Archives » November 2008

Well it’s been a bit quiet here since my opening post. That’s mostly because I’ve been hard at work on the next update. This is going to be quite a big update and I haven’t wanted to risk saying too much about it until I can be sure all the features I’ve wanted are in, but at this stage I think I can give you a taste.

First of all the user interface has been revamped. User interaction is now much more direct. The, shall we say, controversial, sliding buttons have all gone. Attacking, deploying, fortifying and reinforcing are now all achieved by tapping directly on territories. I know quite a few people will be pleased about that. Some may have reservations and worry that this may leave the gameplay open to accidental taps in the wrong place - which can ruin a game! Indeed this was the key reason the current interface is the way it is.

However, after using the current interface for a while it occurred to me how I could solve both problems at once. The solution is so simple and obvious it makes me a little embarrassed I didn’t think of it before - but that’s what happens when you work through the night too often, I suppose. Anyway, I’ll save a little suspense and let you find out exactly how the new system works when it arrives - hopefully in the next couple of weeks.

In addition to UI and other presentation enhancements, the A.I. has been improved again. Most of the effort here has gone on under the hood (for some technical reasons I won’t go into here), but having done the work to create a new engine, work is now underway to split up different A.I. “characters” with different skill levels.

There’s a lot of other work going on in parallel too, and I’m expecting some other big features to make it into this update, including the ability to select starting positions - as well as setting how card trade-in values increase. However I don’t want to risk making too many promises here yet, other than to say that if those features don’t make it into this update they will be in the next one.

I can also report that work is underway on the network play and downloadable map features, although these won’t be in this release.

There will also be a couple of surprises in the new update too. Well, I have to leave something left for you to find out about…