Empires in Ruins
Empires in Ruins - A youtube week
Orbital Potato (English)
[previewyoutube="qQPBS2WApaQ;full"]
Official Stuff Plus (English)
[previewyoutube="wbOThmZi3uY;full"]
Kokoplays MB (English)
[previewyoutube="hQiWwJn0pqg;full"]
Wood Machine (Portuguese)
[previewyoutube="gbwBoYWm60o;full"]
Perafilozof (English)
[previewyoutube="3aKkdbO8fWM;full"]
BumpyMcSquigums (English)
[previewyoutube="oQP5jpyImdM;full"]
Pho Agne (Russian)
[previewyoutube="zOgqOLkdago;full"]
Zap Zockt (German)
[previewyoutube="vFb_jocTnOU;full"]
Funghis Canal Grande (German)
[previewyoutube="pDzuStZUwSI;full"]
Gamingkrabbe (German)
[previewyoutube="MfTihaxBefo;full"]
Cheers,
Dr.H
Roadmap to Early Access
During the years, most people did grow (rightfully) skeptical about Early Access games. The failure stories and the big disappointments of the past left a bit mark on this type of release.
We like to think that Empires in Ruins EA is different. Well, first of all, we are releasing an already playable game, with very few bugs left (and mostly minor) and with almost the full contents of the final one. All the battle maps, the full campaign, all the enemies, buildings and towers, and for a lesser price than the final product.
So you might ask why Early Access if the product it's almost final, why didn't we wait further and release it normally? Well, consider this: Empires in Ruins is in the making since 5-6 years now, and we reached a point in which not even our wide set of testers is wide any longer for us to give the game the final polishing balancing and modding it needs to shine.
There is also an additional set of optional and aesthetic features that we want to get in, but we didn't have time for yet, so focused we were on finishing the core game.
With our pre-release out to youtubers and streamers (let me spoit it for you, most people are loving it ːheimerː ), we noticed a few things that are missing, a few that could be better, and some ways we could enhance the fun (specially in the Sanbox mode).
But that's a lot of words, let me give you a few details on how it will work
* Weekly, a dev blog entry, here and on our website, about the week progress
* Every two weeks, a developer stream with some tricks, insights and progress achieved
* A freely accessible beta branch for whoever wants to try, test and contribute
* An ingame feedback system (already available) for feedback and bugs reports
* The game has embedded analytics (you can opt out if you don't want them) that allow us to track some stats in order to better balance the game (victories vs defeats, duration of battles, etc).
* In the roadmap, we marked the larger updates batches, but each sub-update will go online as soon as tested. We prefered not to detail each one specifically because A) would have been edlessly long to read B) we need the flexibility to adapt to technical challenges that might arise (welcome to programmer's life).
The first update (final deadline in May) will included
* Steam Achievements
>> 50+ Steam Achievements in all gameplay modes
* Game Settings
>> Video, Audio, Controls (includes keys remapping), Gameplay Settings
* Sandbox Update #1
>> Introducing enemy hostile attacks, timed tasks and progression unlocks in Sandbox mode
* Asian Language Localization
>> Traditional Chinese, Modern Chinese, Japanese, Korean
That said, this is taken from our website as I write, so, well, no pressure ːlunar2019grinningpigː!
Going back to work now, if you guys have questions or feedback already, please don't hesitate to write on our forum, join our discord, or contact us directly!
Cheers,
Dr.H, Lead Designer
Pre-release Updates
A big thanks to all those that took some time to play Empires in Ruins, we're first of all stoked with the enthusiasm and the positive feedback, and we're absolutely thankful for the bug reports and all the technical and UX feedback.
Here's what we applied in this build this far:
* Reduced health of the Soldiers, increased cost (TODO - Add respawn time)
* Increased cost of battles progressively with chapters
* Fixed bug on Laboratories assets
* Fixed bug on Armor Research values
* Lowered the loot output of enemy provinces
* Added a safety mechanism for leaving battle maps
* Fixed issue related to movement of the headquarter
* Fixed issue caused by losing certain battles
* Fixed errore spawned by the seeling of a selected barracks and consecutive use of the building menu
* Added warning upon re-entering map in case of upcoming battles
If you're playing Empires, and you do get some funky behavior, something looks wrong or badly made, or a the Red Console of Death opens up, please click F11 and fill the report (no need to put much text, the report sends us a screenshot and the error logs).
There's a lot more to be polished and fixed before release, and only a 6 days left, so, I do hope you guys are enjoying it, and see you soon!
Dr.H, Lead Dev
This looks more like a tutorial!
That said, we knew a tutorial is necessary, but a tutorial is also quite a complex thing to make. Not only to design, but also to code and introduce into the game at the right time, when you're pretty sure there won't be any more big changes in the UIs or mechanics.
We had made a tutorial a couple of years ago, ignoring all the recommendations above, then we had to deactivate it. But, big big moment of joy, when we went to pick it up again, it hadn't broken that much!
There was for sure a lot of stuff to fix, to polish and to remake and add, but damn, most of it worked! That really saved the day for us, as it allowed to work on it a lot lot faster, and get it into the build in less than one week of full time work.
So, if you didn't do it yet, grab our demo, pick campaign, and go and teach those enemies who's in charge! Me, I go back to coding the rest of the tutorials (less necessary but still needed, one for research and a little one in battle too)
See you soon!
Dr.H, Lead Designer
Not a tutorial, but close to it
The fact that a lot of you loved it was instead really motivating.
One request we got more than often in these three days though, was to provide a textual-only tutorial while we are working on the interactive one.
Now, don't say we don't listen to you, cause only 3 days after the demo release, there's already and update with an ingame textual tutorial. It certainly won't substitute the real interactive one, but it should already give you enough guidelines to have a simpler and smoother experience through Campaign and Arcade mode!
It will appear where appropriate during your first run, so we do recommend reading it to get a better idea of what do to (cmon, don't tell me you did play Crusader Kings 2 the first time without "tutorial" :D )
Let us know if it did help, and if any suggestion, contact us in any way you like!
Dr.H, Lead Dev
December - Demo out & Day One Patches!
So, the demo is out! And guess what, it had a classic day 1 bug. Unbelievable, one week testing it, then at the last minute a small fix in order to prevent the loading of the wrong save files, and.... BADUM TSSSS: all of a sudden it's impossible to start a new Campaign.
And this is where we really need to thank our ingame feedback system: some good soul luckily reported it, and fixing it was trivial, a matter of a couple of minutes. So now the first Day 1 patch it's officially up, and the game officially works (luckily Arcade mode had worked since the beginning).
Still, we should wear sackcloth and ashes for such a dumb mistake, but well, at least it's fixed ːsteamhappyː
What's in the demo you will ask. Will you ask? Well, in case you will, here's the demo content:
* The first part of the campaign, including intro, dialogs, 5 battle maps and up to 25 turns of management.
* 5 Arcade maps to play as many times as you wish in all difficulties
* The "famed" Map 26, our workbench map, not part of the game but used to develop and test it, with ALL THE TOWERS and ALL THE ENEMIES so to see how the game evolves.
That said, we hope you like it, and we really look forward to hear what you think about it!
Talk to you soon!
Dr.H, Lead Dev
End of november - Updates
4th February 2020
Mark this date, this time is real. After endless delays and uncountable hours of work from our team, Empires in Ruins is getting revved up for release. Yes, it's an Early Access release, but the game is very very close to its final state.
The latest build does include:
- The full game campaign (5 chapters, 26 battlefields, more than 30 dialogs, 10+ hours of gameplay)
- All the 26 maps available in arcade mode
- Sandbox mode with free roaming map
- All the 100+ technologies unlocks
- All the 23 buildings and the 20 enemies
What's missing (and it will be added during the Early access period) is:
- Manually controlled research tree for arcade mode (Current unlocks are fixed and based on each map difficulty)
- The province assets visualization (HOMM-like)
- Additional scouting modes and information
- A queue system for the research tree (in Campaign and Sandbox mode)
- Localization (Confirmed languages this far: Italian, Greek, German, French, Chinese Traditional, Chinese Modern, Korean, Japanese)
- Further balancing, polishing and minor aesthetic fixes and features
That said, in approximately one week, we will release a free demo on Steam, because first of all we want to excited you and tease you (the saves will be mostly compatible with the full game), but we also want people to know what EiR is about. Being a quite unique mix of genres, we think it's much better for people to try, so those that love it can stay, those that don't like it don't have to waste further time on it!
Now guys, we're off to development, see you very soon around!
PS, have you considered joining our Official Discord Server to be part of the development (also, Emiliano gives away his secret recipes for homebrewing and cooking on a channel there ;) ) ?
Feedback system getting ready
How many times you wanted to provide feedback or report a bug but the whole process of manually taking a screenshot, searching for the log and sending an email was just too slow and time consuming and you just ended up not doing it? ( I know because I've been there a few times myself).
For our early access, we want this to change. We want to capitalize on our early access players, listen to them and use their feedback to polish, balance and fix the game to the best possible state it can achieve.
And our new feedback system is how we want to do it. Either from battle, research or main map, just click F12 and open up a feedback form. Add a title and a small description, pick the category and submit.
The system will automatically pack and send us the unity player log, the game state and a handful of information on your hardware setup (so that we know RAM, GPU, CPU, etc can be involved in the problem), take a screenshot of the current scene, and send us.
The feedback will be automatically classified by our system, so that we will be able to access the issues and solve them in fastest possible way.
In our weekly update, we will show you how your feedback has been used to improve the game too.
We're also planning to add at the end of each map a simple optional form with 3 choices (Too easy, Fine, Too hard) that will provide us with a few info on how the battle went plus your feeling about it, so to balance our more easily our 26 maps as well.
How do you like this? If you have any comment, idea or anything, please don't hesitate to let us know!!
Oomph is the word
I imagine it could be seen as a sort of 4X-lite with a strong emphasis on the story and dialogs, and with a major focus on social management other than economic management, where battles are fought in an "inglorious" hybrid of TD and RTS.
The reason for the above defintion is simple and it's intrisic in the nature of the game story. A drunkard, grumpy and unreliable sergeant is sent with a ragtag army to retake control of the Western Marches, quelling the rebellion and kicking back an invader.
The provinces, that are fallen under the riots and the enemies attacks, are to be defended by using the little resources avaiable, and once retaken under control, they need to be stabilized socially. In order to do that, an economic work is also due, of course. People need to be fed, guards and command posts need to rise from the ruins and help Sarge in re-establishing the law again.
At the beginning of summer, we had a testable version of our main campaign, and playtesting it, both ourselves and our external testers, we realized that while it worked well, it lacked two main things. First of all, one autoresolve system (see article), and second, it needed oomph.
It needed oomph in terms of both a bit of pressure on the Player (beside the plot progress) and a reward for progress. Discussing about this with Wikus in particular, one of our testers, gave me the idea of recurring riots. Every X turns (a random number in a given range, based on the current game difficulty and somewhere around 10) a riot is now gonna strike one of the player provinces, picked at random.
The better the relations with the Population, the more these riots will be take to happen. For each of the chapter objectives achieved (only in campaign mode), the timer will also be slower by one turn.
Each time the player conquers a new province, the next riot will be delayed by 5 to 10 turns as well.
Even though riots can be autoresolved, it's important to know that defeat in a riot means losing a province to the rebellion, therefore it should be important to pay attention to the choices made.
This mechanics, upon the first testing, now generates a pleasant feeling of pressure. The players now will not feel like idling forever on a single occupied province, but they will want to occupy more provinces and to achieve objectives, so to make sure the riots are occurring less often as well.
Now the ball is to the testers, to see how well this new mechanics works, specially mixed with the autoresolve system. There might be some tuning to do, but it might also mostly be on the turns values, and in that case it would be quite easy to handle. We will see, and see you soon!
Dr.H, Lead Designer & Dev
Getting closer, enriching gameplay
Hi there!
We're getting close to our Early Access release, and we're working non stop on the feedback loop from testers.
What we wanna do, is to have the game released maybe (for sure, I mean, it's early access) missing some parts of it, and having some roughness around the edges of the parts in it, but that it's fun and enjoyable already.
Last couple of weeks, working on the feedback coming mostly from the 4X community, we did add a few elements to the game. We start with the first one, the autoresolve system.
Even though battles are a core component of Empires in Ruins, in order to satisfy different types of gamer, and not to impose our own style on each run, we decided to provide the campaign (and sandbox) modes with an autoresolve function for battles.
I think this might come specially handy in case of repeated riots a player might not have intention to play on a given battlefield, or also in the case of a player more into the management/grand-strategy part and less in the details of real time battles.
Nevertheless, now Empires in Ruins has an auto-resolve mode for battles. But how does that work? First of all, we wanted to have a bit of random component, but a controlled randomization. That comes from watching testers playing and playing ourselves the game battles. Specially at higher difficulty mode it's absolutely not guaranteed that you will win, quite the opposite instead, no matter the amount of research, bonuses, etc, it's the human factor that makes the difference.
Therefore we needed to turn this into a chance of success. We're old school people, coming from board games and RPG games that went out of print already a decade ago, and the d100 is our favorite approach to things.
Let the system roll a random number between 1 and 100, if it's less or equal than the target value, you succeeded (with various levels of success), if it's larger, you fail. One thing that affects EVERY single d100 roll in the game is the main character Luck statistic. Luck can't be grown with levels the classic way, and mostly depends on random events and a few other factors, and is a value applied to every percentage check, therefore also on the one to determine the chance of victory.
So we decided to determine a system, taking into account multiple factors, that could help building up in a meaningful way that percentage of success.
Chance of Victory = Base Value(0) + Battle Modifier(1) + Research(2) + Commander Status(3) + Officers (4) + Scouted Enemy Status (5) + Game Difficulty (6)
(0) Base Value. This value is pre-determined based on the map, and on the map position in the campaign progress roadmap. It ranges from 60% (for the very first maps) to 0% (for the very last battle).
(1) Battle Modifier. This is obtained by comparing the Attack value of the province beginning a battle, with the Defense value of the target province. This difference, is used in the full battles (without autoresolve) in order to determine the
class of advantage or disadvantage for the player, with all the related modifiers (to damage, to enemies spawning time, to morale, etc). In the autoresolve, this difference is summed to the victory chance. This modifier usually ranges between -20% and +20%, but in some cases can peak to higher percentages too. It's actually clamped to a range of -50 to 25 with the reason that the impact of a negative modifier, also in classic battles, tend to be a lot more relevant than the impact of a positive one (that's life).
(2) Research. Research is divided into 5 tiers, one for each chapter, and is split among Unlocks (new towers, abilities, buildings, etc) and Upgrades (damage, production times, resources production, etc). Unlocks give the higher contribution, but both categories give a contribution to the percentage based on the tier and on the amount of elements per tier. The value ranges from 0% to 40% once all the tech tree is completely researched.
(3) The presence or absence of Heimer in a specific battle, has quite an impact on the battlefield, therefore it had to be relevant in the auto-resolve as well. If Heimer is missing the chance of victory receives a -10%. No shouting and bullying is not good for the morale it seems! If he is present, he provides a +1% plus his modifier to Damage (1/10 of his Tactics value), plus his modifier for Morale (1/10 of his Leadership value)
(4) You can have 3 officers in your board of Officers, and each officer has a rank (1 to 3, from Rookie to Veteran). In a classic battle they would provide with their abilities a modifier to various aspect of the battle, in the autoresolve, in order to simplify (the modifiers can be positive or negative so it was going to become too articolated to consider them all one by one) each empty place of the board provides a -1% to the chance of Victory, while each officer instead provides a 1% for each of his rank levels.
(5) While it has no impact on a classic battle, beside providing the player with information about the difficulty of the battle, we decided that scouting had to have an influence on the autoresolve. On one side the autoresolve makes the game faster and a lot simpler, but with scouting having an impact on the victory chance, it creates a more interesting interaction. An unscounted enemy province causes a -5% malus, a scouted one provides a +3% bonus.
(6) Finally, the game difficulty level obviously influences the chance of success, with an easy game providing a +10%, an intermediate game with neither positive nor negative influence, and a hardcore game with a -15% (keep in mind that battles are VERY difficult to beat in the classic way in hardcore mode).
What now? Well, first of all testing testing testing. On the first in-house tests, the difficulty seems to be quite ok, but I am 100% sure it's not yet. Only multiple "full" playthrough by people that are not working on this code every day will show if it's working well enough or not. On the other hand, the base idea seems solid and complex enough, still without adding any additional weight or actions on the shoulders of the player, and therefore balancing it out might end up being just a matter of tweaking values.
From Dr.H this is all for now,
Cheers!