Just in time for the holidays, we're excited to announce that we're looking for eager volunteers who'd like to help out play testing Hegemony Rome! Player feedback is really important to us and we're eager to spend the last few months polishing things up as much as possible. And frankly, this game is just way too big for the handful of us to try everything thoroughly.

Now to get into the details: this will be a closed beta, so players who are interested should e-mail me (rob@longbowgames.com) with their names, computer specs, gaming/testing experience and anything else you think relevant and we'll select the testers and contact you sometime over the holidays. We hope to start testing during the first full week of the new year. Our plan is to start small and add more testers as we go along, so if you don't make the first round there will still be plenty of opportunities later.

We will be conducting the beta through Steam to handle error reports and updates, so you will need to have a steam account. And because we want to focus initially on gameplay, there will be a preference in the first round for people with more powerful computers so that technical issues are less likely.

And to finish up with a warning: for those who haven't done much testing before, Hegemony Rome is still a work in progress. All of the pieces are in there, but there are still a lot of rough edges and a lot is going to change in the next few months in terms of bugs, game balance, performance, etc. This is a great opportunity if you're interested in game design and would like some input on how the game comes together (and potentially an in-game tester credit!). But I can guarantee right now that there will be crashes, you'll lose progress and need to restart, and that you'll probably find the AI will be too hard, too easy or too dumb. So if you're just hoping to play the game sooner than I recommend holding out until release because you'll enjoy it much more then.

So if that doesn't scare you off, drop me an e-mail and please tell any friends you think might be interested.

Would this indicate a plan to have it released Q2 2014 if all goes well?

I think we're hoping no later than the beginning of Q2. We thought the Ides of March would be cool, but when you factor in manufacturing and distribution time I don't think we're going to make it.

Does the publisher make the localizations? Because otherwise I could help you with the German localization (I already counterchecked some dozen pages of text in the past).

Thanks for the offer, but Kalypso is handling all of the localization work for us and since they're based in Germany they might even be doing the German version themselves.