It has been about 10 days since the last blog report, time for another one I’d say!

Website

It has also been 10 days since the launch of the website. And even such a seemingly trivial feature didn’t go without quarrels. The site made it to the frontpage of Reddit /r/gaming and our webhost didn’t like that amount of traffic. So we were sadly shut down for half of the time we had our little place in the internet spotlights. Then again, we’re happy to have spread the word to at least 40000 people during our first few days online 🙂

Maps

We have been testing some new maps as well. Not sure which will make it to the final version yet, but we have a nice array of extra choices! Golden Pit, Acropolis, Hillmania, Teamhills. I must say I very much fancy Acropolis.

Balance & Small features

We seem to come close to an end of balancing things. The new British UT (previously City Rights, giving TC +2 range and +50% HP) will be replaced by a technology to boost their Trebuchets (small blast radius). Which also addresses the main British weakness in late games. Namely their lack of a powerful response against heavy siege. Siege onagers, bombard cannons and even scorpions will now have a very hard time dodging the bullets of this stone-hurling monstrosity. On top of that, we did a lot of small bugfixes, Siege engineers, Chemistry and some civ bonuses didn’t work in all situations and this went largely unnoticed in the 13 years of AoK/AoC. Thank you all for reporting them.

Graphics

The palisade gate finally has construction graphics! So far we used construction graphics of the normal gate, which was just silly ofcourse.

Installer

An installer comes with many trivial things you would not expect at first. We want to add multi-lingual support to the installer, but adding support for languages with exotic characters is proving to be very challenging. The installer also communicates with the server, to check if you have the latest version and to update if necessary. But sending data over the internet must obviously be encrypted! All small thingy-bits that take time 🙂

Your voice!

Since the core of the game seems to come in clear, the list of necessary resources is also visibly shorter. Perhaps you can help us out on one of those? We’re currently still looking for some voice sets. Most civs in Age of Empires II have a unique voice set for villagers, soldiers, monks and kings. Currently we’re still looking to make unique sets for: Indians, Incas and Slavs. We have example voice files for all of those civs, but none of them are final, nor complete. Do you think you can help us out, feel free to drop a message below.