Moved to the WIP (Works in Progress) forum.

Hi everybody!

The second beta continues as planned and we've now played 10 turns (2 weeks). The setup has forced all empires to build lots of fleets in order to move troops and settlers from their capital. All empires combined has built 68 fleets with some 279 ships...

The beta will run for at least 4 more weeks (20 turns) and we believe we'll see plenty of action before the end. The player of one empire has decided to not participate and if you are interested in taking over this position please let us know (reply to this post or send a PM).

I spent last weekend in Gothenburg with Johan and a couple of friends, incl. Glom which is our main game tester. Johan and I discussed how we are going to proceed with implementing the last features in Rising Empires. Rising Empires is, in its current version, a complete game but we want to add more diplomatic options as well as the Heaven level before we release it. The first we will add is non-aggression pacts allowing empires to be more friendly towards each other.

We have also designed a new research view and removed the research selection from the empire menu. Research is such an important feature in Rising Empires and we believed it needed its own view where all data on technologies can be reached.

If you're interested in Rising Empires and it's development please support us by visiting our website or our Google+ page and +1 us.

Thanks!

Hi! 

This will be the last update before my summer vacation. Only one more day and I will turn off my computer (and my brain) for three weeks! Johan will take a break from Rising Empires during the same period. We'll start working with Rising Empires again in mid-August when we're also going to have a large meeting to discuss the game. 

Tomorrow we'll run the last turn of the beta test. We've sent out a questionnaire with a couple of questions to our play testers and are eagerly awaiting their replies. We've already received some answers but we hope to get a few more. Overall I must say that this beta test has progressed very well. The routines for downloading results and uploading orders have been flawless, the bugs and errors that were found could be fixed and we've managed to implement non-aggression pacts. 

The last weeks have also been very interesting for me as I've learned a couple of new algorithms and possibilities when writing code. This has allowed me to re-think some ideas that Johan and I had and more practically it also means that I've started on our map generator! It's far from finished but it can create mountain ranges as well as the starting area around the capital. 

I'll continue with the map generator when I get back from vacation. My idea is to make it able to create good Surface maps first and then start to look at the Netherworld which I believe will be more complex to create. 

I hope you're all having a couple of good summer weeks!

Hi,

On our forum we've recently posted posts which discuss the security of Rising Empires as well as where we've got our inspiration to the game.

Rising Empires security

What has inspired us?

I hope you all have a good weekend!

Hi everybody! 

Last weekend Johan and I met for discussing and coding on Rising Empires and I must say that neither of us were prepared for what the weekend held in store for us. Our intent were to complete the setup of new empires and to test it thoroughly, instead we decided to change focus on the project from a massive multi-player game with 1 turn/day to a single-player game. 

We've already started development of the AI and you can follow our progress at the 'Words from the Netherlords'-blog. Both Johan and I feel this is a good decision and we look forward to deliver Rising Empires to all Android user out there! 

Cheers

Hi everybody! 

I've been a bit silent the last weeks. This has nothing to do with lack of progress on Rising Empires as we're moving forward with good speed, especially the AI for the single-player game is getting a lot of love... Johan is also working hard to improve the app and he is doing some great improvements compared to the old layouts. As soon as he completes the first layouts I'll post some screenshots. 

What are the status with the Rising Empires AI? 

We've completed the first version of the scout AI. This is the AI that handle all exploration and patrolling in the empire. The exploration bit is completed and functions well but we've not started with patrolling of already scouted territory. This is important though as the AI need updated information on what's going on around its borders. 

We've also done a lot of work on the settlement AI. The settlement AI can now handle and take care of the food situation in a town or city. It improves terrain, construct food buildings when more food is needed quickly and it also send requests to the main AI for better food technology when needed. The settlement AI also construct new buildings according the wishes of the governor (yeah, each settlement AI has a governor that decides how it will act). We're very satisfied with the algorithm that control what buildings that are constructed. 

What we're doing now is creating the objective AI (the first objective will be to move population from one settlement to another) and implementing the first version of our strategic AI. When this is done the strategic AI will be able to choose between building scouts and sending population to settlements that need/want a larger population. It's not much but with the architecture in place it will be simpler to add more objectives. 

If you want to follow the development of the AI in more detail please visit our blog, the 'Words from the Netherlords'.

Cheers!

Join the beta test of Rising Empires and help us make and shape an excellent strategy game. The game is now an early beta build but we believe we’ve come far enough to ask for your help: Does it work on all phones? Where are all the bugs? We also appreciate general thoughts about the game: Is it interesting to play? Is it too slow or too fast? Is the learning curve just too hard?

We've now uploaded the first beta build of Rising Empires on Google Play.

Read more about the beta test on Google Play or on our website.

Hi,

It seems that the Rising Empires GUI is a little tough to get into. We should, of course, has anticipated this but better late than not at all. I've written a short tutorial over the buttons and things a player need to do in the first turn of playing Rising Empires. It can be found on our blog:

http://www.risingempires.com/netherlords/?p=605

Later this evening we'll upload a new version of Rising Empires to Google Play. This is purely bug fixes to remove some of the most common bugs that has been detected.

I would also like say thank you to all of you who've tested Rising Empires.

We're continuing our series of tutorials for Rising Empires. This week we cover the food resource and how it influence the population growth in your empire: 'Food, or how you keep your population from starving'.

Cheers!

We've now published the 6th tutorial, this one dig deep into the combat system of Rising Empires. Conflict is an important aspect of Rising Empires and with the feature that all empires can develop and design their own unique combat troops it's good to understand how combat works.

Here comes a list of all Rising Empires tutorials that have been written:

Tutorial I - Playing the first turn in Rising Empires

Tutorial II - Research and technologies

Tutorial III - Loyalty, or how to keep your population happy

Tutorial IV -  Food, or how you keep your population from starving

Tutorial V – Troop statistics, or how to design the ‘super soldier’

Tutorial VI – War! Rules of engagement in Rising Empires

Cheers!