Campaign, AI & Release Date

I have been hard at work the past few weeks with finalising the campaign. The key feature of the campaign is that you can buy infantry, cavalry and artillery units inbetween battles with the rewards you gain from the battles.

The ressources you need to recruit units are

soldiers, horses and gold. You can attach these units to Corps (groups) that get unlocked automatically as you progress. Depending on how many kills your units make during the battle the more experience they gain. At a certain level they get upgraded to a unit of the same type but with better stats.

The unit subtypes are

Infantry: Line Infantry, Grenadier, Guard

Cavalry: Hussars, Cuirassiers

Artillery: 6 Pounder, 12 Pounder

When your units get upgraded they also get marching band and eagle attachments automatically.

You must also buy musketballs and cannonballs so your troops can keep up ranged combat. Then there is a brief discussion between Napoleon and a Marshal before the battle. You can see an example in the video I posted earlier showing the first gameplay footage of the battle of Austerlitz. You can then distribute your corps so they spawn in certain areas of the battle. Some battles in the campaign must be won and some not depending on the history.

Your losses carry over of course from battle to battle. Note that there is no dynamic difficulty scaling, meaning the game doesn’t adjust the number of enemy troops to how well you do. I believe this is important so the player can have an influence on the world and doesn’t feel like it is pointless to play. The idea behind these systems is that that way the game is guaranteed to stay interesting and the players will not notice anyway. But they are definitely smart enough to notice! Of course the downside of not having scaling is that the game might become boring or too hard, but that’s what the difficulty setting at the start is for. If you are a good player, you just choose the hard difficulty.

Speaking of which, what I am very proud of is that I managed to make the difficulty almost entirely dependent on AI behavior (the only other factor is how many rewards you receive from battles). Here is a table of the key behavioral modifications of the AI depending on the difficulty. This list is not complete and I have some more ideas I might implement until launch.

If you have any questions, let me know.

Also in other news, I now have a set release date: 1st of August. See you then!