Empire: Total War (2º parte)

[Makis]

First off, we are going to support Empire for a long time. The first game play patch with both a lot of fixes and balancing/economic changes as well as more is in testing, and then the cycle of hot fixes then game play patches will begin again. At the moment every programmer is focused on fixing bugs.

What balance/economic/other changes will be in the first game play patch?

Quite a lot really. Unit balancing has seem some general tweaks across the board to improve it. Unit costs have changed for both multiplayer and single player.

For multiplayer there are now separate costs for early and late era so that units better reflect the techs available, and units such as mortars and rocket ships have had big cost increases and light infantry have had their cost increased a bit as well.

For single player, unit costs have increased on normal, even more on hard and even more on very hard so that on very hard units cost 4x their upkeep cost. Bigger ships have had their cost increased and all ships upkeep costs have increased.

There have also been general economic tweaks to prevent the huge sums of money that were possible in the late game, and so to increase the challenge of the game.

As for the other changes, we've added in a delete save game button, a button to allow you to view battle replays from the single player Play Battle menu, improved ship grouping UI and other things.

There are also of course AI improvements and yes naval invasions though they may be rare for now.

What you going to do after that?

Well we are going to carry on fixing and improving the game. The AI (both battle and campaign) will see continuous improvements, multiplayer will see improvements, there will be more balancing improvements, and some nice free stuff you'll be hearing about in due time.

From a personal perspective as someone working on unit balancing, the next game play patch after this one will see some big improvements in terms of diversification of different unit and artillery types. The game play patch after that one will see improvements to naval battle balancing.

So what are you getting at?

We are going to carry on supporting Empire for a long time. We are going to carry on improving Empire. You'll see more as things get done.


How come you are focusing on balancing and not fixing bugs?

We are not. The designers are working on balancing improvements, and the programmers on code fixes. Work on one does not preclude work on the other. It is not a case of we can work on balancing or fixes, it's a case of we can do both, so we are.

You're quadrupling upkeep costs!?!

No, the recruitment cost of units on very hard will be 4x their upkeep cost. Upkeep costs are actually reducing slightly. This confusion was caused by poor wording in yesterdays update.

Why didn't you mention fixes for such and such?

As a designer I do not work with code so I am not aware of all the fixes that have been done. This does not mean there haven't been any. We are fixing the sound issues people have been reporting, crashes and lots of other bugs.

Some examples of fixes in the upcoming patch are:

# Fixed audio volume dropping following advisor
# General sound balance changes
# Campaign map optimisations, and general crash fixes
# General stability improvements and crash fixes
# General optimisation tweaks
# An array of fixes and tweaks to improve AI aggression levels
# Fix Video Stutter

There are a lot more fixes than those coming in the patch.

And what did you mean by rare naval invasions for now?

We've fixed the bugs that were preventing the AI from doing naval invasions, but that did not mean they would suddenly start doing them all the time. The priority for them needs to be balanced against all the other items that have priorities for the AI and this will take a while to get right. We are going to continuously improve the AI so the amount of naval invasions will keep on getting better from the initial fix that is coming in the next patch.

What about multiplayer?

More maps are coming. When is still being discussed but you will see more maps at some point(mostly 4v4s, 3v3s and 2v2s).

The problem with cheaters being able to edit unit stats and costs without problem for multiplayer has been fixed and will be in the next patch.

Other multiplayer improvements are still being discussed.

We will also continue to work to fix bugs with multiplayer