It has been a few weeks since our last major development update, and first, I want to apologize for the silence.
The reason is pretty simple: the team has been up to its neck in work.
And while it may have seemed quiet from the outside, behind the scenes The Glorious Cause has probably undergone some of the biggest improvements we have made since development began.
We are now approaching the 5-yard line.
From One Battle of Trenton to Two
Way back in February, our original plan was to release The Glorious Cause at Version 0.3.5 with the Battle of Trenton as its centerpiece.
Then something interesting happened.
Members of the community began pointing us toward newer historical interpretations suggesting that the Hessians may have been more aware of Washington's impending attack than the original books & documentaries many of us grew up hearing about.
I was raised on the same books and documentaries many of you probably were, the story of Hessian troops being completely surprised by Washington's army after celebrations.
Rather than choose one interpretation and tell half of our audience that the other was wrong, we decided:
Why not let you play both?
That decision resulted in two versions of Trenton.
In the first, players who played our January demo may remember the vertical awareness meter with the alarm indicator at the top of the screen. The longer Washington takes to reach Trenton, and the more fighting that occurs against the Hessian outposts, the greater the enemy's awareness becomes.
A careful player can move quickly, neutralize the outposts efficiently, and potentially reach Trenton before the Hessian regiments can fully organize. If you execute the operation correctly, you can recreate something much closer to the devastating surprise Washington hoped to achieve and potentially produce casualty and capture figures resembling the historical battle.
But there is another Trenton.
In this version, the Hessians are waiting for you.
Now things become considerably more difficult.
After dealing with the outposts, Washington's exhausted and frozen 2,000-man force must confront more than 1,000 Hessian troops who are already forming for battle, with artillery ready to support them. You can still win. But you will have to think out of the box. Cut enemy formations off from their main line. Attack exposed flanks. Get behind isolated formations. Decide where your division and army commanders need to be positioned. Determine when to concentrate your forces and when to maneuver. Every unit begins to matter.
The current public Demo version of Trenton can already be played through our Steam page with this new 'Hessians Aware' scenario, but the version we are preparing for Early Access contains major more additions in strategic depth, battlefield systems, and artificial intelligence.
The AI - The Biggest Reason for the Delay
This is really the story behind why we did not release on July 4th.
On July 3rd, we had to make a difficult decision.
The AI simply was not ready.
Trenton was playable and could provide some resistance, but when we began implementing Princeton, the weaknesses in the old AI architecture became impossible to ignore.
In some situations, formations would essentially remain where they had been positioned at the beginning of the scenario and do little more than return fire.
That was not acceptable.
The last thing we wanted was to release two Trenton scenarios where the AI was somewhat challenging, followed by Princeton where we immediately realized that the computer opponent did not move to obtain its objective, sat idle until you found them, they fired back but were easy pickings.
So we delayed the release.
And then we made an even larger decision:
We started rebuilding the battlefield AI.
Initially, we experimented with a more heavily scripted system. That worked, but it created another problem. If an AI follows a fixed roadmap, eventually the player learns the roadmap. Play the scenario three, four, or five times and you begin to know what the enemy is going to do before it does it. We were informed that there is will always a level of predictability in any strategy game, but we wanted to push considerably further.
We wanted an AI commander that could look at what was actually happening on the battlefield. An AI that could evaluate your lines. Recognize exposed formations. Respond to changing terrain conditions. React when its route is threatened. Alter its approach when a plan is failing. Protect its objectives. Exploit opportunities when you make a mistake. And, most importantly, continue pursuing its battlefield mission rather than blindly following a predetermined sequence of moves.
That is what we have spent much of the past several weeks building.
The new Adaptive AI system has been completed for out 0.4.5 release, however we are taking a few weeks to tweak and test it so it provides the experience we all want you to have.
Had we released the version we had on July 3rd, The Glorious Cause would have been a much shallower game.
Instead, Early Access will launch with the foundation of an AI system we can continue expanding.
And our ambitions do not stop there.
Long term, we want the AI to go beyond adapting during a battle. We want to explore systems that allow it to analyze why a strategy failed, recognize what could have been done differently, and improve how it approaches similar battlefield situations. That is a much larger project and will come later.
But the foundation for that future is now being built.
Our objective is simple:
Whether you are playing your first battle or your fiftieth, we want the opposing commander to make you think.
If you are interested in helping us test this Adaptive AI before release, please contact our Project Lead, Jean Marciniak, at
Major Feature Additions
While all of this AI work has been happening, development on the rest of the game has not stopped.
Quite the opposite.
Several systems originally planned for later versions of the game have now made their way into the Early Access build.
We have also been working on our third scenario. I am still going to keep the battle itself a surprise. Originally, we considered presenting a more extreme “What If?” version of the engagement, something almost resembling an Alamo-style situation where one faction faced overwhelming odds. The feedback we received, however, raised a very fair concern: If players feel there is effectively no possibility of victory, the scenario may become frustrating rather than challenging. So we moved the scenario closer to its historical circumstances.
The odds still favor one side.
The disadvantaged faction is still going to have a serious fight on its hands, but victory will be possible for a commander who understands the battlefield and uses his forces effectively.
And I think it is going to become one of the more interesting scenarios in the game.
Deserters, Stragglers, Casualties and Captured Troops
Another major addition involves something that has always fascinated me about warfare during the American Revolution: An army was constantly disappearing around its commander.
Not simply through battlefield casualties.
Men became separated from their formations.
Soldiers straggled during marches.
Others deserted.
Entire groups could be captured.
Maintaining the fighting strength of an army was therefore about considerably more than simply watching a casualty counter.
We originally intended to substantially introduce a custom Deserter and Straggler system for Version 0.5.0, but while I was concentrating heavily on the AI, Ben jumped into the system and began developing it. He not only improved the underlying mechanic, but built new GUI elements capable of showing its effects at both the individual unit level and across your entire army.
That led to another question:
If we are tracking deserters and stragglers this way, why not do the same for battlefield casualties and captured troops?
Ben had it working within hours.
Here is a look at the new GUI for the game:
So now these systems are part of the game as well.
You will be able to see the human cost of your decisions accumulating across the battlefield, not simply whether a regiment still exists on the map.
Was the position you captured worth 80 casualties?
Did your aggressive march leave dozens of men straggling behind?
How badly has desertion affected your army?
How many enemy soldiers have you captured?
These numbers begin telling the story of the battle beyond simply Victory or Defeat.
And I have to give Ben a tremendous amount of credit here.
He is an incredible programmer, and several features that I initially thought would have to wait for later releases have entered the game because he simply looked at them and said, essentially, “Yeah, I can do that.”
ART
Sophia has been hard at work redeveloping the sprites throughout the game, and there are a lot of them. From British Light Infantry to Native American warriors, she has taken on the challenge and already completed a substantial number of new unit sprites.
One of the key questions we faced was just how detailed those sprites should be. Our upcoming mystery scenario, along with future battles such as Saratoga and others we have planned, will eventually place far more units on the battlefield at the same time. That means we have to think carefully about performance.
We want The Glorious Cause to appeal to both sides of our audience: the historical enthusiast playing on a more traditional business laptop with integrated or lower-end graphics, and the strategy gamer running a dedicated gaming PC with a much more powerful GPU.
And considering that only one member of our own development team currently has anything beyond a mid-range graphics card, due to the rather painful price of GPUs these days, we have been able to test the game under hardware conditions that probably resemble what many of our players will actually be using.
The result is a sprite and graphics system designed to serve both audiences: detailed enough to give every formation its own character and historical identity, but optimized enough that larger battles should remain accessible to players without high-end gaming hardware.
Here is a sample of one of our newly redesigned American Militia units:
Why Is Early Access Taking So Long?
This is probably the most important part of this update.
When we originally talked about releasing The Glorious Cause earlier this year, the game we were talking about releasing was considerably smaller than the game that exists today.
We could have released that version.
We could have shipped Trenton, fixed problems afterward, and gradually rebuilt major systems through Early Access.
Instead, every time we reached one of those crossroads, we kept asking ourselves the same question:
Would we be proud of releasing it this way?
The answer was no, we kept working.
But it has also given The Glorious Cause an Adaptive AI architecture, deeper battlefield decision-making, multiple interpretations of Trenton, another historical scenario, expanded casualty tracking, captured troops, deserters and stragglers, new GUI systems, and numerous improvements throughout the game.
But there comes a point where you have to stop adding things and release the game.
We are reaching that point now.
The major systems are all done.
The focus is increasingly shifting away from building and toward testing, balancing, bug fixing, and polishing.
That is why I say we are at the 5-yard line.
There is still work between us and the end zone.
But we can see it.
And I would much rather apologize for making everyone wait a little longer than apologize after release for giving you a game we knew was not ready.
Thank you to everyone who has remained patient with us, everyone who has tested builds, everyone who has sent historical research, everyone who has reported bugs, and especially everyone here on Patreon who has helped financially support development.
You are helping us build the American Revolution strategy game we have wanted to play ourselves for years.
We are getting very close.