It's been a long time coming, but the latest update is finally here. Take control of the northern expansion into the lands of the Gaulish people and build thriving, rich villages.
New Society
Introducing the Gauls, the tribal based culture situated in southern ancient France.
These people are hearty, strong and robust. They have a culturally rich society and through a range of scenarios you'll learn what they require and how they play.
Gaul Overview
You'll play initially as the Gauls and become familiar with their people. You'll learn about their industries, religion and culture and grow vibrant trade centric villages.
The Gauls produced a wide ranges of goods, trading extensively across local tribes and with Rome. The Gauls employ a series of deeply interconnected buildings to generate, refine and trade goods with others.
Much like Rome, the Gauls created a series of raw resources and through their industries and artisans created highly sought after trade goods. There are well over a dozen processed goods that you'll need to create to satisfy the needs of both Rome and their local population.
Gaul Citizens
You'll manage three distinct groups of citizens in your settlements. These are the Kin, Warrior and Elites. Each of these groups will have their own resource needs, civic service requirements and operate in selected buildings.
Much like in Rome, each of these citizens will require more and varied resources to help them upgrade their dwellings. it's up to you to provide these goods and help them flourish.
Gaul Civic Services
The Gauls require several passive buildings to make them happy, these are Culture, Religion and Security.
While compared to Rome they have less diversity in types of requirements, you'll find they need much more of these resources to be satisfied. it's going to be up to you to build a range of these buildings around your dwellings to ensure maximum coverage.
You'll have access to several monuments, shrines and other buildings to provide these services to your citizens.
Gaulish Industries
The Gauls have an extensive range of resources and trade goods. Several goods require resources to be processed at multiple industries. Each of these buildings have their own labour needs, so getting the right balance for your settlement will be part of the challenge.
It's quite common for end level luxury goods to require 3 or more steps along the way to produce the raw resources they need.
When playing as Gaul you'll be continually refining resources and crafting a range of luxury goods. Compared to Rome, the Gauls require much more planning of their industry to maximise their effectiveness.
I'm really hoping you all enjoy the wide range of industries and goods the Gaulish roster employs. I found it an exciting challenge to create heavily dependent resource chains and to collect your raw resource and refine it into something worthy of trade.
Scenarios
You'll take control of a pivotal time in Roman occupied Gaul. During this tumultuous time, warriors and chieftains alike resented Rome, seeing them as nothing but an occupying force.
It's your job as the regional advisor to overseer the growth and development of these new lands and to ensure these people thrive under Roman rule. You'll create vast villages across eight unique scenarios, bringing growth, trade and repairing relations with the Gauls.
You'll play a series of Gaul only scenarios in which you can get familiar with their playstyle and then after that you'll need to balance that along with the traditional buildings of Rome. The challenge you'll find is building between two distinct cultures and maintaining balance. A whole heap of new maps have been created, featuring the snowy landscapes of south and north Gaul.
New Systems / Gameplay Optimisations
While the Gauls were the primary focus of the expansion, I've taken the time to refine some of the game systems, UI and features to make it overall a better game to play.
Split Building Menu
One of the areas I've been looking to improve has been the main building menus. When playing the grand roman campaign, where you only focus on Roman buildings, the menu itself is serviceable, it shows a lot of buildings but you can find what you need.
However, in the African campaign, where now you also have to build additional dwellings, industries and cultural / religious buildings for the local population, it became hard to navigate.
This new menu structure splits the buildings into their own top level menu, one for Rome, Africa and Gaul respectively. You'll only see the build menu for the applicable culture if your current scenario involves that society.
Building Sub-categories
Another area I've looked into is the organisation of industry buildings. Because there are so many buildings that relate to industry, I've re-defined how these groupings worked. Now when you play as Rome, Africa or Gaul there will be several custom groups, used to relate similar buildings together.
This makes finding farms, mineral extraction buildings and other buildings much easier.
Worker Summary UI
A new persistent UI now shows in the bottom left corner of the game. This shows at a glace your total number of workers along with the total number of jobs in the settlement. This should help you quickly determine if you too many / too few workers and to adjust your building accordingly.
What's Next?
After the initial Gaul release ill be balancing, tweaking and perfecting the campaign. I'm always keen for feedback and to hear how people are playing the game.
Going forward ill be undertaking a large polish stage, getting it ready for it's transition out of early access!