Empire: Rebuild a Nation! v0.2 Public Alpha

[Dale]

Announcing the release of Empire: v0.2 Public Alpha!

Many items have now been finished and refined. Gameplay is a lot more stable than before, and the game now looks like a game. Build mighty armies, prosperous cities and conquer your enemies.

Unfortunately I haven't got any AI in it yet, but it works well as a multiplayer hotseat game!

Please download the latest alpha, have a play with it and let me know of any bugs/comments/suggestions. No criticism is too harsh when trying to write a great game.

http://members.dodo.net.au/~thesdale/download.html

Thanks
Dale

[Nebula]

Nice work.

Are you going to replace the surface of the minimap with a tiled version? It looks a little unatractive like this compared with the other graphics.

I noticed the minimap does not center correctly in this build. When you press on it the map is moved not directly centered. It is about a half a map to much down.

A corruption occurs when scrolling the map with the minimap. Some tiles remain on the display thus corrupting the view.

Maybe you could add a popup that says when the movement phase is over. (one with the option to disable) When you know about the movement phase and other face it is doable but when you just start you might get confused. (I did)

The king in the game is pro quaility graphics but I think he does not look like a king. Just my 2 cents.

I asume building ports has not been implemented. I tried building one but it did not seem to get into the building mode (if that is planned?) When are there going to be ships?

I hope you can add some of the ai soon. I look forward to playing a game with ai in it.
I do realise it will probably take a while. I spend most of last years proress working/learning how to code ai. Only got a couple of thousand lines of it and was buggy/slow as hell

Keep up good work

[Dale]

Astonishing.......... 331 views and only 1 reply. Surely someone else has something to say.

Nebula:

Thanks for the comments.

1. Minimap. I'm not sure I get what you mean. A tiled version of the minimap?

2. Minimap centreing. It'll be fixed in the next update. At present, when you click on the minimap the top-left corner of the main map is where you clicked.

3. Scrolling corruption. I take it that's when the edge of the map flows into the main map? Yeah I've got to fix that one. The main map stops scrolling at the edges in normal scrolling, but on the minimap it doesn't.

4. Phases. There is only one phase in the game. You do everything at the one time. You can build, move, recruit all during your turn. If this isn't what you mean, let me know.

5. King. He's not a king yet, just a Lord. That's why you need to kill off all the other Lords.

6. Building ports is in, but it's a civil building and thus only one per city. You can only build them next to beaches (on the water side) inside a cities radius. Ships will be in the next update.

7. AI. I'll start with pathfinding, then the domestic AI (buildings/resources), then the combat AI. Look for the next update.

Thanks mate.

[Zaphod Beeblebrox]

Originally posted by Dale
Astonishing.......... 331 views and only 1 reply. Surely someone else has something to say.

ok, then you will get my comments as well:
looks promising, though there is still a lot to do. i'd like to see the next update, right after ages of man has been finished

[LDiCesare]

I downloaded V0.2 and played a bit, and, well, my question is: What's new from V 0.1? I mean, could you put it plainly in the manual for example? I wanted to test new stuff, but couldn't really remember what was new.
A note on the map generator: Rivers sometimes end in the middle of nowhere. Once it might have been because there was a sea in a diagonal square, but it still looked weird.
Looking forward to an ai.