Noticed the following in another topic thread from Rick @ Longbowgames:

"Rest assured that better grouping behaviour is high on our list of improvements to make for the sequel..."

Sequel!?! YES! Would be great, because this is a great game (in need for some improvements such as grouping, but still a great game)! Hopefully it is about Alexander, and then a third game could be about the Diadochi (a very interesting time period about the power struggle after Alexander's death). At least hopefully it is kept to Ancient times.

Comments, Rick et al?

hmm: intriguing...! You're indicating a similar game style to Hegemony, which could imply a fairly concentrated map and the focus on one specific person, or maybe a few...

Could it be a game on Republican (Caesar, potentially combined with Pompeius) or Imperial Rome (who then?), or Carthage (Hannibal)? Or Byzantium (Belisarius)? But for all of these the map would be very large, like for Alexander. Or something completely different? (which would actually be very good too!)

All speculations and I am at loss here but that is exciting: how long do we need to wait for the answer?!?

Maybe you're right in that Alexander would risk being too many miles of pure tedious travelling, and therefore not as intensive as needed. Unless you have one grand campaign and many smaller sub-campaigns/scenarios. Because in Alexander you'd have many interesting generals, many various factions to fight, an extensive map (which is good in my view!), and a lot of potentially very interesting (real as well as hypothetical) objectives. And you'd have a lot of the mythology and hero aspects that i think you really succeeded with in Hegemony. (Campaigning in the North, in the Danube region, fighting the tribes was a real adventure, and very exciting.)



Your response sounds really promising, Rick: I think it is wise to keep a game series to a certain time period and level for which the game engine is designed and known to work. Ageod is focussing on 17th to 19th centuries and has adapted an engine for this period and its aspects, and Paradox has a franchise in Hearts of Iron's WW2 (their EU:Rome not actually being an an Ancient time strategy game in my view, as it is very generic in its engine, although I must say I like its dynasty building). Any other?

And the Ancient times are sadly underrepresented in good strategy computer games. So go for it and make it YOUR time period.

I will definitively support a sequel, and please let me know if you are in need of any beta testers or researchers.

I would be highly interested in the Peloponnese war era, with playability for both Athens and Sparta...

I am very happy for your focus on Ancient times and looking forward to a sequel (and expansions to Hegemony as well)! :o) Keep up the good work!

Well if it's not Alexander, and the idea is to keep the format close to the current game... Well just for fun here's a few guesses.

Pyrrhus
Spartacus
Dionysus of Syracuse
Mithridates (although the map would need to be a little bigger)
Demetrius the Sea King

Just an Idea, what you could do greco-persian wars, if you would to flash towards another periode you could do philip v of macedon or maybe flashback to inicial greek periodes including the siege of troy or the greek colonization of the east aegean sea

Well you almost certainly have plans already so this sequel discussion is an exercise in futility to a large degree ... buuuuut I would love to see a similar game with multiple selectable factions set in ancient Sumeria. Maybe the geography ain't so interesting, but that era has always fascinated me. Whatever the sequel might be, I look forward to playing it.

As far as I can see about the original, the only missing thing is multiplayer. I jsu tbought the game yesterday at Fan Expo, and I think it would be an interesting addition to an already fantastic game. Maybe give multiplayer support (LAN?) in a patch?

I'm two days into this game and can hardly think about any other period. But if I could have my way, I'd want a very underrepresented era in the genre - Late Antiquity. The fall of the Roman Empire. You can have the Huns, the Visigoths, the last stand of "Arthurian" Britain against the Saxon hordes (I smell a campaign here).

The game would have to be seriously rebalanced to make multiplayer viable. It wouldn't work as is.

Please, for the love of all that is holy, do NOT add multiplayer to a game that doesn't need it. If people want to play multiplayer RTS, they can go play StarCraft II. Your game is awesome as is (except for the fact that I want to throw my laptop across the room every time a massive Athenian fleet drops a metric fuck-ton of peltasts and hoplites on me), and multiplayer for multiplayer's sake just wastes time that could have been spent working on and improving the main point of the game, the single player. (*ahem* Bioshock 2 *cough*)

I totally agree with ScooterBeast: this game is truly blessed in single-player format and does not at all need multi-player capabilities.

And in my view better to spend developers' resources on the single-player part (balance, stability, scenarios, etc.) than on making multi-player work.

Unfortunately it seems that every game developer feels there is a need for multi-player and put far too many resources on it.

Granted, some games (and game types) are definitely well suitable for multi-player (and sometimes multi-player only) but then again some aren't (in particular certain strategy games).

Now I will go back playing Hegemony!

It's not the developers who insist on multiplayer, it's the reviewers. Only a minority (c 10%) of strategy game players use the MP features, but every single review will mark you down for not having it.

I see. And as developers know that, they will feel a pressure to include multi-player.

Do the reviewers fairly represent the player community? Or is it just a "flavour-of-the-month" at reviewers' end, that every game must have multi-player capabilities?

Weeeell, to be honest, most of the professional reviewing industry already seems pretty rigged to me. Far too many games out there you can get utterly bored of in 2-3 days, yet they're boasting review scores of 9/10 just because they're made by big studios.

It's either that or the reviewers nowadays are just plain too incompetent to notice the important bits that make or break the potential for greatness and a lasting appeal.

There's also the trick with many modern games - they're made so shallow, they only give you a flash in the pan sort of pleasure, which is awesome fun for the first day or two, but after that, it's a bloody bore with zero replayability.
If reviewers only spend a few hours on a game, they will only experience the flash, the awesome fun part, and give rave reviews based on that, duping people into believing it's worth the money.
Commercially speaking, this makes sense - instead of making 1 game that lasts the player weeks or months, you make tons of shallow, short-lived games that force the player to go out and buy something new every other week, for the same old price of course.

This is why I don't read positive reviews anymore. I only read the negative ones, at least those tend to be honest and I usually get a far better idea of a game by reading what people don't like about it, than what they do.

Demos also speak far more than a thousand reviews. If there's no demo, that too is a message, a terribly alarming one, suggesting the company doesn't want players to know what a stinker the game is (Lords of the Realm III comes to mind, along with some others).

As for multiplayer, sometimes it's good, sometimes it's just there as a cheap attempt to add replayability to a game that otherwise doesn't have any, or to make up for a blatantly dumb AI. I definitely don't agree with reviewers criticising *every* game that lacks MP, some games just don't need it, aren't suited for it. But I guess many people have been lulled into thinking, through a long series of disappointments (or maybe it's a fashion trend, whatever), that singleplayer always has to have bad AI, no engaging depth, no interesting randomness and thus no replayability so multiplayer is and always must be the be-all-end-all of gaming experience.

As for Hegemony and multiplayer - I must admit, I sometimes found myself wishing I had a clone of me to manage a second or third front of my war through ancient Greece, because I had the resources, I only lacked another pair of eyes. Playing with the thought I realized I was essentially contemplating the idea of a co-op multiplayer (where more players are on the same side, managing the same faction for instance). It could be interesting, but Hegemony is one of those rare gems with such a compelling singleplayer experience that you really can't complain about a lack of MP here.

Maybe u could do a game on mythology? like odysseus and Troy and hercules and all those stories. Or maybe u could do a game on the Orient?