feneur

I wouldn't say the Celts are at such an advantage. Not too long ago I managed to hold out pretty well against someone playing Carthaginians, quite a lot thanks to the Celt rams actually

Yes. For now think of all pages except the Civ pages as outdated The structures page should be generally up-to-date as well, though specifics vary (i.e. the stats are not exactly like that, it's mostly the houses that vary from civ to civ and similar).

Ah, those are really worthwhile (Maybe I should actually finish watching them all, that's the down-side to them being so full of content )

Not sure where you saw us saying something about forcing players to play to unlock things, but on the other hand the Design Document (DD) is in need of being updated (and it's planned to be updated before Alpha 8 actually) so perhaps it says something like that somewhere. It's definitely not our intention to dumb down the game, so apart from the phases (similar to ages in AoK etc) unlocking new buildings in each new phase there shouldn't be any such restrictions. Of course, as you say, for campaigns it could be another matter. Taking a look at the DD I see what you're talking about, it is a bit unclear, but from the context it's implied that the unlocking is of new strategies and new ideas on how to overcome obstacles and survive certain attacks etc. So no dumbing down is intended. We will look thoroughly at the DD in the coming weeks though so this should be clearer eventually.

Or we could force players to defend their farms It's no big deal either way for me, perhaps it's easier for the AIs to not have to check whether a farm is enemy/defended before farming, but apart from that people should mind where they build their farms/that they defend their farms

The Embassies are intended to exist in skirmishes as well.

Ah, that's a nice idea. Like "Life Canyon" (As opposed to Death Canyon which is set in a more arid climate I mean )

Iirc the changes to Atlas at least aren't included in Alpha 7 as there were some issues on Windows with the changes that made things work on Mac (Edit: I really wish there was a less happy smilie with his tongue out =) )

The battle system is definitely not set in stone, and there have been thoughts on how to improve it. We'll see if it's something we'll spend time on for part one, but it's definitely something we'll look into later. One thing that at least has been a part of how we've thought about these things is that the outcome of a battle shouldn't be too random. In fact, it's been an intention to not have it be random at all. In the end we'll probably end up somewhere in-between, but if nothing else it's an illustration that there are people who want to have things be non-random and following strict rules as well We do intend to add some kind of visual indication for where you've ordered your unit/units to go. That's only part of the problem you describe though. For determining if/when a player has clicked on something we use a bounding box (essentially a box around the entire object, if the mouse is above it the object will be affected - selected, attacked, etc depending on what you're doing) sometimes that means you can click quite far away from an object and still affect it. Hopefully we'll be able to find a way that's less prone to error, but we're currently prioritizing getting in the gameplay features, the things around so to speak will be our focus later. After all, if the game is no fun to play it doesn't matter as much if it's not as responsive etc. We will focus on these things later though, so don't despair

Decay (or loss of loyalty later) happen when a building loses contact with a civic centre, when the building was built it was your territory since it was under the influence of your civ centre, but if the civ centre is destroyed it's as if it had been built in neutral territory.

Using HTML and CSS is much better than flash imho (especially since not all users have flash enabled, or use a mobile to access the web that doesn't support flash. And also, flash at least has had trouble with search engines, making it hard for people to find a flash based site.)

We're still looking for a web designer to help us with it In the worst case we'll get something together ourselves, but we would prefer if we could get someone with more web design skills to do it as that would result in a better web site

Well, adding features is one thing if they're needed, adding them just because someone might need them one day is probably not a good idea (unless someone implements them just because he can like Philip did when he added support for flying units ). Generally though we're not going to add features unless they're needed. If someone needs it for a mod it's another thing though, either they'll be skilled enough to add it themselves or if it's quick and easy we might. It should probably not be too difficult to add I can imagine - I'm not a programmer so don't take my opinion on this matter too seriously - after all it's more or less what garrisoning does, only the units would reappear at a different spot. Either way, most likely not worth spending time on implementing unless someone definitely needs it

It is already done =) You can already start the playtesting and continue to edit the map. Any changes to units and buildings (after the playtesting has started) will be reset once the platesting is stopped, but all changes to the map (changed elevation, texture, etc) will remain.

A map is just a representation of reality, not reality itself There were a couple of things we needed to fix/polish before the release so we put it back a week or so, should be out next week though

This page should have all the required info: http://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/BuildInstructions (the URL is listed under acquiring the code, I could paste it here, but it's better that you have that page open to be sure you know where to find out further steps if you run into problems ).

http://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/BuildInstructions

There's no need to uninstall the release version before installing the SVN version. And it is normal afaik, they're not included in the GIT repository, so if you want to use that rather than SVN you'll have to compile the game yourself yeah.

Thanks. Am updating it

This bot will not be included in the Alpha 7 release. Most importantly because it has not been developed for it and with the Alpha 7 release just about a week away (depends on how much time it takes to fix a few remaining things and if there are any new showstopping bugs) it's too late to include major new things anyway. As far as I know no bots are programmed to handle naval battles etc, and I'm thinking it's probably not a good idea to spend too much time implementing it at this stage as naval battles etc has a lot still to be implemented so any work now would most likely have to be redone once things like ramming are implemented. On a related note: AIs are likely to "be behind" in terms of new features and might not take advantage of/react to new gameplay features until the next Alpha version or so. Of course AI developers can (and if I may be bold enough to offer my opinion are encouraged to) use the SVN version and thus develop their AIs to take advantage of new features as soon as they are implemented. However, say that a major gameplay feature is not finished until a week or two before the Alpha release, then the AI programmer/s might not have time to make their AI take advantage of it. That's of course different from case to case and from developer to developer, but I think it's wise to have that at the back of ones mind when trying out a new release

Nice to see another update. I have to ask whether you've tested this in the SVN version of the game? I just tested on Acropolis II using the latest SVN version and it didn't do well at all. It basically just built a house, then it built a bunch of farms and only gathered wood. (Also tested on Oasis II and there it didn't even build any farms. I didn't play for as long there though, but it certainly had the resources to as it had over 3000 wood iirc. It was a lot more than it needed to stockpile in any case.) Also, I got the below error: Btw, would you please add an option to turn off the "I've got this and this" message? It's interesting to see, but kinda takes away the fun from playing against it I'm guessing it's only meant to be there during the development, but even now it would be nice to be able to turn it off (You could leave something similar for later and have the bot sometimes tell the truth and sometimes lie, to confuse the player

There will be. The current plan looks something like: http://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/Civ%3A_Carthaginians#SIEGE

What is not mentioned there, but is mentioned in the Design Document (DD) here: http://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/Civ%3A_Romans_PreImp#SPECIALTECHNOLOGIES is that it will be associated with a large cost. That + it being the only Roman technology (at least as the DD is now, testing might prove it to be too powerful or too weak if the cost is too high etc, so testing will have to prove exactly what will be done) should hopefully balance it out.

Multiple attacks is indeed a feature we intend to add eventually