[Open beta] Rising Empires - a 4x fantasy strategy game

Hi,

My name is Peter Norberg and together with my brother I'm working on the indie title Rising Empires for Android. It's a 4x strategy game in a fantasy setting. We started working on Rising Empires for about two years ago and are now in the middle of our open beta test. Both of us lives in Sweden although one at the west coast and one at the east coast...

Here are two screenshots from the game play:


I anyone would like to give it a try it can be downloaded on Google Play (search for Rising Empires beta).

Best regards,

Peter

Johan and I are currently working on the next update for Rising Empires and plan to release it on the 1st of July.

In this update we'll add a number of new features, for example the new Military Academy building will be activated allowing emperors to recruit generals for their armies. A general gives a number of bonuses to the troops in his command, boosting their combat efficiancy and morale. Another new feature is that empires will be able to build settlers and militia from the races that they've conquered. The computer controlled empires have been able to do this for some time but now you can do it as well. This makes conquered towns and cities more useful.

We also hope to improve the AI further and are focusing on making it able to defend itself better. Previously the AI have had problems with defending it's capital due to it being unable to change it's priorities once a project (task) has been assigned. Now we're giving the AI the ability to cancel a project worked on in a threatened settlement allowing it to focus on its own defence instead. We've come a bit forward on this work but there are still some circumstances where the AI fail to defend itself.

The new update of Rising Empires has now been available on Google Play for a couple of days and we’re awaiting the first comments about it. There are a lot of new features and improvements. For example it’s now possible to recruit commanders for your armies in cities with the Military Academy building and you can train militia and settlers from races that you’ve conquered. This will make conquered towns and cities more useful. We did also tweak the AI quite a lot and improved it’s defensive capability.

If you've been playing Rising Empires before please let us know your thoughts on the new AI. Do you notice any difference? Is it better at defending itself? Has it ever left the cover of the high walls to hunt down your intruding armies?

I’m now preparing the code needed for training the AI. Each turns the AI evaluates a number of possible actions and selects those that gets the highest priority. These actions might be relatively simple, for example building a new patrol army, to quite advanced, for example using several settlements to create a big army that will be sent to the other level to capture an enemy city. The first one might take 1-2 turns while the other action could take 20+ turns... When training the AI we’ll try to optimise how the AI sets it’s priorities. This is done by letting different versions of the AI play against itself. I’m really looking forward to this!

Rising Empires, the epic 4x turn-based strategy game for Android will be released on September 21st. There will be two versions of the game; a free one with ads and a premium version with additional content. The extra premium features include two additional playable races, the fast breeding Krant and the versatile Dwarves. The game is scheduled for release on Google Play and several other app stores.

The game is currently in an open beta stage and can be downloaded at Google Play. At the time of writing, it is installed on 900 devices and has been downloaded more than 2,700 times. Many reviewers compare the game to classics like Civilization and Total War. One player writes: “Exactly the type of game I’ve been hoping for.” The average rating is 4.2. This news release has featured on Droid Life, Droid Gamers and many others.

It’s only six days left until the release of Rising Empires and we’re just about finished with all the new features and improvements for the premium version. Just a few hours ago I uploaded the final version of my code (AI and what we call the process methods) and Johan completed the last improvements for the GUI yesterday. We’ll still polish the game until the very end but we’ve added all the stuff that we intended for the release. We’re very excited to hear your response to the last features we’ve added and also how you like the insectoid Krant and the Dwarf races.

Among the last things I fixed was improving how the AI value the strength of it’s armies when it prepares to attack an enemy town. Now it will build extra companies if it believes that the enemy town is very well defended, before it sometimes sent conquest armies that where to weak even when it was sent off.

While working with this improvement I also found a very irritating bug. It seemed that when the AI compared if there is a path between two locations in the same region it always failed if both locations were the same. This just happened to have a big influence when it came to making use of all its army reserves since it always tried to locate its largest army reserve and when it would pick companies from the reserve it could no longer see that it was connected to its target location. Anyway, when I fixed this error the formerly very big army reserves that some AIs built up decreased in size as they now send them to do mischief instead.