3.2 Beta Available Now!

[rob]

It's here! The beta version of the next expansion is now available for everyone to try in the beta branch. Update 3.2 overhauls the raider and resource trading systems and adds a whole new level of economic control for your cities.

If you've never tried one of our betas before, you can access it by right-clicking on Hegemony III in your Steam library, selecting Properties and then opening the Betas tab. From there you can choose the new beta or any of our earlier releases.

As a beta release, there are still a number of loose ends we're working on such as tips, tutorials, balance, optimizations, etc, but while we finish those up we'd love to get your feedback on how the new features are working and any ideas or suggestions you have for moving forward.

In particular, we're interested in how the changes affect the difficulty and whether there are any features that aren't clear or need better explanations. And as always, we'd also appreciate receiving any saved games (mailto: [e-mail]) where you think the AI could be doing a better job since that's the best way for us to tell what the AI's "thinking" and how to improve it.

Unfortunately, even as we patch the old bugs, any big update is guaranteed to introduce a few new problems, so if you get any dump files or script crashes please pass them along so we can patch them as quickly as possible.

In terms of compatibility, 3.2 should load any savegame made in earlier releases, but you may have to do a little adjusting to bring your empire back into balance. However, games made in 3.2 will not work in earlier versions and the Macedonian map mod will need an update to work properly that we'll release along with the official 3.2 version.

You can read below for a description of the major new features and smaller bug fixes, and if you haven't watched it yet, we've got a playthrough video up on youtube that highlights how a lot of it works.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZvw8ZPt8ko

Thanks again for everyone's ongoing support for the series and we're looking forward to getting 3.2 wrapped up so we can get back to finishing the first big DLC expansion.

Change Log: 3.2.0 Beta 1 rev. 39115

Territories

Territories are an expansion of the old supply zones and designate the terrain that your faction controls around your cities and buildings. Unlike supply zones, territories now automatically merge together when they overlap creating continuous zones of control that act as resource hubs sharing all of their wood and food automatically. This clustering effect eliminates the need for extra supply lines between nearby buildings and dramatically simplifies the flow of resources so that it's much easier to identify shortfalls, surpluses and bottlenecks within your empire.

Economic Controls

The new update drops city stances and replaces them with individual controls for Tax Rate, Rationing and Recruitment. Using these controls, you can now adjust exactly how much gold a city produces, how much food it consumes (and therefore how fast it grows), and also how fast it generates new recruits.

These new controls make it much easier to make quick changes to your economy in response to changes in strategy e.g. suffer heavy losses and need to rebuild your army - turn up recruitment, need to hire a few extra units but don't have the cash - raise taxes, don't have enough food to make it through the winter - ration your cities.

Of course, there is a catch to all of this. Raising any of these controls will decrease your city's morale, and dropping morale below zero will lead to rebellion. So with limited morale to work with, you'll need to make trade offs like deciding if its more important to generate taxes or to reduce food consumption. In addition to generating some interesting strategic choices, it also highlights the real historical differences between managing friendly native cities with high morale versus hostile conquered cities that are less inclined to fork over their gold and recruits to you.

Raiders and Rebels

Now, just because you've got the morale to "spend" on generating gold doesn't mean you won't still want to keep your taxes low. In 3.2, raiders (we're calling them rebels now) appear as a response to persistent low morale in your cities. This means that periodically (the speed depends on how low a city's morale is) rebel units will break away from your cities and seek out ways to liberate their homeland. This could mean that they immediately start raiding your farms, or it could mean they construct a camp nearby to wait for more rebel units to join them before launching a larger assault on your cities.

Companions

For those who remember the special Companions units in Hegemony Gold, we've got a new objective series that provides your empire with an elite unit supported by your realms noble families that grows in size and power along with your empire.

Liberation

Inspired by Rome's many slave revolts, we've added a new feature that let's raiders liberate enemy slaves from resource buildings and turn them into basic combat units that will fight alongside them. While not powerful themselves, they can quickly turn a small raiding party into a major threat if you're not careful.

Bugs and Minor Changes

• Fixed bug completing "Defeating the Other" objective after assimilating the enemy's cities
  
• Fixed a bug when hitting escape while the game was initializing
  
• 50+ new historical city tips
  
• Multi-select support for cities
  
• Redesign of the trade tab
  
• Fixed Gallic faction victory achievement
  
• Fixed rare script crash with "Castor and Pollux" event
  
• Add strategy morale map overlay
  
• Removed defense strategy map overlay
  
• Fixed defeat message when disbanding units
  
• Fixed fullscreen checkbox in the options screen
  
• Fixed crash when trying to settle non-colonist units
  
• Fixed bug with extra 'Not hostile' warnings
  
• Razing captured cities no longer triggers warning event
  
• New captured/lost city notifications
  
• Fixed bug with enemy group miniatures not being visible
  
• Fixed bug with AI recruiting workers when out of gold
  
• Fixed a few pathfinding issues on the map

[Ca_Putt]

Good news! I can't wait to try this out. Especially happy about the gallic fix, i'm in the middle of a cenomani campaign

[Dual_Cored]

Awesome thx guys!

[Wenchbane]

Haha nice work! Had to use wifi hotspot to get the download running xD Definitely gonna get some time in while I'm offline over here!

You guys are the best! Thanks for the update!

I did see a few things that might still need some addressing but I will have to try it out and see how it goes. Hopefully there's a way to shut down sea pirates for good!

[pacman]

Thanks for this update! I hope it will get finalized soon and the beta won't last too long. This game is just sooooo good.
-pac

[Cybermat47]

Sounds awesome! It's been great seeing this series evolve from 'Hegemony Gold' onwards :)

[UrbanCohort]

Sounds like a lot more fun :) However, I have 1 question, I keep morale in my cities at 50% or so, in non-native cities even lower, so I can harvest as many gold as possible for my vast, great and always victorious army... At wich morale level will rebels appear? If this is 50% I have a grand problema in my ongoing campaign :P

[rob]

@wenchbane Looking forward to your feedback. Unfortuntely, we didn't get quite as far on the naval updates as we hoped for this update but more is coming (including better naval deterants). Pirates should play a much smaller role in 3.2, but they are still attracted to unguarded coastal resources. Naval raids from other factions can also be stopped by truces.

@urbancohort Any morale below 100 will increase the rebellion level in the city (which will eventually lead to rebels), but the rate increases exponentially as morale drops to zero. So you can leave it in the 50-100 range for quite awhile before you'll run into trouble and you can always push it back over 100 to lower it back down before any rebellions happen. Generally, the idea behind the new economic controls is to give more short term options when you're in a crunch, but to make sure they still have consequences in the long run.

We are intentionally trying to make it more difficult to raise the resources for war (something most ancient generals faced), but we expect to tweak these values during the beta so let us know if you're running into a lot of balance problems.

[UrbanCohort]

So, their will be notifications when a city is about to make some rebels to prevent it from happening?

[rob]

Originally posted by UrbanCohort:

So, their will be notifications when a city is about to make some rebels to prevent it from happening?

The chance of rebels appearing increases as the rebellion level gets to 100 and is more likely when there are fewer guards around or if there are other rebel bases nearby.

The rebellion level also determines the size of the force, so you might be get a small unit appearing on an unguarded city when the rebellion level is at 30, or you may get a much larger force trying to break through your garrison when the rebellion level reaches 100.

There are guaranteed to be no rebellions when morale is over 100 and the rebellion level is falling (regardless of what the current rebellion level is).

The idea is that you should know the risk of rebellion in your cities, but not necessarily when they will strike. In most cases, you won't need to deal with them immediately as they will generally move first to setup a base nearby and build their forces before engaging in any attacks or raids.

That said, we do give a special warning the first time rebels would appear in the game so players know its coming and there is also a rare special event in the game that gives you advanced warning of a rebellion and offers a few options on how to deal with it.

[UrbanCohort]

Ok, I think I should just try it out. Thanks for explaining :)

[The Drunken Queen]

Don't know if somoene already asked this but, how do we get the beta?

[meltdown]

<3 devs

[challengespaceyard]

I like the new economic system so far. I have not yet made it very far, being only 21 weeks into a new game as the Cenomani.

[rob]

Originally posted by Invicta Sadie The Drunken Queen:

Don't know if somoene already asked this but, how do we get the beta?

You can access the beta by right-clicking on the game in your steam library and selecting 'Properties'. In the properties window, open the Betas tab and select beta from the drop-down list.

[Mac]

This looks like an excellent upgrade. Going back to play this.