Early Access

After some sleepless nights we finally made it. Excited, contented, exhausted and happy we can announce: Empires and Tribes has launched into Early Access and is now available on Steam. Many thanks to all the players who support us in this phase and thanks to all the incredibly appreciative and constructive feedback we get from you every day! This is the very reason why we constantly continue to build Empires and Tribes. We were also very lucky to be mentioned in an article by gameskeys.com as one of the promising new releases in May. Check out their website for more info. Your Empires and Tribes Team

Storyline

Game of Thrones is about to end in the foreseeable future?

Then let's finally start to rewrite the history of the Middle Ages ourselves. We are making good progress with the development of Empires and Tribes and are starting to reach a point where the essential game mechanics have either already been written and will soon be unlocked (keyword: combat mechanics and artificial intelligence) or will find their way into the game in the near future. So now we can and will start planning the campaigns and the story of Empires and Tribes. After all, whole kingdoms are waiting to be built, defended or defeated, kings to be crowned and intrigues to be spun...

But what do we have in mind for the campaigns? Empires and Tribes is on the one hand a city-building game with a strong economic component. So we're planning different scenarios in which the player has to deal with a lack of resources, an economically malplanned city which has to be renovated or the construction of a certain building like the cathedral. On the other hand, the game thrives on the warlike and tactical components. Therefore, scenarios in which alliances are forged, cities attacked and defended, and entire sieges must be held are virtually mandatory. And last but not least the RPG component should not be missing. Diplomatic campaigns that focus on tactics between different parties such as the church and the royal family or RPG campaigns where the player goes behind enemy positions at night to raid a valuable transport, for example, should make it into the game as well. The Empires and Tribes game concept gives us a thousand possibilities. Therefore our current task is to collect and categorize all options in order to achieve a reasonable and equal distribution of the game mechanics in the campaign and to increase the game depth step by step in order not to put the player in front of this abundance of possibilities right at the beginning. On the other hand we want to keep some new options in our campaign planning, especially for the late game, in order to make the world of Empires and Tribes still varied and unpredictable even after a few hours of gameplay.

Trebuchet

One of the most sophisticated and feared siege weapons of the Middle Ages has been the trebuchet. Thanks to a relatively simple system of counterweights, which impressed by its sheer size, whole boulders could be fired at enemy positions and ramparts. Fortunately there are a lot of medieval-enthusiastic people these days, who are not afraid to build and test siege weapons on a grand scale.... Like this one here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RN18I-RBVm4

Finally, it was the task of our programmer to calculate and implement the ballistic trajectory of the projectile. Actually not such a difficult task, but since we had to start from a perfect trajectory to a fixed target, among other things for the AI, the whole thing became a little more difficult. Wikipedia could only help us with this rather less revealing formula:

Yes, this was not exactly what we were looking for. Some hours in mathematical forums and a lot of trial and error attempts later the trajectories now had the desired shape, so our trebuchet is finally ready for use.