Hi, this is Hubert from Emperor Games. As you probably know, for many months we've been working on Roman: Empire Wars - a complex real-time strategy game, which will allow players to take part in historical battles from the glory days of the great Roman Empire.

In addition to historical accuracy, we are also making every effort to make our game look as visually beautiful as possible. Unfortunately, providing excellent graphics and good optimization does not come easy, and we have to face technological challenges on a daily basis. Each object created in our game initially consists of millions of polygons forming a model mesh, but is reduced by up to 95%. Thanks to this, an object that took up 1GB starts to weigh 1MB, which is 1,000 times less than originally.

Next, we burn PBR textures onto the object. These are designed to create a realistic shading model, replacing the dense geometry of the object. In game, the visual difference is almost unnoticeable until you bring the camera within a few cm of the character. Which is not the case in normal gameplay.

An additional optimization trick which we implement to our game is the use several grid densities depending on the distance of the camera from the object. As the camera moves away from the character, details on the texture are no longer visible. When the camera is close to the character, we give the texture a resolution of 2048 x 2048px, and the further away the camera is, the lower the texture resolution gets, down to 32 x 32 px. This way we optimise the amount of memory needed, the amount of calculations by the graphics card and the processor, and we get 60 frames per second.

The aforementioned problems don't worry us though, especially given that we like a good challenge! It does mean, however, that we need a bit more time to finish the project and get the game to you in a state that both you and are happy with! Currently Roman: Empire Wars runs without any problems on top graphics cards. However, we wouldn't want to divide players by making only those who can afford the most expensive hardware take part in the greatest battles of Ancient Rome! Not to mention the difficult availability of the best cards during a pandemic.

That is why we ask for your patience! But we promise that the wait will be worth it! See you soon on the battlefields all across the Europe!