Version v0.8 - graphics, trade, territories and performance news

We proudly announce that version v0.8 is out! Changes were made to many parts of the project and the result is definitely worth to see.

Firstly, we improved the graphic. We focused mostly on features like waves around the coast, realistically looking trees (from tree sizes to grouping them into forests) and unique terrain features like rocks, sand and mud. Another big improvement is the animation support for all units. Legionaries finally attack and fall to the ground, cavalry units trot and workers build. It makes the game very real and live. Even browsing of the map can be a great experience.

A new trade feature was incorporated in the game. Players can trade among themselves on both short- and long-term basis. Trade is always an exchange of resources and depending on the distance and relations between the trading parties (countries) the shipping costs are calculated. These factors also play a role in the risk of marauders attack. Trade makes the mutual relations stronger and motivates all parties to improve the infrastructure by building new roads and sea routes that cut down the shipping costs.

A new „territory“ concept has been added to the game. It can be used in many different ways. Each territory can vary in production, population mood or importance for each player. The concept can be further extended and adjusted for each mod. We were aiming at maximum flexibility of the game core so that the mod developers have free hands in defining the ways to use the territories.

We have introduced two new resources to the Ancient Rome mod – food and wood. Food has became one of the essential resources for all players. When there is a lack of food the cities and population start to revolt and eventually the desperate situation leeds to famine. It is quite difficult to escape from this spiral of death.

Again we improved the computer player and its possibilities. Even an experienced player will find that it is not so easy to win and this is a sign for us that we are heading in the right direction. The intelligence of computer player is adjustable, of course. What is really important, though, is that we covered the whole spectrum of players and our computer player will be a worthy opponent to anyone.
Another field of focus was the thinking time of computer player. This we managed to reduced by cca 30%.

We have also added four full hours of new music with different style and atmosphere for each mod.

Last but not least was for us a thorough analysis of performance and memory. The leap ahead in this area is significant. We managed to increase performance by 20% and decrease the memory usage down to a third comparing to the previous version. The game even with a big map of area 100x70 fields allocates only 200MB of memory which is manageable even for weaker computers.

We are also contemplating the option of entering our project to Kickstarter platform to ask the public for its support in the development. The final step of the development is going to be the most expensive and probably also the most difficult part of the whole project. We need 3D graphic artists who will create a fully professional models with animations, we need testers to play and test all aspects of the game from both the functional and user point of view and we would like to extend our development team so that we could incorporate all the necessary changes into the game as fast as possible.

Stay with us, the release is a stone throw away!