I just came across the game Hegemony Philip of Macedon today on steam and it looks pretty cool. I love strategy games and play games such as Civilization and the Total War series. I've been reading the forums and can't seem to get answers to a couple questions I have and hopefully I'm not just blind or something, and maybe someone would be nice enough to answer.

Firstly I was wondering about updates. How would I get the latest updates for the game once I buy it. If I buy it off Steam will it automatically update as other games do. I would like to buy it from this site my only concern is the difficulty in updating the game.

Secondly a major thing that put me off the game initially was lack of multiplayer. One of the first things I thought when I saw this game was 'I gotta play this with my brother' but shortly after I discovered that multiplayer wasn't included. So I was wondering if there are any plans whatsoever to include multiplayer in the future. If there are I would be very happy, overjoyed as a matter of fact.

Thirdly I was reading about the Gold version and am downloading the demo right now. I was wondering if me, as a new player to this game, should even be playing Gold yet. I would like to get as much out of the game as possible and it seems Gold has many more features, however I am concerned about stability of it. I don't expect it by any means to be bug free, but if it's relatively stable I would be happy to play it. Also does it include the original games campaign and all? As in would I be missing out on anything from the original game if I went right to Gold? And to the best of my understanding after buying the game I can use the key to unlock Gold as the full version of the game right?

This game looks really fun, and I'm about to try the Gold demo and hopefully I'll have good first impressions. I won't expect perfection but hopefully I won't be too disappointed but encouraged to buy the game as soon as my credit card activates in less than an hour.

Thank you for any further responses and/or feedback
Vince

Edit: Wow this game is a must buy for me. My first impression was how aliased the game was, but I set AA to 4x in my graphics card panel and now that's golden. Some model details are questionable, like Athenian infantry seeming fairly larger than my own spearmen. But there's something amazing about this game. It seems quite 'deep,' the learning curve is fairly steep though and it's gonna take me awhile to grasp the basics, but I'm willing to take the time to do that. This game is something else and I look forward to further developments of this game in the future as well.
I think I'm gonna end up just buying the game right now from the site here. What can it hurt? I'll find out later how to update it and whatever. Gonna start a new campaign from the beginning, I think I can do a bit better if I start again.