Honestly all we need is more players to stay. We have so so many new players that only stay for a couple of days never to return. If player retention was higher, we'd be golden - everything else would follow the population.
My cousin joined to a late-game round of slaughtered and got, well, slaughtered by HE heavies while desperately repairing a lonely turret in the open field. She never returned after that round.
We definitely need more mines. Mines improve the game tremendously. When you see every doorway in your spawn point coated in mines, you know that there's a lot of learning to be had. The game does a great job of giving you plenty of feedback on why you just instantly died. That way, next time you won't die instantly to something that you never saw coming. That kind of excellent feedback loop really does a great job teaching new players the best part of this game. And even better, we have a lovely skill that lets players defuse mines. If that same skill didn't make them entirely undetectable by mines, then they might actually have some incentive to diffuse those mines. It's a pretty well integrated and thought-out system that promotes teamwork. Therefore, we probably need to put even more mines into empires. There's really no reason not to.
Sparty you forgot the part where there is no indicator you are defusing a mine until it literally disappears
Pretty vague question there OP... Simplicity is the life and death of Empires, the average players attention span is too short, so make it a 5 button mobile app and you'ld have plenty of players, is that what Empires needs? Anyway defusing mines takes too long for my taste, make it half a second and it would make defusing more worthwhile.