Now that the date is settled, we are hard at work to complete the Gold version of the game, which means that we are feature and content complete (admittedly, some of the features seem to be cursed and need fixing!) and trying to finalise the game’s stability. This in turn signifies that in the weeks to come, we’ll be bug fixing like crazy, polishing till our elbows hurt and putting in those finishing touches on the AI.
What does it mean for the Beta?
We will have the Beta up and running for a few more weeks, but then we do plan to close it for a bit before release, so that even our faithful Beta testers can perhaps enjoy one or two new things on release.
Our improved battle maps are now less flat and have the location models in for more flavour.
So, we’re at the end of July now, and I am sure you’re all wondering how things are progressing, right? Well, things are going well. We are producing regular patches/updates (8 big ones so far) to catch bugs as well as modify features due to feedback and/or add new ones.
Our biggest hurdle remains firmly in the AI behaviours. While the AI at the moment is learning more and more complex tasks and combinations, and in the weeks to come, we will hopefully have it become more and more aggressive and proactive towards the player.
But for now, we come across such odd diplomatic conversations:
I mean, I did not declare war on him, and I certainly did not refuse any offers, maybe I accidentally said no to a date, or something, and he’s upset now? Don’t know, but he is angry…
Diplomacy is an integral part of the Master of Magic gameplay. It refers to the interaction between the Wizards. This interaction ranges from the initial meeting, to trade agreements, peace treaties, throwing out threats or joining an alliance, as even though there can be only one, sometimes it is a good strategy to work together to beat a common enemy. All of this is of course handled by the AI that decides how and when a Wizard will react to the player and to other Wizards. In the original game, there were a lot of things that never really worked beyond the concept, so we hope our AI will bring to life the ideas of the previous designers.
Personalities
The AI behaviour is based on the concepts from the original, so there will be the six personality types : maniacal, ruthless, aggressive, chaotic, lawful and peaceful. Based on those personalities the Wizards will have modifiers to their behaviour both in tactics and diplomacy. So a peaceful Wizard will be much more likely to try and have a treaty with you, and much less likely to resort straight to violence, while a maniacal one will be almost the opposite, quick to attack and generally paranoid.
As a continuation from last week’s community led Q&A, I will talk a little about community feedback and how we try to balance it as we develop the remake. We’ll also share a few pictures of our own improvements and try to explain the process behind it all.
So, the general rule here at MuHa is that we do our best to read the feedback and keep up to date with community discussions. We then take note of any points that we either find particularly interesting, or pressing, and we try our best to get them into the game.
It is also important to note here, that we have read and continue to read the community forums and wiki as we build our design doc. As such, a lot of our base design choices were already built on your feedback and hard work.
We’ve asked our community on Discord to put forward some burning questions and we’ve attempted to answer them all the best we can at this point in development. Please note I may have paraphrased some of the questions, especially when there were several that asked the same thing.
Q: What are the main changes/improvements? What are the differences with the original Master of Magic? So far, we know about the graphics and hexagons on the world map, but any other outstanding features?
That is a question I intend to tackle fully another time, as we are pushing closer and closer to a feature complete build, I want to wait and collect all the big ones in one go, because we will inevitably make changes once we play our game and find things that may or may not work for our version. But, not wanting to leave this entirely unanswered, customising your playthrough is a feature we hope to greatly improve from the original. So apart from the usual difficulty settings, we’d like to include as many on/off options as we can, especially when it comes to things that stray from the original, but not exclusively so.
As an example, in addition to the option of turning the game’s events on/off, we already have a second pack of events that will also be optional. Another plan is to have customisable AI difficulty. While these are only a few examples, our intention is to build up this list, especially once the game is playable and thus open to more precise feedback.
Another feature that already received a makeover, are the events. There will be two event packs at launch, one, the original 18 events, and another, with brand new ones. You will of course be able to switch both/either on and off. While the original events are copied from the old game directly, they have been updated and given alternate routes. So, when you encounter an earthquake for example, in the original, it was simply a notification, in the new version, you may have an option to mitigate the effects. The new event pack will follow the same rule, events that occur will have multiple ways of resolution, instead of them being simple notice.
