Johan said:Hi everyone and welcome to another development diary of Rome. We had to wade through metres of snow, and fight off several polarbears on the streets of Stockholm to get our weekly lunch vindaloo, but now we are back in our office and working hard at preparing the beta.
One of the most interesting aspects that was finished last week was the portrait generating code which creates the images for the characters dynamically from a set of textures. We get a lot of variations, with about four billion unique ones for each gender and culture. The AI for actions got its first implementation finalised last week as well. We also wrapped up everything with Barbarians, and that part of the game works really fine now, and I’ll talk about it later in this diary. The underlying logic for characters marrying and having kids was also written during this time period.
In the seventh week, we come to the final member of my team, Doomdark, or Henrik Fåhraeus as his passport says. Henrik rejoined the company early this autumn after spending the last few years studying. He worked with us on every project from Eu2 to HoI2, and was doing everything from game design to AI programming. His experience when it comes to developing games has been a godsend to the team, and his biggest strengths are his touch when it comes to game-design, and his strong programming skills.
Here we see one event that happens early in the game, where you pick what kind of nobility you want in your empire.
As I said earlier in this diary, I’d talk more about the Barbarians of Rome. At times during the game, there will be a too big of a restless population in non-civilized provinces that feel entitled to more food and riches. They will then form what we refer to as a horde. A horde will then march until it finds a good place to settle. Passing through similar culture areas, it may pick up more troops, and while moving through semi-civilized territory, it may drop of settlers, plunder it for money, and reduce the civilization value. If a horde controls everything of a country, it may take over the country, introducing a new rulers and culture to the ruling elite in that state. There are several ways to deal with barbarians. First of all, you can send an army to defeat and destroy them, which will net you their gathered loot (minus personal expenses for the commanding generals, and their friends, and nephews, and …), and a large amount of slaves. If that option is not cost effective you could try to negotiate with the barbarians, where you have multiple options, including creating client kingdoms, allow them to settle or pay them off.
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