In this month’s update we’ll get into details on Hegemony III’s all new event/objective system, new upgrades to impress your neighbours and manage your slave trade, as well a progress report on the map and art assets and details on the new beta for Rome.Dynamic Campaign
For most of the last month we’ve been buried in lua code working on the new event system for Hegemony III and we’re really excited about how it’s coming along. Unlike the previous games, Hegemony III doesn’t focus on a specific leader or campaign but rather on a time and place when many similarly powerful nations fought for control. While we definitely want players to enjoy building the Roman Republic, we also want it to be just as fun to establish a new Etruscan or Greek Hegemony. To do this, we needed a framework that was flexible enough to adapt to wildly different strategies while still incorporating the historical details the series is known for.
Scripted Events
This is where the new event scripting system comes into place. As you’re playing, the new system looks for patterns and conditions in the database and dynamically creates objectives and events that respond to your play style. These can be as small as a request to rescue hostages from a raider fort or as significant as the invasion of Campania that triggered the first Samnite War. Following or ignoring these events is entirely up to you. You may choose to appease the Samnites by allowing them Campania, or push East early and forestall Brennus’ sack of Rome.
Importance of Diplomacy
At the same time, we’ve streamlined the diplomacy mechanics while making their effects on the game are more important than ever. The occurrence of many random and historical events depends significantly on your relations with other factions. Maintaining peace with the independent cities of your faction results in completely different path to unification than if you choose to conquer by force.
Custom Events
One of the coolest things about the new system is how easy it is to add new events either through updates or mods. Since everything is generated as you play, even 10, 20 or 30 hours into a game you can install a mod that adds the chance of a Spartacus-like slave revolt or a Pyrrhic-scale invasion. All events are written in standard lua script and just need to be dropped in the right folder to run.
Monuments, Slave Markets, and Sanitation
In addition to the event system, we’ve also been working on refining the upgrades including dropping some underused buildings like the supply depot and adding new ones like the monument that increase your faction’s intimidation score opening up new event and diplomatic options, the new slave market that lets you buy and sell slave units, and various sanitation upgrades that boost your city’s growth.
Art and Map
We’ve also made a lot of progress on the content for the game, all of the civilians that populate the cities and resource buildings are now done and we’ve added about a dozen new miniatures to the strategy map over the last month. About 90% of the playable map is now sculpted, painted and forested (that’s about 70,000 trees) and the rest should be done in the next couple weeks. This week Blake is filling in some holes in the Roman roster including the Leves and Velites so with any luck we might be able to play Rome for the next Twitch broadcast.
Rome Beta
And last but not least, we’ve got another Beta for Hegemony Rome up on Steam. Beta 3 includes some further improvements to unit and group movement as well as some new modding support. We’re hoping this will be the last beta so we can officially role out 2.2.2 to the general crowd.