Mon Général!
The new title was announced a few days ago. We’re still amazed how well the announcement was received - thanks to every one of you, who dropped comments, encouragement, and re-posted to spread the word! It is really humbling to see such support!
Already, a lot of questions have been posted about this title. For this first devblog, where the imperial cat is finally out of the bag, we’ll give a rough idea of our massive project, hopefully answering many of the pending questions in rough detail. Like said, we’re early in the development and all details are not yet set in stone.
When will it be released? Will there be an Early Access release?
We’re still early in the development, pre-alpha, so to say. At this point we have no exact release date in mind. The situation is similar to what it was when we first announced Grand Tactician: The Civil War (1861-1865). We know this project is massive. So, how to eat an elephant of this size?
Of course the answer is in pieces. Our approach is to utilize Early Access. Like when developing GT1, we’re still a very small team of developers: the core team is just three people - though unlike when starting working on GT1 basically from zero experience, we’ve now worked together for almost 10 years, and learned a lot.
This said, the development roadmap is built in three parts: pre-release, Early Access, and post-release. At some point we’ll drop some details about the first part, but in the grand scheme of things, the concept is a bit different from what we had with GT1. With that game, we tried to push every feature into the EA release, which resulted in quite a rough start, with a lot of bugs and features that didn’t work properly.
We have learned from that, and as such, Napoleonic Wars Early Access will contain already properly playable content, but not all the scenarios, nations or campaign features. These we will keep adding during the EA period. The first campaign we are working on is Italy 1796-1797, with two major nations: Revolutionary France and Austria (units of these armies can be seen in the announcement trailer video). This is one of the theatre-specific focus campaign, as mentioned in the game’s store page. It will not be a simple quick campaign like many know from Total War, but with proper army hierarchies, historical game play and 1:1 scale in troops.
While creating this campaign, we are at the same time building the grand campaign map that will cover the whole of Europe. In the Italian campaign diplomacy will not yet be an issue, so this campaign feature will be added later during the EA. The EA period will end, when all the intended feature modules, different nations and campaigns are ready. It’ll take time, but in the end the elephant shall be fully consumed.
The scale is larger than before, how is the performance?
We are rebuilding the game engine from ground zero. This is because during the development of GT1, we learned a lot, and at the same time development tools and technology took many big steps. Napoleonic Wars is coded in a different way, which now allows us to gain full advantage of today’s technical environment.
Improving performance has been one of the key points in rebuilding the engine. At the same time, we wanted to have as big a scale as possible. With the detailed combat simulation we have, it’s of course a balancing act between performance and scale. But we can safely say already, that the performance is much better than in GT1 - getting double the FPS on average, with large armies. With a high spec computer, the difference is more pronounced.
What will be the main differences compared to The Civil War (1861-1865)
This is written with the assumption that the reader is well aware of what GT: TCW contained and how it worked technically.
First of all, as mentioned above, the code is re-written from top to bottom. This means many concepts and the vision may be shared, but at the same we will do our best to improve the technical implementation. The aim here is better performance, less “clunkiness”, a more challenging AI opponent and in some areas (like UI) some streamlining, but without sacrificing the complexity of the simulation. As specific examples, the supply system and economy will receive an overhaul, especially from an understandability point of view, and there will be a diplomacy layer.
Unlike GT1, Napoleonic Wars contains a built-in localization infrastructure. This allows translating all the game’s text elements. The game will be released with a number of localizations. With the tools available, the community may also add their own localizations.
Moddability is higher than in GT1. Many of the game’s elements are exported to an external data -library, from where the engine then reads them. This will allow modding unit textures, sounds, commanders, units and their formations, and also maps, to name a few. Switching mainly to editable data files makes modding a lot easier, as different data files, still containing hundreds to thousands of lines of info, will also contain the descriptions.
Will there be a multiplayer option?
This is not part of the pre-release or Early Access roadmaps, and for this reason we will not promise it in the Steam store page. This time it’s highly likely we will look into this in detail at one point, but multiplayer mode will not be a simple topic to implement with the complex systems and datasets we have in this game.
Could I become a beta-tester?
Thank you for the many offers received. It’s heartening so many people are willing to help! At this point, beta testing is not yet topical. We will let you know when things have developed further and if such public beta testing would take place. We are also planning on using a Steam beta option during the Early Access period, where players could, if they want, run the latest beta version of the game (contributing to bug hunting), or stick to the most recent public version.
En Avant
As development progresses, we will keep answering further questions in these devblogs, and releasing more detailed information about the game. Blogs are aimed to be released approximately each month for now, on the game’s Steam page. Some further information may drop on the forums.
Thank you for following us! Cheers,
Grand Engineer Corps:
Oliver Keppelmüller - Code
Ilja Varha - Design
Peter Lebek - Art