MOST WANTED

[icycalm]

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1373 ... il_Empires

Anvil is a massively multiplayer game where thousands of players work together to build empires, wage war, and conquer in a persistent online world. March alongside armies of players in massive melee battles and large scale sieges.

Announcement Trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdojONa ... XVyolQO3wj



This looks pretty amazing. Finally real armies in an Age of Empires format, and not 30 morons lobbing spears between two castles that are two minutes' walk from each other. THIS is Age of Empires 4 and not what the retards are playing!

One thing I didn't like is that EVERY soldier is a human. Big mistake, they should have had human players leading NPC squads. No one wants to be just a soldier who is sacrificed in the frontline of every assault. Nevertheless, the action looks incredible.

I have some reservations about how persistence will be handled. It looks like the wars will last days, and even weeks. I suspect this will be handled as in PlanetSide meaning that the war will continue in your absence, but they will remove the regular and frequent resets, and that's how the war will persist for days (whereas in PlanetSide it persists for hours). Of course this is great, but I don't know how well it will be able to hold the player's attention while he goes about his daily life. Will he be interested in jumping back for an hour or two every evening, even though he missed out on a lot? Perhaps a mobile app to stay up to date with the war effort might help here.

There will apparently be animal hunting, resource gathering, building etc. Need to look for details on all this when I have some more time.











The game appears to be a "reskin" of the company's WW2 game Foxhole that was released back in September to a positive reception, so if we want a preview of how Anvil will play, we could give this a try sometime soon: https://store.steampowered.com/app/505460/Foxhole

It even got fawning reviews from journalists.

I enjoyed Foxhole, and I know much of that enjoyment grew out the marvel of watching so many players working together.

This was the first time that I felt like I was playing in a war: it was both entertaining and surreal.

Being set in the modern era, Foxhole probably doesn't have the farming/building elements that Anvil will have, which is a bummer. But that's WW2 for you. Part of why I don't like the era for war games. But basically it looks like Foxhole does for Company of Heroes what Anvil Empires will do for Age of Empires: they finally take them to the next level, for high-IQ/high-T players. I will be definitely trying both.

[icycalm]

lol the game was originally titled "Anvil", as you can still see from the Steam description I quote above. They did this to match the "Foxhole" title of their previous game. But then... they decided to add "Empires" to it. Even in the logo of the YouTube video you can see that the Empires is tacked on.

I wonder why they did that.

[icycalm]

Devblog 2 - Pre-Alpha & Seasons
https://steamcommunity.com/games/137391 ... 6901356697

Tests will be run roughly once every two weeks but this schedule may change as development evolves. It's important to note that not every test will follow the same format. Some tests will be more focused on building while others on PvP. At times, we may want to simply run a technical test or evaluate a specific part of the game. Initially, the server will only be open for limited time frames, but over time the sessions will last longer and longer.

In short, development will take a LONG time, but there will also be many opportunities to play alphas and betas, the first of which is due in a few days. To participate though, you have to get onto their Discord and be on your toes for the invites etc., and I am not going to do that when I have two campaigns to run this weekend. When they make it easy for me to play, I will play. That said, if anyone reading this feels like going to the trouble to TRY to play, and you end up playing, I would appreciate a stream and some impressions.

There's cool information too in the post including a roadmap:



and an animated gif showing the seasonal changes:

We are working towards having climate and weather be foundational part of Anvil from the start. Seasons will be simulated in full and have a long term impact on settlement gameplay, with tree leaves changing colour and withering away in the fall, snow accumulating in winter, and flowers blooming in the spring. We'll have a lot more to say about seasons in the near future, but for now the image below gives you a sneak peak of things to come. Stay tuned!

This is the real Age of Empires 2, no doubt about it.

[icycalm]

Devblog 3 - Blacksmithing, Multi Tenant Housing, Large World Tech
https://steamcommunity.com/games/137391 ... 9194861399

Blacksmithing will be a process that involves a chain of tasks necessary to forge weapons, tools, and other equipment. This process will start out slow and inefficient, requiring effort to craft even a single sword. As a settlement and its supporting infrastructure is developed, blacksmiths will become more efficient and capable of mass producing weapons for armies.

The first part of the process will involve building out an industrial area within your settlement. This involves placing down foundations that will form the workshop where your Anvil, Forge, Quenching Station, and other equipment will reside. These will be modular structures so players will have the freedom to lay them out however they wish within their workshop.

Sounds exactly like Life is Feudal.





You can zoom in a lot, and dimensions are real-life and not the Age of Retards BS where the castle can barely fit three horses.

Even better sounds the multitenant housing system. It sounds, once again, right out of Life is Feudal.

In Anvil Empires, every player must build or claim a House in order to join a Settlement. While we are looking to make this system more sophisticated in the future, even now this is a foundational part of the gameplay as you can't do much without being part of a Settlement. One of the issues that was encountered during initial tests was that the Houses were occupying too much space within Settlements.

As a first step towards addressing this, upgraded Houses can now accomodate multiple players. While a basic Hut can still only house one player, a Thatched House can house two, and a Wood House can house three. Each player will have their own separate inventories for storing a few personal items. In addition, the names of occupants are now shown on the UI so it's easy for players to tell who they are sharing a house with.

We never got around to building the larger houses in LiF, we only had huts. We'll be making them in LiF2 I am sure, and maybe in this thing too.

This game sounds pretty much like isometric LiF.

There's more in the post about server meshing. It sounds like they're doing similar things to Star Citizen with it, making it at least a bit more dynamic than LiF's static meshing. Nowhere near as dynamic as SC's will be of course.

While current Pre-Alpha tests have taken place on a temporary test map that is relatively small, we are internally developing the rest of the world which will be much more expansive. One critical piece of tech that we're working on is the ability to divide the world up into "regions" and farm them out to multiple R2 server instances to simulate. This is what will ultimately allow many thousands of players to occupy a vast world spanning an entire continent filled with seas, mountains, rivers, islands and more.

In Foxhole, this technical problem was solved by creating multiple map assets and stitching them together. A lot of time and effort was put into ensuring that the edges of each map would visually match the edges of neighbouring region maps. When the player walked to the edge of a region, the neighbouring region map would load in so that its landscape and environment could be viewed. At any given moment the client would have its own region map and one or more adjacent region map assets loaded in memory.

With Anvil, there is no concept of separate map assets being stitched together. Rather, the world will consist of one giant map. The R2 Engine automatically partitions the world into a grid and distributes each cell to a separate R2 server instance for simulation and networking. From the client's perspective though, the world is one giant continuous map. Now to be very clear here, this doesn't mean that the simulation can occur seamlessly across the entire world. Like Foxhole, the simulation will still be divided into regions separated by virtual borders meaning you can't arbitrarily shoot projectiles or interact with objects across regions. However, having the entire world on the client does provide many benefits, such as the potential to provide the experience of walking seamlessly between regions without loading screens under the right conditions. We are still developing this technology so don't expect this sort of polished experience off the bat but the base technology does provide this kind of potential for the future.

I am encountering the same terrain-stitching issues with my TaleSpire-powered West Marches by the way. Only way to get it done well is to hire an expert terrain-builder, and that's what I've done. Menyr won't have these issues.

[icycalm]

This is basically LiF demake. Meaning the real Age of Empires 2, since LiF is the real Age of Empires 3.

And what are the official AoE "sequels"?

Expansions.

A real sequel must evolve the mechanics, and evolve them greatly.

LiF was such a giant leap from AoE, that it jumped over a sequel. Meanwhile, armies of midwit players and developers were holding AoE back and stunting it, until these devs came in and are delivering the sequel that the midwits didn't want, and will never play, or even hear about.

[icycalm]

Devblog 16 - Keeps, World Expansion, and New Weapon Features
https://steamcommunity.com/games/137391 ... 7450528056



Check out this fort picture. It's real-scale! Not like Age of Empires et al. where the soldier is taller than the castle because player IQ is too low to realize this. This is Cult Engine 3 scale = real scale. Too bad the game will demand you live inside it because programmers don't have lives and can't tell the difference, so it'll be unplayable.