Brit

Hi Martok, welcome to the forums. Someone else was asking a similar question the other day - http://www.battlefront.com/community/showpost.php?p=1154009&postcount=110. There are four major continents shown in this image (http://www.empiresofsteel.com/assets/images/Screenshot-RandomMapIslands2.png), and some smaller islands mixed in. I was also worried about making continents too big (and too valuable) because the first person to arrive on the continent has an advantage in taking control of it, and I didn't want it to be a "first player to the one big continent will win" kind of a situation.

The tech-levels do help, but one tech level isn't going to determine the game. In the case of tanks, a better technology tank fights about 25-30% better than the previous version. This means that a player with 13 [Class 2 Tanks] is roughly as powerful as another player with 10 [Class 3 Tanks]. A player who is behind one-technology level in all technologies can compensate for the power difference with more cities or other advantages.

No, no historical scenarios. There are currently no images for other historical periods. The unit images/animations are stored in directories, and the format is not locked-down. So, it's possible to add additional units; but the uploading/downloading is not automated, like it is for maps, scenarios, and rules. It would be nice in the future to add features so that artists can upload their own units to the game, and people can download them.

The random map generator now has five settings: sparse islands (small islands, lots of water), small islands, medium islands, large islands, and continents. All of the maps have a variety of island sizes, but the setting determines the largest island-size on that map (e.g. the "medium islands" setting creates small and medium islands, but no large islands or continents). I have thought about giving users more control over the random-map settings (like slider-bars to determine the mix of different island types), but haven't implemented that. I also want random-maps to have a certain amount of uniformity to them because I don't want one player to have a big advantage simply because he happened to start near a large, valuable continent while another player starts out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Here's a few random maps on a 1600x1600 map. You can see a variety of island sizes on the "continents" map, but it's not really comparable to a Pacific island-hopping campaign. http://www.empiresofsteel.com/assets/images/Screenshot-RandomMapIslands2.png It's also possible for people to create and upload their own custom-created maps to the server. Maybe a good mix of large and small islands could work well in someone's custom-created maps, where the creator can be careful about not giving any players a big advantage.

Right now, the largest map size is 4000x3200. The reason I say "right now" is because that's actually a very, very large map. It's probably larger than anyone needs. For comparison, our multiplayer game (5 players; 4 human players, 1 AI) was 1400x1200. In terms of map-area, the maximum map size is 7.5x larger than our multiplayer map. The map sizes are measured in pixels, so if your screen resolution is 1024x768, then the largest map would be four screens wide and four screens high. There is no maximum number cities or resources. The game allows for upto 10 players. You can set all the other nine slots to "AI" if you want. No, there is no limit on the number of units in the game at any one time. There are limits imposed by your resources (your military consumes food and oil), but it's not possible for one player to max-out the number of units and prevent another player from building more units.

Oops. You're right. I did see some of NormalDude's ships moving around down there (my aircraft were doing flights near Steve's coastline) - although that's not a strong indicator, since he could've been scouting. Also, I think they had formed an alliance, and that shows up on the foreign relations window. Alliances allow players do do some extra things, including land aircraft in your allies cities, dock ships there, and get repairs and upgrades to your units.

The new AAR is available. You can read it here: http://www.battlefront.com/index.php?option=com_myblog&show=After-Action-Report-1-from-the-Brit-s-viewpoint.html&Itemid=213

Hey everyone. I just wanted to know that we're planning on having the open-beta next month. It should start sometime around September 13-15. What will the open-beta include? You'll be able to play single-player and multiplayer games against people over the internet. You'll also be able to access the map-editor, and play-around with the map-building tools. It's also completely free. We'll provide a download link for everyone.

Yup. All players assign orders to their cities and units (simultaneously), and then, once everyone has submitted their turns, everything happens simultaneously.

No, all cities exist before the game starts.

No, sorry. You can turn-off the game-music, though, so that it doesn't interfere with music you're playing on a different application (iTunes, etc). We're sorting out the dates on the open-beta right now, and should let you know more about that soon.

The main sounds in the game are select-sounds (when you select a unit, before giving it orders), and combat sounds (tank cannons, bombs exploding, air-raid sirens, etc). I didn't add any movement sounds to the game because everything is moving simultaneously. The sounds would get confusing if everything played a sound while moving.

Thanks. One of the things I've been thinking about lately is the release of Masters of Orion 3. It got bad reviews because it wasn't a very good game. I've heard that they released several patches that made the game a whole lot better. Despite the fact that I own a copy, I still haven't bothered to get the latest patches and try it out again. The reason I've been thinking about MOO3 is because I wouldn't want to make the same mistake they did: releasing before it was ready. It sounds like they would've done a lot better holding off the release instead of releasing and then adding patches.

I'd like to get something out to people "soon", but I can't really define what "soon" means. I can tell you that it won't be this month. I can also say that one of the problems I'm dealing with right now is a networking problem. At least I'm in good company - it looks like Stardock has the same problem with Demigod (scroll down to "The Pantheon" section http://frogboy.joeuser.com/article/355534). We're using the same library. They didn't discover it until after they released the game, and now they're trying to fix it.

Hi MagicKoji. Sorry for the lack of updates. The beta has been taking longer than I would've expected. A lot has been accomplished, though. In the past few months, we've reduced the amount of memory the game takes (it was using up too much memory on very large maps with lots of AI players), speeded up turn-processing, speeded up AI decision-making, made big improvements to the game rendering (which was slowing down when there were lots of units and animations on the screen), and fixing other bugs. Some of these improvements have been pretty dramatic. I've been adding a some of the beta-tester suggestions to the game as well. At this point, we're still getting everything in top shape.

The game is still progressing. I've been doing more work on game-balancing and the AI. I'm spending a lot of time watching the AI play games against itself, watching for errors and fixing them. Interesting side note: The AI is designed to play the game with any set of rules. This means if someone creates their own game-rules, with totally new units and technology, the AI should be able to play a good game. As far as the release date: it looks like the release won't be within the first half of the year - which is only six weeks away at this point. But, we'll certainly be giving out more information during that six weeks.

Hi Hawk. The AI vs AI isn't something that I'm going to turn-on for the initial release. I do like to give users what they're looking for, though, so if this is something that people would like to see, then maybe I could open it up later.

I need to do some discussion with the publisher to figure out if we'll release before the end of June. I'll get back to you on this.

Yeah, sorry for the lack of updates. Lately, I've been busy with game-balancing issues: making sure resources on the map are balanced well against the cities' and units' consumption of those resources, tweaking the technology tree, units, and the city improvements. There's a bug that sometimes crashes the application once every 70 turns or so. I hope to get that fixed this week. And, of course, tweaks to the AI to make it play better. (It's actually very cool setting up the game to have AIs play against each other with no human players involved; this isn't something players will be able to do, but it's very nice for testing.) Things are progressing, and have been progressing over the past few months. But, it's the perpetual problem of software projects that things take longer than you initially think they will. So, that's the state of things right now: flushing out the bugs so players will have a bug-free experience, and tweaking the game-balance and AI to make the game as fun as possible.

Hi Dennis. The game maps can be anywhere from 1000x1000 (measured in pixels) to 4000x3200. I guess that's a 13x change in the size of the map area. With the exception of advanced-technology aircraft, there aren't any units that can move across the map quickly. I think the fastest naval unit moves at (around) 130. With map-wrapping turned off, moving from one corner to the far corner of the largest map (4000x3200) would be a distance of 5120 pixels. I guess it would take 40 turns (ignoring the fact that the ship would have to sail around landmasses). That's the worst-case scenario. Yes, that option is in there. You can start the game with no knowledge of the map. You can also start with all players seeing the world-map. It seemed silly to have a WorldMap, and be playing (say) a world-war game and not know what the world looked like in the 20th century. And "Scenarios" (which can be created by anyone) allow players to customize exactly which parts of the map are known by each player at the beginning of the game. Yeah, I remember reading about the old "spearman defeats tank" problem in the Civilization games. One negative aspect of having certain units always win is that it increases the importance of technology (to the detriment of any player falling behind in tech research). Unfortunately, right now, there is no technology that automatically wins against another lesser technology. I had originally thought that, because technology was limited to the 20th century, that there wouldn't really be a big need to have an "automatically wins" logic built into the system because there could only be a several decade gap between nations (as opposed to the Civilization example of spearmen versus tanks, which is several millenia). But, your example of a biplane versus modern jets is a good point. Yeah, getting the technology research to work-out in all game problems is tricky. Technology research depends mostly on research funding (money). But, money depends on the number of cities a player controls. This can lead to a situation where a small map (because fewer cities = less money = less research per turn, and smaller distances = shorter game) doesn't get very far in technology research, whereas a large map (because more cities = more money = more research per turn, and longer distances = longer game) gets all the technology research done before the game is over. That's actually a very good suggestion. I've never played "Sword of the Stars", so I didn't know about that game-dynamic. It would be a good way to balance-out the small and large maps, and one that wouldn't require hardly any change to the code. Turtling? Is that when players hide away, building up a big military and then suddenly explode apparently "out of nowhere"? Anyway, militaries are constrained by resources. All units require food, and most require oil, so players can't have unlimited numbers of units. Yes, son of montfort is right - this is mostly an academic discussion at this point. No big changes to the gameplay are going to be made. I did think the tech-slider idea was a good one though - and small enough of a change to the code that it can be done before release.

It's getting there. We'll definitely let you know at least a month before release.

Hey Guys. Sorry we were quiet for a while there. I just uploaded a new image of a world-map that will come with the game. You can check it out here: http://www.empiresofsteel.com/assets/images/WorldMap.jpg Depending on your browser settings, you may need to click on the image to see it in it's full 1 MB / 3400x1600 image-size. The map also wraps left-to-right, so you can sail from the Americas across the Pacific to East Asia. And "Panama" is a choke-point. You can only sail ships through the Panama canal if you control the city. (Hmmm, I should probably add a Suez canal choke-point as well.) I should add that I drew some borders on that map - they match the borders you'd see on a "Risk" board. I'll probably re-do those borders to match modern-day national borders. Adding to what Moon already said: >>1. I am pretty sure you said there was an AI for single play (although the game is clearly being developed with PBEM in mind) or am I wrong here?<< Yes, there are AI players - you don't need to get online and play against other people. There is no PBEM option at this point. Other people have suggested this option as well, but that won't be available at release. >>2. I noticed, like other games in the genre (i.e. Advanced Tactics), maps are generated with roads and pre-existing cities. Can you decide how "civilized" you want the map to be? Also, are their engineer style units to built stuff like roads, forts, and airstrips, or is it basically using what pre-exists?<< The random-map generator lets you choose the density/size of the landmasses. There are no options to control, say, the density of cities or how many roads are on the map. Infantry units can built airfields, and they automatically entrench if left in one location for a few turns. There are "forts", but they can't be built by units - they can be placed on the map inside the map editor. >>3. I am going to guess that the white circle around units is the range that they will engage nearby enemies (if told to do so), is that right?<< You can give your units "field orders" that control what they'll do when they discover enemy units. They can be things like "attack all enemy units" or "attack enemy ships".

(nod) Yeah, I started out with a vision to create a good, simple game (but not too simple). I've already added more complexity to it than I had originally intended, so I'm not eager to add more to it. If I were to add freighters back into the mix, I would be careful not to add obligations to the player. (For example, I could have freighters automatically do their own thing. I wouldn't want to burden the player with the need to build freighters, give them orders, setup supply routes, or stuff like that.)

Cool. Glad you like it. The problem of 'waiting for other players' in other turn-based multiplayer games was a major influence in deciding to make EoS use a simultaneous turn system.

Huh. Thanks for the screenshots. I've never seen Advanced Tactics before.