Mythos_Ruler

Well, I think the Parthians will be the "Eastern" faction for Part II. If the Sassanids are ever added, then they'd be added as a kind of content add-on after Part II goes gold. But we're talking about years into the future here. lol

Yeah, such an ability would require advanced pathfinding and unit AI. It can be done, but I think it would be something added to part 2 for the Parthians and Huns.

Yep, the Pontic dynasty is descended from the Achaemenid Empire. Such a faction would have a good mix of Eastern and Greek units. Scythe chariots, various Persian-style skirmishers and levies, mixed with Greek cavalry and bronze-shield Macedonian pikemen.

Babylonians and Assyrians won't be in the game (WFG won't spend time making them and I don't blame them). But I know WFG would definitely welcome a dedicated and talented modder or mod team creating such factions as a mod.

Great news post! I think this is the way indie games will head in the future. I think they pulled in over $1,000,000 with this.

Hmm, Alexander doesn't look "bald" to me. he has blond hair.

Good post Philip. I don't think content control and "downloadable" content is inherently evil. But I do think it muddies the waters for gamers who have to shell out additional money for content they think they have already bought when they purchased the disk. It would make me feel better if they advertised their unlockable content up-front, but they don't. "Surprise!" our game has "downloadable content" that is already on your disk, so pay us a little bit more money to unlock it. It just feels like a sucker punch.

Hmm, no. I didn't catch that.

Hehe, nice work. I suggest screenshots not use such stark camera angles, but that's just my opinion.

Iberians could easily show up in a Punic Wars campaign.

As far as I know from what I have read, the Sassanids had higher quality armies than the Achaemenids, but used a lot fewer soldiers. They weren't prone to using massive numbers of levy conscripts like the armies of old.

Looks like so far the ratio of resolutions is... 4:2 = 11 Widescreen = 19

SMST, you can add me to MSN Messenger if you have any further problems. mythgamer (at) aol (dot) com

I don't really think the industry is "ignorant" of anything in the article. I also don't believe that the industry really believes that piracy is robbing them of 90% of their sales (that's just ridiculous). What I do believe is that they use the specter of piracy as a scapegoat to their shareholders, and as a justification for switching to easier-to-develop console games with dumbed-down gameplay and standardized graphics requirements. DRM and other measures also allow for better content control to milk their PC customers for more cash through "downloadable content", which is a euphemism for unlockable content that is already on the disk. Look at Empire:Total War for an example of this.

Building a Civic Centre on a settlement of course.

Yes, semi-realistic naval warfare is in the design, but I'd imagine it would be one of the last things added to the game. I doubt we'll see groups of hoplite marines swinging over to an enemy trireme and engaging the enemy marines on-deck though.

http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/05/Another-view-of-game-piracy Another view of game piracy By David on May 6th, 2010 We've been hearing a lot about game piracy recently, with big developers inflicting draconian online-only DRM systems on their users, and blaming their declining PC game sales entirely on piracy. I'm not questioning that piracy is common, since even honest, DRM-free, indie developers like 2DBoy[1] report a 90% piracy rate. I am, however, questioning what this means. How much revenue are developers actually losing to piracy? The common industry assumption is that developers are losing 90% of their revenue. That is, pirates would have bought every single game that they downloaded. From personal experience, I know this is not possible -- most pirates that I've met have downloaded enough software to exceed their entire lifetime income, were they to have paid for it all. A more plausible (but still overly optimistic) guess is that if piracy was stopped the average pirate would behave like an average consumer. This means that to calculate the worst-case scenario of how much money is lost to piracy, we just need to figure out what percentage of the target market consists of pirates. For example, if 50% of the market is pirates, that means that it's possible that you've lost 50% of your revenue to piracy. So how do we calculate what percentage of the market consists of pirates? Do we just go with 90%? iPhone piracy iPhone game developers have also found that around 80% of their users are running pirated copies of their game (using jailbroken phones) [2] This immediately struck me as odd -- I suspected that most iPhone users had never even heard of 'jailbreaking'. I did a bit more research and found that my intuition was correct -- only 5% of iPhones in the US are jailbroken. [3] World-wide, the jailbreak statistics are highest in poor countries -- but, unsurprisingly, iPhones are also much less common there. The highest estimate I've seen is that 10% of worldwide iPhones are jailbroken. Given that there are so few jailbroken phones, how can we explain that 80% of game copies are pirated? The answer is simple -- the average pirate downloads a lot more games than the average customer buys. This means that even though games see that 80% of their copies are pirated, only 10% of their potential customers are pirates, which means they are losing at most 10% of their sales. If you'd like to see an example with math, read the following paragraph. If word problems make your eyes glaze over, then I advise you to skip it. Let's consider the following scenario. Because game pirates can get apps for free, they download a couple new games every day -- or about 500 games in a year. On the other hand, normal gamers tend to play the same game for a longer time -- buying an average of 5 games per year. If this seems low to you, then consider that you are also reading a post on an indie game developer blog. You are probably more hardcore than the average gamer. Anyway, given these statistics, if the market consists of 10 million gamers, then there are 500 million pirated game copies, and 90 million purchased game copies, From the perspective of every individual game, 80% of its users are using pirated copies. However, only 10% of the market consists of pirates. PC game piracy Does this also apply to PC (Windows/Mac/Linux) gamers? Many PC game developers find that about 90% of their users are running pirated copies -- does this mean that piracy is killing PC games? Let's try our alternative explanation, and see if these statistics are possible even if only 20% of worldwide PC gamers are pirates. The average PC gamer worldwide only buys about three games a year, and plays them for a long time [4]. I buy many more than that, and you probably do too, but again, we are not average gamers! On the other hand, game pirates might download a new game every few days, for a total of about 125 games a year. Given these numbers, games would see 90% piracy rates even though only 20% of gamers are pirates. Are these numbers accurate? The NPD recently conducted an anonymous survey showing that only 4% of PC gamers in the US admit to pirating games [5], a number that is comparable to XBox 360 piracy statistics [6] . However, since piracy is inversely proportionate to per-capita GDP, we can expect piracy rates to increase dramatically in places like Russia, China and India, driving up the world-wide average. Let's say to 20%. This means that if all pirates would otherwise buy as many games as the average consumer, then game developers would be losing 20% of their revenue to piracy. But would pirates really buy games? Anecdotally and from studies by companies like the BSA, it's clear that pirates for the most part have very little income. They are unemployed students, or live in countries with very low per-capita GDP, where the price of a $60 game is more like $1000 (in terms of purchasing power parity and income percentage). When Reflexive games performed a series of experiments with anti-piracy measures, they found that they only made one extra sale for every 1000 pirated copies they blocked [7]. This implies that their 90% piracy statistic caused them to lose less than 1% of their sales. Why are PC games really losing sales? While many game developers blame piracy for their decreasing PC game sales, it is clear that this is not the problem -- relatively few gamers are pirates, and those that are would mostly not be able to afford games anyway. However, it's easier for these developers to point their fingers at pirates than to face the real problem: that their games are not fun on PC. The games in question are usually designed for consoles, with the desktop port as an afterthought. This means they are not fun to play with a mouse and keyboard, and don't work well on PC hardware. Their field of view is designed to be viewed from a distant couch instead of a nearby monitor, and their gameplay is simplified to compensate for this tunnel vision. Blizzard is one of the most successful game developers in the world, and it develops exclusively for desktop computers. Why do they succeed where everyone else fails? They create games that are designed from the beginning to work well with the mouse and keyboard, and with all kinds of desktop hardware. If developers spent more time improving their PC gaming experience, and less time complaining about piracy, we might see more successful PC games. With the Humble Indie Bundle promotion we've seen that when we treat gamers as real people instead of criminals, they seem to respond in kind. Anyone can get all five DRM-free games for a single penny, and pirate them as much as they want -- we have no way to find out or stop it. However, in just the first two days, we have over 40,000 contributions with an average of $8 each! Would we have seen this much support if the games were console ports that only worked when connected to a secure online DRM server? We'll never know for sure, but somehow I doubt it.

I think it would be too much micro management. You'd have to take micro away from something else, IMHO. The one plus side is that the leveling is automatic. Still you have to micro which villagers go where then, based on their ever changing skillset.

Yeah, the entities and GUI code are going through a big revamp at the moment.

I think the player should be able to place a building beneath units. The units would then move out of the way when the builder approaches to begin construction. Thoughts?

Hello you two.

That's not a bad idea. It would take some scripting, but the engine could handle it, from what little I know about entity code. However, I wouldn't do it in a game where you might have 200 such citizen-soldiers. It would be pretty awesome though if the game used a battalion system and you could customize your battalions in such a way.

A "netbook" is not meant for playing games (it's meant to surf the Internet, email, chat, listen to music, etc). It'll probably run on a fairly new notebook though.

Such detail can be implemented easily, however 0 A.D.'s game design does not include such distinction between soldiers and farmers (for instance). In 0 A.D. farmers are soldiers.

Some very good ideas there, m8.