The game will keep running in this period as it is right now. The programmers might log in on the forums to answer questions from the hotel, but there will not be any bug fixing.

I took a small break from blogging during Easter and now I’m back.

Mars continues to work on the graphics of the game.

Tony worked before leaving the city on the mass messaging system that we’ll use for important announcements ingame. Right now he’s working on making the connections between the design done by Mars and the backend that they created so far.

Raywall is still working on the battle system. This one is a biggy. We really went out of our way to make it .. “special”. He made a combat simulator for testing purposes and he’s already fixed the bugs I found so far.

I have to try every possible scenario in the battle system, check on paper if the combat simulator spits out the right results, and report to Tony anything that goes wrong. I also need to finish some buildings on paper in the next period.

Well, Tony finished the chat system yesterday and we tested it for a bit. It works and its in real time with updates at 1 second. The private chats we decided to leave them for now, due to the load on the server. Maybe in 3-4 months once the game starts we’ll implement that also if the server and the bandwidth consumed allows us. As for the alliance chat, you can’t change your nickname, it just uses the username of the player, and can only be accessed by those in the same alliance.

Raywall is working on the battlesystem and its giving him a few headaches. The 8 pages of text we gave him were the result of 4-5 excruciating days of throwing ideas around with Mars and its very complex. You can finish a battle by loosing all your infantry and only a small part of the cavalry, you can loose all the infantry and cavalry while the archers survive the battle, or you can loose only 2% of your army and your general would die anyway, due to injuries from previous battles that haven’t healed yet. To be more precise, the general will lose 30% of his life if he loses 30% of his army on the battlefield. If he is at 1% life and he loses 2% of his army, then he dies. He can be revived after that, but a general that dies doesn’t receive any experience from that battle.

As for Mars, he is locked in mortal combat with the design of the game. Still a long way from the final version, but something that can be used for internal testing of the game, before the alpha test.

I’m working right now on the small details, what should be written on each page of the game, what options each page should have, etc.

What is currently done:

• most of the buildings in the game
• half of the units are in place (those that fight): units like the general, rams, catapults, spies and two other are written down but not implemented yet
• the resources
• the map of the game
• military bonuses
• graphics for most of the military units of the first age
• part of the alliance system
• in-game messaging
• trade system is working

What we’re currently working on:

Alex: writing in this blog (:P), finishing touches on the more specialized units in the game and tackling the problem of the battles with Mars

Mars: the battle system and the graphical part of the game. Currently on military units but we all hope he’s gonna make an effort and begin work on the other part of the game graphics, so we can finally see something pretty on our screens

Raywall: military bonuses for the units

Tony: invite system for the alliances

About the part that I’m more familiar with these days, the battle system, I can tell you this. Me and Mars are going crazy trying to figure out a system that makes for a fair battle result. The problem is that there are two types of defense for each unit: cavalry defense and infantry defense. The way we have to implement this needs to bring a battle result that anyone can say its fair. Well, thats not gonna happen, but we are working on some basic principles:

1. both sides need a fairly balanced army (infantry, cavalry and archers). If they don’t, their chances of winning a battle are diminished even if they seem to have a larger force.
2. the winner of the battle needs to loose troops based on how much more troops they have then the losing side. Example: if an army of 50,000 atack a 20,000 army, they might lose 15,000 soldiers (just an example); now if an army of 500,000 atack that 20,000 army they would have to loose not just 10 ten times less then in the first case or the same number. They would have to lose 20 times less (again, just an example) because the battle is much more unbalanced.