Projekt Weltherrscher - "Phase 2"

[Cybermonkey]

Just according to the screenshots, this looks awesome! I definitely have to test it although I am not the turn based strategy guy.

[farcodev]

Wow what a hellish of work you've made!

Great job!

[Sascha Willems]

I have released a new version (revision 121), grab it here. I dub this the "AI release" as it mostly contains enhacements for the AI. Prior to this release it was still mostly at the same state as for the "Phase 1" release, so I added a lot of functionality to the enemy AI and also made it a bit smarter. The AI will now do most of the stuff that players can do in "Phase 2", including upgrading buildings, researching infinite technologies, doing espionage and sabotage and so on.

I also changed the construction AI (see this blog posting for more information), so the AI will now be much more competitive than before, populating regions in a better way than before that'll get upgraded over time. It also demolishes buildings that aren't needed aynmore, making space for better once. Also the AI is now less prone to loosing reagions due to high pollution or low loyalty.

Here is the complete changelog for this revision :

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Revision #121
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Fixes
   - (Regions) Added missing connections from Japan to neirhbouring countries
   - (Regions) Added missing connection from Korean Kuril to United korea
   - (Regions) Added missing connection from State Alliance to Texas
   - (Regions) Added missing connection from New Texas to Texas
   - (Regions) Removed connection from Oldquebec to New Nunavut (no shared border)
   - (Regions) Removed wrong connection from Egypt to Algeria (no shared border)
   - (Regions) Wrong regional loyality display and calculations fixed
   - (Espionage) Captured agents during hostile region infiltration are now removed (as noted in the message box)
   - (Savegame) Creating a new savegame now uses the correct file extension

 User interface
   - (Regions) Changed building selection (again). Dropdown for building category now only jumpts to selected category
               instead of only displaying buildings from selected category
   - (Transfermarket) Several optical and usability changes
   - (Misc) Changed scrollbar appearance for listboxes (no more overlapping, better scrolling visualization)
   - (Misc) Fixed partially wrong button click areas

 Balancing
   - (Buildings) Lowered resource penalty for "Orbital sun sails", giving it an advantage over a nuclear power plant

 AI
   - (Construction) No longer constructs normal buildings on coastal spots
   - (Construction) No longer populates locked coastal spots (regions without coasts)
   - (Construction) Added more randomization to the construction AI (placement, building selection)
   - (Construction) Now constructs new coastal buildings when coastal spots are available
   - (Construction) Now demolishes buildings not needed anymore and regains funds (like human players)
   - (Construction) Added upgrade paths for buildings, so AI will now upgrade existing buildings to better versions
   - (Espionage) Now also hires and manages agents
   - (Espionage) Assigns hired agents to the different infiltration targets (own region, hostile region, data net)
   - (Espionage) Agents infiltrated into own regions fake either division or structure data
   - (Espionage) Agents transition from one data net level to the next one
   - (Epsionage) Agents execute data net espionage and sabotage actions
   - (Military) No longer attacks with one-unit only divisions

[Sascha Willems]

With 2012 ending soon I decided to release a new version of the "Phase 2" beta. You can grab it grab it here (Revision #125).

Contrary to the last release this one doesn't include bugfixes but adds a new feature and new content :

• Detached manual battles
  As the manual battles in Projekt "W" could almost be made into a separate game I decided to add a new entry to the game's main menu that allows you to setup a manual battle and play it without having t play a "real" game". So from both the single- and multiplayer menu it's now possible to start manual battles detached from the main game. A new dialogue will show up that allows you to customize all of the battle's aspect. Starting from the setting, to the nations involved and also including complete control over how many and what units will participate in the battle
• New maps
  I also added half a dozen new maps for the manual battles that'll get selected at random. The last release only included 6 maps, so the number of possible maps for the manual battles is now doubled.

Screenshots :



I hope you enjoy the new features and have a happy new year

Edit : I noticed that the last video of PjW was from November 2011, so I decided to cut together a new video showcasing the most recent version. You can watch it here : www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LmWSjU-vTU&hd=1

[Sascha Willems]

So 2013 is here, the open beta is running good and people seem to like the game.So for 2013 I plan a final release (after all the years of hard work and endless weekends that made it look like the game would never become finished) and there isn't that much left to do :

• Sound design
  The game is severely lacking in this area. I noticed this will playing a small indie strategy game where the sounds perfectly fit the scenario and added to the overall atmosphere. That’s pretty much missing from “Phase 2″ currently, and this is one of the bigger issues I’ll take care of.
  
• Politics feature
  I mentioned this in several posts and the button is already there in the current beta build, but the feature is still in design stage. My plan is to add more personality to the game so the player feels more like the leader of a nation rather than “just” building stuff and moving divisions.
  
• Ingame tutorial and documentation
  “Phase 1″ had an ingame tutorial that lead the player through the most important aspects of the gameplay. This is currently missing from “Phase 2″, but something like this is a necessity for such a complex game. The html manual include is already a step in the right direction but not sufficient in my eyes.
  
• Add more content
  Although already stuffed with a lot of content (currrently the development directory inlcudes almost 800 MBytes of drafts, artworks, models, textures, designs, etc.) there are still areas where content is lacking. Battlefields for example still lack variety in 3D models and I also want to add some more buildings, technologies and global projects.
  
• Remove backwards compatibility for shaderless GPUs
  Wheen the original game launched there were lots of GPUs that didn’t support shaders, so there is still code in the renderer for these cards. But nowadays even the cheapest GPU is capable of shaders (inlcuded integrated GPUs), so I want to remove this legacy stuff and then also use shaders to opimize rendering in certain areas.

These are the most important points on my agenda, though I still have some plans left after the first final release (except for patches). I may implement a complete network mode in addition to hotseat multiplayer and I also want to make it compile with Lazarus so that I can also release a linux and MacOSX version (or maybe even more). Though these points aren't written in stone as I'd like to move on from Projekt "W" at some point in the near future and start working on something else.

And btw. the game is now also listed on the IndieDB. I hope this will broaden the audience a bit and make more people play it :

[Rodrigo Robles]

I think this is one of the best indie games I ever seen. It's feature full and polished.
A Linux version would be fine. I tried it under wine and the game almost work, but at some points graphics didn't show and I couldn't make an extensive testing.
Porting to Lazarus can open the multiplatform world and make it runnable in many platforms, including iOS and Android.

[Sascha Willems]

Well, that'd be my ultimate plane. I think a game like this is perfectly suited to be played on a tabled, so getting it up and running with Android (or even iOS) would be great. But I know that means a lot of work, but getting it to compile with Lazarus would be a big step in the multi-platform direction. And that's what I'm currently doing (out of curiosity), though Lazarus has it's share of problems with such a big project. Converting it fails each and every time with a different error, so I'm doing it by hand now. The biggest part of this will be adjusting the XML-parts, cause the Delphi XML-functionality differs from the implementation in Lazarus. But that's nothing that can't be done

And thanks for the kind words, always good to hear positive stuff on your own projects