar notifications are now grouped in the notification center to keep things clean.
v1.5BalanceHeat
SEC Heat Penalties Now Enforced
SEC Heat penalties are no longer just visual — they're real. Investigation tier (heat 51-75) now reduces division income by 15-30% and deal success by 10%. Lawsuit tier (76+) hits income by 35%. The Watchlist tier (26-50) introduces random SEC audits with a 15% chance per hour to freeze a random division for 1 hour. Manage your heat wisely.
v1.4BalanceEmployees
Employee Skills Now Impact Income
Employee skills are now fully integrated into the game economy. Operations specialty employees passively boost division income regardless of assignment. Employees assigned to divisions boost that division's income. The employee page now shows team power summaries and tooltips explaining what each employee contributes.
v1.3FeaturePartner Games
Daily Bonus & Drugwars Integration
A new Daily Bonus section has been added to the Missions page. Complete a game of Drugwars to earn $10,000 + 200 XP + a guaranteed loot drop — higher value rewards than standard daily missions. More partner games coming soon.
v1.2FeatureSocial
Referral System & Share Button
Refer friends and earn rewards. When someone registers with your referral code, you get an instant energy drink (full AP refill). When they reach CEO Level 3, you earn 1-3 energy drinks, $10,000 cash, and 500 XP. Refer 5 players to unlock the Recruiter achievement. A native share button is now on every game page — shared links automatically include your referral code. (Updated in v1.17: the sign-up Energy Drink is now paid at the Level 3 milestone instead.)
v1.0Announcement
Empire War Launches
Empire War is live! Build your corporate empire from a startup garage to a global conglomerate. Execute deals, build business divisions, recruit employees, launch hostile takeovers, and climb the Power 500 leaderboard. When you're ready, IPO your company to cash out and start fresh with permanent bonuses. Free to play, runs entirely in your browser.