Development Diary #5 - 14th of November 2007

[Johan]

Hello everyone. We are located in a city that had some snow chaos last night, luckily none of the team-members got stranded anywhere, so we could have our weekly Vindaloo happily today.

The last week we have seen a lot of underlying code getting finalised, including civil wars & important character attributes like corruption, popularity and loyalty. The interface team have been busy finalising the look of the character information windows and the province view. Important interface lessons we learned from NA has been implemented as well, including building queues and disabling event options for the first seconds.

This week we are introducing our 2d-artist yonaz, also known as Jonas Jakobsson, to you all. Jonas joined us in the middle of this summer and has been an important addition to our team. Jonas has been doing the interface artwork, as well as the map that covers most of the screenshots. While our programmers have done a great job at an improved map engine, only Jonas great art skills have made it possible to look as good as it does.

This screenshot shows the greek heartlands, and also shows the alert icons. Wonder if anyone can identify what they are all for?

I thought today would be a good time to tell you about the technology system of Rome.

There are five categories for technology, land, construction, naval, civic and religious. Each of these has a set amount of levels, kind of similar to have Eu3 and Victoria works. However, there are no immediate effects from getting a new “level” of technology as in those games. For each type of technology you can appoint a character to a position in the government, where his skill will amongst other things affect the progress in this field. The other major factors affecting the progress are Civilization Value of a province and the amount of Citizens present.

So, if technology levels does not give you immediate effects, what good is it then to have any form research. Well, there is a thing called “discoveries” which triggers during the game, depending on various factors. Different discoveries are enabled for different types of countries, depending on their triggers. Of course, there is no guarantee that you will get a discovery as soon as you have reached the desired technology level.

phalanx_charge = {
	trigger = {
		land_tech = 18
		capital_scope = {civilization_value = 60}
		has_country_flag = hellenistic_warfare
	}
	effect = {
		#no enabling effects
	}
	heavy_infantry_offensive = 0.03			
}

irrigation_invention = {
	trigger = {
		construction_tech = 1
		capital_scope = { civilization_value = 5 }
	}
	effect = {
		irrigation = yes
	}
	#no modifiers applied.
}

 

[Chaingun]

Must say it starts out to shape out pretty good.