We've been so busy on Hegemony III that it's hard to believe a whole month has gone by since our last news post. The game is coming together really well and we're getting close to the point where we can confidently announce a launch date. In the meantime check out the updates below and to see it all in action tune in to Twitch next week (Thursday, Mar 12, 4PM EST (8PM GMT)) for another live playthrough and developer Q&A.

Faction Skills
I talked in the last post about adding a skill/tech tree to unlock new units and faction-wide bonuses and I'm excited to share that feature is now in the game. Skill points are awarded for completing objectives so no matter what direction you expand you can choose how your faction will advance. The screenshot below shows the first few tiers of the Etruscan Military tree. There is also an Economic tree that will provide bonuses for resources, city growth and diplomacy.



Farm, Trade and Pillage!
We've been doing a lot of work to improve the resource balance in Hegemony III to make sure there's always pressure to protect your supplies throughout the game. A big part of this is the new city growth feature we've talked about before where you'll need to feed your cities if you want to unlock more recruits, upgrades and income. Additionally, we've got a new system where you can buy and sell resources with nearby towns of other factions, plus an all-new pillaging system that lets you raid the enemy when you're down on gold. Both the trade and pillage mechanics are now possible because, unlike in the previous games, gold in Hegemony III will accumulate allowing for one time transactions.





Everything else ...
We've also been really busy working on unit movement, grouping, ship combat, the new fonts and textures for the strategy map, and lots of awesome new units (check out Blake's sculpt for the Celtic nobleman above), but I think it's really best to see them all in action so I'll save the rest for Twitch broadcast next week and just leave you with a few more fun screenshots.

I also agree with Kolopaper. I wouldn't mind a color pallet based on colors more realistic for the natural world.

Thanks for the feedback. Blake's rewritten most of the shaders since Rome and continues to tweak them whenever he has the time so we'll keep the suggestions in mind.

Any chance we'll see AI improvements?

Definitely. We've already done a lot of work on the raiders for the early game, but we needed to finalize the mechanics and balance the resources before we can move onto tuning the AI.

Any chance they'll be back ported to Rome?

At this point, I'm not expecting any further significant AI changes for Rome. I admit there are things that could still be improved, but unfortunately even small AI changes can lead to a lot of unpredictable consequences and we just don't have the resources right now to test everything.

That said, whenever it seems reasonable like the recent grouping and naval improvements, we will continue to port back as much as we can.

We are planning on some historical objectives that will include specific generals that were mentioned in the histories, but we're not planning any new political mechanics.

While Rome is definitely a key part of the game, we're trying to design things so it's just as interesting to play as other factions like the Etruscans or Greeks so we're focusing on mechanics like trade, faction skills and diplomacy that can be used by everyone.

From your last demonstration on twich i still haven't seen the hoplite falanx formation and how it works. Did you finished it?

Nope. For now the phalanx formation is still just a spacing/bonus variant of the existing battleline. It is still on our todo list to write some custom phalanx movement code. At the moment the greek factions are still our least complete, but hopefully we'll have a better demo for them in the next month.

ANY NEWS ON RELEASE DATE GUYS? so pumped i already have steam moneyz put away for it;)

We're getting closer ... it's going to be this summer for sure (hopefully on the early side), but I'm hesitant to set a specific date until we get further into playtesting and we have a better idea how much balance/debug work there is.

I'm working on an updated news post now so you should have some new details in the next few days.

While we've made a number of mechanical changes to make play balancing easier this time, the game is still way too big for us to test everything internally so we are planning a closed beta a little closer to release to get some input from the community.