As you might have noticed due to the busy forum, we started our first pre-beta test on Friday night. During the last three days we solved numrous bugs but all in all it is running stable. As soon as the number of bugs discovered per day drops below a certain number, the real Beta phase of the game will begin. 

 Cheers!

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Before expectations get out of bounds: I'm not going to announce the begin ningof the beta-tests today. All I can say is that we make steady progress towards the first internal test rounds, which should start in a week or two.

What I wanted to show you today is some new stuff that's in place now. The first is the revised Newspaper design. We decided to call your number one source of quality information in the game the "Daily European", which describes itself as "inter-European" and "independent" - we may add "indiscriminating", as it will publish any piece of misinformation and propaganda you feed it.

Here's what it looks like:

 We believe a second addition will add even more atmosphere to the game: The leaders of the 16 countries in Supremacy1914 are now modeled after the real leaders in the beginning of the last century. This means that the titles are those really used in the different countries and the names of AI-players will be the original names. We also added the feature to upload a portrait picture for each player, which can for example be seen in the foreign affairs section:

 

Thats all for today, stay tuned!

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You might ask yourself, why we came up with this magnificent idea of developing such a great online multi-player real-time strategy game (OMRTSG)??
'Cause actually, there's quite a bunch of online strategy games... And most of them support far more than 13 players without being constraint in a form that someday someone will win...

Well you know what? You're right... There are a lot of such games sticking around like bad breath after a night of exhaustive gaming with loads of pizza and energy drinks. And just like that... They often suck.
Well not those nights, but those games.

Honestly... Did you try them? You normally enter a game with some thousands of other users from all around the globe 'cause a random guy told you it was great. That guy, even if he's a good mate of yours is probably way stronger as he has played way longer than you and does already know all the  tricks and all the guys that are strong as well. If your lucky he tells you what to do, what keeps you from reading tons of resources concerning boring tech trees, species or character specifications. Finally you start your game, have two or three days of great fun, "watching" your star ships sail through the deepest corners of the good old universe and then... you get your ass beaten by some kiddy who spends all his time playing that game managing all alone about 20 different characters for the optimal combination of battle units. And he does not only rip apart the first god damn expensive battleship you've build and which you nearly love more than the bottle opener you’ve attached to your desk... No... He and his friends from a top ten ranked universe vaporize your whole galaxy and therefore all those random guys who started to become some sort of friends of yours quit the game as they are as pissed as you are.

Now focus, cause here comes the point I'm about to make:

We decided to develop a game that has more of the characteristics of such a long night with that pizza and those energy drinks and those 10 or so blokes you call friends (but without the bad breath of course).Therefore, we came up with Supremacy1914. An online multi-player real-time strategy game. 'Cause we believe that the real-time component (as in a real real time game that lasts for a couple of weeks rather than in those pseudo real-time games that just are called real time because they are not round based) really increases the tension and involves the players much deeper as they have way more time for planning, intriguing and being afraid wether their newest bold plan will break their neck or instead turn around the situation on the battle field. Furthermore we honestly believe that it is of utmost importance for a great game that's trying to involve you to a level never (or at least seldom) experienced before that you play it with those friends of yours, that you share those precious moments I was just talking about. That's because only if you know the guy you're betraying it gets really mean and he will get really angry with you :) That's why we decided for a small but elite round of players, that you will select when you start playing that game. And ... You will play until one of you proves to be the god damn smartest of you all because he managed it to make the most out of a situation that is equal to each player at the start of the game! Oh, and why strategy? You're kidding aren't you? Strategy games are those games where not just everything depends on how long you've spend learning maps and training head shots (Not that I'm saying that these games aren't fun from time to time ;)). But if you want to see if you've got brains or guts compared with your buddies... You've got to rule a country and get them to beg you to leave them that last coal province they have!

Maybe now you'll understand why we felt like developing Supremacy1914, a real OMRTSG...

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The Date of our first DevCon has been set to 1st - 3rd Sempember 2006. It will take place at Siegen in the great Siegerland. Our goal is to release the first beta after the conference. Let's see if we can make it. 

 cheers!

  {mos_fb_discuss:2}

 In this update we will talk about one of the more important things that have to get fixed before we will have a working beta-version of the game: The military/fighting system. We may get into some technical detailes that might not be interesting for everyone - but if you are: We apprechiate your feedback!

In general, armies in Supremacy1914 work like this: An army is a "container" for other units. Any unit in the game automatically is an army, too, as only armies can receive commands. To form stronger military forces, several armies can be united. In general, one large army is stronger than a group of smaller ones. The standard type of units in Supremacy is infantery for close combat and occupation. If infantery is sent on the sea, it will be automatically transported in ships, which can also fight each other. Later in the game, industrialization offers you more and more new weapons: Artillery to bombard the enemy over some distance and damage fortesses, Battleships, Tanks, Balloons and huge Railguns (very powerful but slow and rail-bound artillery).

Up to now the game used a very simple algorithm to determine the armies' strength and to calculate battles. As soon as two non-friendly armies meet, a battle starts. During this battle there is one fight every 30 minutes in which one unit of the attacker or defender is destroyed. Chances are higher to win a fight if your army is stronger (strength equals size times morale plus fortress bonus). This works pretty fine as long as there is only one type of units, but we get some trouble to balance the game as soon as different unit types are involved. For example guns: These units shoot over a certain distance without the risk of being destroyed by the attacked army. These guns have a rate of fire of 1 shot in 30 minutes, too - but unlike infantry units their power increases with the number of guns (therefore, two guns shoot two times in 30 minutes). The problem is obvious: Even the largest army composed of infantry will be outpowered by two single guns. Things get even more difficult as we introduce more types of weapons.

As a solution, we are working on an extended army system: When an army attacks an other army, each of it's units in range has the chance to "fire" once. All successful attacks are summed up specifiy the number of destroyed units from the defenders army. The defender will do a similar calculation, depending on it's units in range to strike back at the enemy, resulting in its defence value. Depending on this value, each attacking unit has a certain chance to be killed. One important issue may be to get the durations of battles straight: A fight of one unit agains one unit should be decided pretty quickly while a fight involving two large armies should take quite long - for example by making it more unlikely to kill a unit out of a big army.

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Hi, and welcome back to another Supremacy 1914 update. As you may already have noticed, we are making steady progress with our nice little homepage here. It's now almost in the shape we want it to be (at least until the beta test kick off): We have some basic description of the game, a blog where we can communicate news and progress to the community and a forum to discuss and chat about the game. Thanks go to Christopher, who put most of the work into this. Because of him we will soon be able to "go public" - well, not that there is way to hide yourself in the internet. Anyways, we're looking forward to hear from you in the forums. Any feedback is a new motivation for us.

Beside the homepage we also have some news from behind the scenes. We implemented a custom "look and feel" for the Java user interface of Supremacy 1914. A look'n'feel in Java specifies the way everything looks - buttons, labels etc - and allows us to get rid of the boring Java standards and easily create our own Supremacy1914 look. This is of course very preliminary and absolutely work in progress, but the screenshot should give you some impression about the direction we are aiming at. It also shows some details of the military system and some special units in Supremacy.

When things were a bit slow during the last weeks this may also be due to the Football WorldCup which is currently taking place in Germany. Not because we are sitting in front of our tellies and drinking beer all day (what we certainly do), but also because at least Felix is directly involved in the WorldCup as a referee and TV-commentator! I'm talking about the Robocup WorldCup, of course, which has been taking place in Bremen over the last weekend.

 That’s all for today... stay tuned!

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