We've dropped a few hints so far at some of the resource changes in Rome, but today we're going to dig into some details. On the surface, we've got a new wood resource that you'll be harvesting and spending to build some of those engineering marvels Caesar was famous for. But, there's also a lot of subtler changes we've made to improve the strategy in the game and we're going to look at some of those as well.

But first off, here are the basics on wood: it's produced at logging camps, transported via supply lines, stored in forts/cities, and consumed to construct walls, upgrades, ships and siege equipment. It's something of a combination between food and recruits and its purpose is to support a new stage of development once you've satisfied your basic needs for food, gold and units. In other words, once you've captured a position, wood will let you fortify it, customize its strengths with upgrades, and build more powerful units to let you take on tougher enemy positions.

That said, gathering wood can't always be an afterthought - defending a city with walls, for example, is usually more cost effective than training a similar number of units, and constructing an upgrade that reduces rebellions might be the best option to maintain control over a hostile city.


New logging camps require workers or slaves to produce wood

Interesting Choices

And it's obviously those kind of decisions that are really at the core of any strategy game and that's what we try to encourage whenever we make design changes. Which is why we weren't really satisfied with the mechanics for collecting resources in the earlier games. Whenever you'd capture a new city in Gold, you'd immediately capture all of the nearby farms, connect them up to your city, and then you were done. To borrow a line from another game designer, there really were no “interesting choices” to be made.

Our solution to this was to make all resources in Rome more like mines. Rather than just producing food automatically, farms (and also logging camps) now require that you assign workers or slaves to operate them. While this was something a lot of our testers intuitively tried to do anyways, the major advantage for gameplay is that players can no longer have everything and you've got to decide, for example, to spend those precious few recruits on new combat units or for workers to harvest food, wood or gold.


Farmers will stop production when enemy units get too close

Raid and Pillage

To further increase your options, we've also carried over the ability to disrupt and raid farms to all other resource buildings so that those pesky raiders will also be burning your mines and logging camps as well. And for consistency, mines will no longer be exempt from lengthy supply lines – all resource production is now penalized based on the length of the supply line. We've also eliminated the limit on the number of supply lines you can connect and gotten rid of their construction time since neither really added anything strategic to the game and we prefer a simpler ruleset whenever possible.

Some of the other changes you'll notice are that the mobile sheep flocks have been replaced with a fixed cattle farm (no more AI sheep wars), farms no longer have their own supply radius, and workers and slaves no longer carry food. But the resupply changes are probably a topic all by themselves so we'll leave that for a later date (or for the forums if you can't wait).

Stay tuned for next week - we'll be doing things a little differently. There won't be a regular blog post since Rick, Philippe and I are heading over to Germany to take in GamesCom, but we're still hoping to have some news to post for you.

Cheers!

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Watching a few Hegemony Gold Let's Plays reveals that often players constantly switch the hometowns of their units

I agree that's not really something we wanted to encourage. In the initial design for the recruit system in Gold you couldn't change a unit's home city, but through playtesting we found that was far too limiting and so we added the option to change it and tried to make it as simple as possible via the asset list.

In general I like the idea that recruits are a local resource so that when you're under siege you've only got the resources at hand to work with. And it's also important in Rome, for example, that your captured Britons aren't used to train new legions. However, I do have a few ideas still to tweak the system that we're still testing and maybe we'll get into those more in an upcoming blog.

One last thing, you haven't announced who your publisher is yet have you? Just that as one of the staff at Heavengames and someone who wishes to see the Hegemony series prosper I was curious if there was some way to mutually benefit or help further. Though definitely going to publish this as front page news either way.

Nope, although the announcement should be very soon. Thanks for the link. We're coordinating our PR efforts through our publisher now, but if you've got some ideas on something we could do together let me know and I'll see what we can do.

Although, like most information, this blog post raises even more questions from me.

I appreciate that I dropped a lot of teasers in that post, but we're trying to keep them relatively short and leave the follow ups for the comments.

You say that resource production is penalized. Is that specific to mines, or can lumber camps and farms not stockpile resources on site?

Yep, you read that correctly. Resource buildings only produce now and no longer store resources locally. This was made to simplify the resupply mechanics and reduce the number of overlapping radii on the map. To compensate, forts and cities now have much larger resupply ranges that adapt to the terrain (extend further over open fields than into mountain passes). You can still pillage a farm to grab resources in the field without setting up a camp, but this does inflict inflict damage on the farm and can't be kept up indefinitely.

How are cattle farms unique or diverse from crop fields? Does their output vary according to different seasons? Do they generally produce more or less?

We're still tweaking this based on play testing, but one of the most obvious differences right now is that cattle farms produce food consistently all year, while grain farm production varies significantly throughout the year like they did in gold.

Finally, I'm curious what you'll be up to at GamesCom. Is Longbow hosting a booth, or is your group there just to take in the sites?

GamesCom is really out of our league for hosting our own booth. However, and I think I'm safe to say this at this point, our publisher does have a good presence at the show and we'll be hanging around their booth talking about Rome and hopefully doing some demos for the press.

Does the pillage mechanic also apply to the lumber camps or will the player have to resort to that abhorred practice of honest labor to acquire wood?

Unfortunately there is no pillaging wood ... unit's don't carry wood on their own, it's only transported to where you need with supply lines. It is also the most "difficult" resource to transport long distance e.g. it has the highest penalties per km.

Should we start speculating about a possible interview or gameplay footage?

I hope so, but we won't know for sure until we get there.

When we will now something about sandbox?
Will AI will bi more agresive and will attack each other?

Yep, we've completely rebuilt the sandbox AI for Rome so it will be playing with the same rules and goals as the player. This means they'll be both attacking and allying with each other while trying to conquer the map. We are also planning to have a few options to control how aggressive the AI will be so you can also tweak it to be more like the original games if you want.

We'll definitely do a blog focused on the sandbox at some point, but in the meantime feel free to post any questions to the forums.

It isn't really that more difficult to transport if you are creative enough:

True, but we still wanted to encourage the player to gather it locally rather than ship it across the empire because that fits better with how they actually would have used it e.g. a legion would have harvested the closest forest to build their camp even if they had a large stockpile a hundred miles away.

If there's a river (flowing in the right direction, of course), make a raft out of it and let one of the woodcutters steer it down the river to its destination!

Yep, there will be bonuses to transporting resources down rivers - and there are a lot of rivers in the game. I hadn't thought about differentiating the bonus based on the direction though - it could be interesting and should be fairly intuitive.

Amusingly, I think a lot of Canadian kids of my generation are familiar with the idea thanks to a national film board animation they used to play incessantly on tv between cartoons to try and teach us some history.

Transporting logs (or every ware, perhaps) downhill could give a bonus while transporting ...

An interesting idea, my only concern is whether there are enough instances of noticeable elevation differences between logging camps and forts to warrant teaching the mechanic to players.

Just wondering how political the game is set to be.

The gameplay in Rome is still focused on military campaigning because we didn't want to get distracted from what Hegemony's really about by adding a lot of new political mechanics. However, obviously the politics going on back in Rome played a crucial role and we've tried to tell that story as close as possible in the campaigns through the cutscenes, objectives and in-game dialogue. Where this affects the gameplay the most I suppose is in determining what legions you have at different points in the campaign as we've tried to keep that accurate to Caesar's accounts.

I know its too late for me to be mentioning this, but what about stone?

We did consider adding a stone resource since it can admittedly feel a little odd to construct stone walls using wood. But, while food and wood have enough differences to justify the extra complexity, adding stone just gave you something else to track without really adding any new strategies.

We also considered calling wood a more generic 'construction material' but we found that was just too awkward. And, with the exception of stone fortifications, pretty much everything was wood anyways. In the end our artists decided just to add some extra wood details to the stone walls so it felt a little more consistent.