First of all I just want to say how much I love the Hegemony series, it is unique in its gameplay and scale, very addicting and easily the most educative historical strategy game I've come across. Which is quite an accomplishment and definitely deserves more spotlight than it's getting.

As it happens, I had been wondering where the next game would be set, and when thinking of possible settings which kind of seem to fit the trend (classical antiquity, much campaigning and conquest, often centered around an idividual's accomplishments such as Philip II or Caesar) I kind of thought that Hannibal in Italy would be a great match, and that having a game set in Italy would have a lot of other possibilities for campaigns as well besides Hannibal (Pyrrhus of Epirus, Brennus of the Senones) not to mention perhaps opening modding possibilities for different time frames (Alaric's sacking of Rome comes to mind, the Italian wars, etc...). So I was thinking that maybe ancient Italy would make for an interesting Hegemony experience.

So imagine my surprise when I read the new announcement. There may or may not have been a grin on my face.

Unfortunately, credit cards are a rarity where I'm from so I can't use kickstarter. So instead I'll just buy it when it comes out and in the meanwhile wish you guys the best of luck, hopefully the campaign will get you far.

Man, I really wish I could help. Unfortunately, no one in my family or friends even plays video games to begin with. Dropping a thread over at some of the total war fan forums might not be a bad idea though. I would offer to help translate to Dutch, but that seems rather pointless because everyone over here prefers watching movies/playing games in their native language anyways.

Definitely excited for the map editor though, I've been interested in modding Hegemony but haven't really gotten around to it yet. Would definitely give it a try in the next title.

I pledged for the game and made a thread about the Kickstarter on gog.com. Its hard to get people to notice the game since Longbowgames is more or less unknown there. Just a small advice - drop an update or two to Hegemony Rome while kickstarter is active so that you won't get negative feedback from steam users for supposedly abandoning the game like it happened to several kickstarters already - steam users can generate a lot of negative feedback if they think the game is not in the state that they think it should be.

Don't worry, we just released 2.2.0, and we're already working on 2.2.1. We're not abandoning Rome any time soon, but there really hasn't been anything left for the artists to work on for a while, which is why they've been working on heg3 :)

Yeah, I know that Rick :) Was just a word of caution. I know how you develop games so I understand that :) Otherweise my gog thread seems to be starting to atract some people now. Also what might interest you is that in the beginning of 2015 gog.com is going to bring out a client similar to steam client but everything on it made in accordance with drm-free requierements so that autopatching is not going to a problem anymore there.

Also one other thing - if you do get on gog.com platfrom you can get free keys for your backers without a problem on gog. You basically just write and tell them how many keys you wan't and they send them to you and that's it. No charge, no nothing.

One other thing - gog users are wary of one thing though and asking how the new AI is going to be cause there were some negative reviews for it in Hegemony Rome in comparison to Hegemony Gold.

Since you mentioned on the kickstarter that you will change stretch goals I would advise you to do that asap since people who would pledge cause of linux or mac ports won't do that until the stuff is more clear. And it needs to be in the update section :) Now, I will be quiet and not bother you anymore.

Hell yeah I'm going to back you! I love the Hegemony series!

On a side note. The first song in your Kickstarter video is called "Knights of Darkness" and was written by the Greek composer Zero-Project. It's a good choice. It brings good memories back to me, because I had it as a theme song for my Civilization IV mod Fairy Tale back in 2009-10 or something. As I used a lot of his music for my mod, I was in contact with him quite a lot in those days and I recommended him to get into video games music. His music was very much appreciated by the mod's players and when we ended up in PC Gamer magazine as one of the four best Civilization mods, it was mentioned that the mod even had its own soundtrack, which was indeed quite something of an achievement. You might want to look into getting him to do some musical work on Hegemony 3 as well. He's an all around good guy and really talented. I was so happy to hear the song featured in your video as well! :)

EDIT: Can't wait to have that hand-written and hand-drawn postcard on my wall. Go for it guys! :)