Brit

Could be an issue with the anti-virus. Do you have any antivirus applications installed and running?

I noticed something weird the other day - some planes would have land orders even though they were already landed. I wonder if this is related to the problem you're seeing. I would always just clear the orders by giving the aircraft orders to move somewhere while not holding down CRTL. Are you holding down CTRL when you give your aircraft the first order? If so, then I suppose the land order might still be in the queue and might mess things up. I'm not sure. I should look at that again before I get out the update. You can also send me the save-game file and I'll be able to take a closer look at it.

Good point. In the rules editor, you would just need to go to the AA units, change the to-hit value against Missiles. Yes. I've toyed around with the idea of some alternate system for combat. As you outlined above, units get an attack each moment that the enemy is within range. Alternate systems would allow units to attack and have a reload rate. For example, an AA gun could fire once every turn. This would allow an AA gun to get one full attack on an incoming missile, no matter how long the missile was within range.

Are you running low on oil? Oil shortages can prevent aircraft from taking off.

Okay, I took a look at these today. I think you're right: the V2 Missile is underpowered for the price. I also renamed it "Short Range Missile" instead of "Missile (V2)". It didn't make sense to call it a "V2" - which is a specific historical name when I went with more generic names for everything else. I reduced the price of the Short Range Missile and the Medium Range Missile. I also made some changes to other ballistic missiles - they move slower now. This means that, unless they're launched from close-range, you can see them coming and potentially mount a counterstrike before the enemy missiles hit. This also increases the value of submarine-launched nukes, since it allows players to get closer to the target before doing a nuclear strike, leaving them with no time to counterstrike before the nukes hit.

I've actually been wanting to be a review of the game units and balance. The early missiles being part of that. But, yeah, from what I've heard, the V2 wasn't a very effective weapon for the cost. Although, there's no reason to necessarily stick to historical reality (though I might want to change the name of the missile), or maybe the missile can be less effective but it provides hands-on technology experience that allows for later improvements in missile technology.

Notable Changes/Improvements: - Added artillery-fire animations for artillery, cruisers, and battleships - Changed the display of missile-smoke trails to make fuller smoke - Fixed Bug: The scenario-editor discovered tool wasn't working correctly - Fixed Bug: Aircraft inside a group inside a carrier can sometimes fly-back to the wrong location on the map - Fixed Bug: There was a glitch in the animation system that would slow down the game over time - Fixed Bug with the research and resource warnings popup - The tech-research bar will appear even when the application-window width is short - Fixed a few bugs in the rules editor - Added debug and verification data to the PBEM system

Can you send me the file where this is happening. I'll mess around with it and see if I need to change some code.

Strange. Can you send me a copy of your game, with the game-events in your PBEM folder?

Cool, thanks!

Notable Fixes/Improvements: - Fixed a crash - Changed the unit-description display shown inside the city-build window - Fixed bug: 'radar visible' aircraft and missiles were appearing on the map even though they were landed. - Fixed bug: 'radar visible' missiles inside submarines were visible on the map, even though though the submarine itself was not visible - Units inside other units no longer appear on the map (this means aircraft/missiles in carriers, troops in transports) - Fixed bug: missiles would sometimes appear incorrectly after they were launched - Fixed bug: nukes would sometimes not explode Have a good thanksgiving!

That's fine. I have friends who won't join FB, either.

Hey guys. It's hard to believe, but it's been almost one year since the game was released. As part of the one-year anniversary, once the Empires of Steel facebook page gets 100 likes, I'll release a DRM-free version of the game. You'll be able to get the DRM-free version via the regular update process. Facebook Page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Empires-of-Steel/6745172658

I've never heard of that map. I'm looking it up on Google right now.

By the way, I updated the main website (www.empiresofsteel.com) to include some new embedded videos and more straight-forward information. Let me know what you think.

Since the UI (not including the actual map) is built using Microsoft technologies, I'm not sure how easy it would be to transition since there's a lot of code there. I was also a little worried about the AI running fast enough on tablets and Android/iPhones. But, I don't know enough to say for sure.

Yeah, I created all the art. Using 3D wouldn't be that difficult. I actually use a 3D model for the ballistic missile. The one problem I have with doing 3D is that small things (like units) look bad. There's problems with jaggies, and the coloring isn't quite as sharp (because I sharpen the 2d image). Some of these issues can be solved as long players use antialiasing. I also put a slight black outline around the unit to make it stand out a little more against the background. I should probably put-up a rendered 2d sprite next to the same 3D model of the same size to illustrate what I mean, so here's a comparison. (The 3D model shown below doesn't use antialiasing, by the way.) I think this is the reason a lot of games that transitioned from 2D to 3D use much larger unit sizes - because they look bad if they kept the units at the same size. (For example, when the Civilization series went to 3D in Civ 4, the units were much compared to the screen.)

The issue I had with satellite maps is that I wanted the map images to look good when matched with the unit images. I think I'd have to figure out how to send the image data, as well. The current maps don't send pixel-by-pixel map data, it uses larger blocks of terrain and along with the terrain type data, and the client machine actually builds the image. Also, players will need to know which areas are which terrain. You also wouldn't want (what the game sees as) water area to appear as land to the player, or vice versa. Yeah, although it can be a draw for players. Oftentimes, players judge the game by the sophistication of the graphics. In general, there is a correlation - in part because small indie projects have bad graphics and bad gameplay. So, I think there's a tendency to say, "This game has bad graphics or so-so graphics, it's probably not that good so it's not worth checking out". Nice graphics can be fun, too. On a similar note, I still remember how satisfying the sound of automatic weapons were in the original Fallout games - yet, they were completely superficial to the actual gameplay.

Yeah, we (KillerBee and I) were both talking to the original Empire guys at the same time. Mark Baldwin, who was one of the original Empire creators sometimes shows up at our local game developer meetings. It would've been interesting to get the Empire name, but he wanted too much money. If KillerBee paid what Mark Baldwin wanted for the name, I can't imagine he made his money back in sales. (Admittedly, I could've used the "Empire" name but not "Empire 3" since it suggests a lineage. He probably couldn't have defended the "Empire" name in court since common descriptive names are difficult to defend in court. Plus, there's already another game called "Empire" which has no connection to the original games.) Thanks. Yeah, I was just out on the KillerBee website checking out how active they were. The Yahoo Groups seem rather deserted at this point, and it looks like KillerBee hasn't been doing any more work on the Empire game - the last update I saw was from a year and a half ago. Yeah, I feel bummed about that, too.

Direct2Drive said they weren't interested in carrying EOS. I did get $100 of free adwords money from Google. I tried it for a week, but didn't see any noticeable effect on sales. One of my friends suggested doing targeted advertising with Facebook (that's part of Facebook's advertising advantages, BTW - doing targeted advertising based on your profile). Although, I guess adwords are targeted advertising, too. Battlefront hasn't been too pleased with advertising experiments they've done. (They spent a lot of money on Google Adwords, too, but didn't see the results to justify the money they spent.) I suppose once you've got a low percentage of the population who wants "X", it's difficult to do effective advertising since you're paying for everyone who sees the ad, but only making money on people who buy it. I suppose it's slightly better when you're paying for targeted advertising and only for clicks. Yeah, I know what you mean. I've been thinking back to the recent post on the forums about sexing up the units and animations. I think that's a useful suggestion. One of the other issues I'm thinking about is the fact that sales were highest for the first two months after release. 44% of all the domestic sales happened in the first two months. This means that the last ten months has accounted for the other 56%. I think part of this is due to the media cycle - they want something to report in the news. New game releases get media attention. After that, the media leaves and it's hard to get attention again. If I had quite a bit more money, I could sex-up the graphics make some other changes and then release it as "Empires of Steel 2", which might get some more media attention since it's a new release.

Direct2Drive said they weren't interested in carrying EOS. I did get $100 of free adwords money from Google. I tried it for a week, but didn't see any noticeable effect on sales. One of my friends suggested doing targeted advertising with Facebook (that's part of Facebook's advertising advantages, BTW - doing targeted advertising based on your profile). Although, I guess adwords are targeted advertising, too. Battlefront hasn't been too pleased with advertising experiments they've done. I suppose once you've got a low percentage of the population who wants "X", it's difficult to do effective advertising since you're paying for everyone who sees the ad, but only making money on people who buy it. I suppose it's slightly better when you're paying for targeted advertising and only for clicks. Yeah, I know what you mean. I've been thinking back to the recent post on the forums about sexing up the units and animations. I think that's a useful suggestion. One of the other issues I'm thinking about is the fact that sales were highest for the first two months after release. 44% of all the domestic sales happened in the first two months. I think part of this is due to the media cycle - they want something to report in the news. New game releases get media attention. After that, the media leaves and it's hard to get attention again. If I had quite a bit more money, I could sex-up the graphics make some other changes and then release it as "Empires of Steel 2", which might get some more media attention since it's a new release.

We'll be checking into it. Although, some of the game-distribution companies aren't interested in carrying EOS. I don't know what Valve/Steam will say.

Yeah, I had thought about having a third player start in the Greece/Turkey area. That area is a little weaker as far as production numbers, compared to the other two players, though. As far as the production, I tried to keep things relatively balanced. If both players stay on the mainland, then by the time both players reach the middle of North Africa, the Western player has slightly more production. The Cairo player has a little easier access to Greece and Turkey. This is part of the reason I'm calling it a "beta" map, because I think I'll be making some more adjustments to it. I did most of the work on the map months ago. It was only last week that I made a whole bunch of adjustments to the city production values and placed the resources. The scenario editor let's you place units on the map at certain times. For example, I could have a bunch of tanks show up on turn 20 if I wanted.

It's not actually a World War 2 map. It's just the North Africa map. This is the map that I was going to use for the WW2 North Africa scenario, but got too busy with other stuff to add-in all the features I needed - stuff like reinforcements at the correct times, new units (which are different for each side), turning off city-production (since neither side was manufacturing weapons or getting their soldiers from the local population), etc. I did try to balance the distribution of cities over the map, though, so that the player's sides were balanced.

Hey guys. Just wanted to let you know that I got the sales numbers recently, and sales have been low over the past two months. Do to a miscalculation, I didn't know how low they were over the month of September until a few days ago. It seems that the status quo - with me spending all my time creating weekly bug fixes and updates - isn't working. I think I need to spend more time doing marketing, or else I won't be able to continue working on the game. This will probably result in the slowdown of amount of coding I can do each week, but will hopefully result in more longevity for the game. Any suggestions you have for bringing in new players would be helpful. Marketing isn't really my favorite thing, and it's not what I'm really good at. I'm still mulling over things I can do to promote the game to new players. And if you like the game, please tell a friend. You can also "Like" the Empires of Steel facebook page, and hopefully your friends will see it. http://www.facebook.com/pages/Empires-of-Steel/6745172658