Supreme Ruler 2010 Development Log

Wrapping up the 'Development Log'

2005-07-25T12:05:00.000-04:00

It’s now time for us to wrap up our “Development Log”, at least for the current incarnation of Supreme Ruler 2010. At the end of May, SR2010 finally started to hit the store shelves, albeit slowly. Most retailers choose not to stock our title on release, feeling that “serious strategy” was a niche market that held little interest for them. Even though industry “experts” whine constantly about how there is so little innovation and fresh thinking in computer games, anything that isn’t a sequel or a knock-off is brushed aside and given little attention. One has to wonder if legendary titles like Panzer General or the original Civilization would ever have made it to market if the industry back then was the same way.

We have had our bright spots, though – EB Games Online ( www.ebgames.com ) launched us May 13, 2005, and for the following three weeks we were consistently in their top selling PC Games; some days we were their top selling game of any format. We are now carried by a wider selection of resellers, though many “brick and mortar” stores still have the “strategy blindness”. Even strategy titles with a solid history such as Galactic Civilizations Deluxe or Hearts of Iron II are hard to find in many stores, who seem to need more shelf space for classics such as “Bass Fishing” or “Big Game Hunter 2005”.

Reviews have started coming in, and have been generally very favorable. Ratings average 75%-80%, with concerns about Diplomacy and AI that we are working to address with our regular game Updates. Unfortunately a print reviewer in PC Gamer (US) seemed to forgo actually playing the game and instead just wrote about how much he didn’t like it, without listing any facts or features; even the captions on their screen shots were incorrect. And in the same issue, the “Wargamer” column laments about how few new “innovative” and original strategy games are developed; sigh….

As I write this in July 2005, we’re working on our next few “Updates”, adding new missions, new features, and improvements based on feedback from players and our forum. (All available for free download, of course.)

We are also working with European developers on “localizing” (translating) SR2010 to be sold across Europe – hopefully we’ll be showing up in stores throughout Europe very soon. Beyond that, hard to tell what the future will hold, though we certainly plan to continue developing, refining and building on the Supreme Ruler game engine.

Once again a big thank-you to our supporters, beta testers, fans, and strategy-game enthusiasts the world over. We think that Supreme Ruler 2010 is a great game that has brought new ideas and concepts to the modern strategy game, ideas that you’ll see further developed not just in our own future games, but in games from others as well.

Note: our new Blog can be found at http://www.supremeruler.com/blogs/ - with the first Blog posted August 30th, 2006 by David Thompson.

Europe Map Post Mortem

2005-05-02T16:09:00.000-04:00

One of the maps I am certainly most excited about is our Europe map. This map was one of the last to be completed for the game partially because its size made it complicated but also because the research would be easy. The map is 260 hexes wide by 180 hexes high. It includes all of Europe with the exception of Turkey. This size gave us a scale of 18km per hex. The research for this map was actually spread over two years in a sense since every region on this map with the exception of Switzerland exists in a submap. When it came time to create the Europe map, it was needed as the second map in the campaign for when the player has completed the submap. The fact the game engine supports grouping regions together meant that we could build the map using our maximum of 31 players and then group the countries after. We actually went with 30 players as that covered most of the regions nicely. They are as follows;

Ireland
United Kingdom
Portugal
Spain
France
Italy
Germany
Poland (includes Kaliningrad)
Benelux
Ukraine
Belarus
Denmark
Norway
Sweden
Finland
Greece
Bulgaria
Romania (includes Moldova)
Austria
Hungary
Czech Rep
Slovakia
Lithuania (includes Latvia)
Estonia
Switzerland
Slovenia
Croatia
Bosnia
Serbia (includes Montenegro)
Macedonia
Albania

Since these existed in submaps, we where able to take the data form those and reuse it to create each of the countries in the Europe map. Each of the countries was given it’s starting units and balanced the same as the region in the submap.

The strongest players are certainly France, Germany and the United Kingdom, but Italy, Poland, the Ukraine, Switzerland and Sweden are reasonably strong as well. The number of players also allows for a large amount of diplomacy to affect the outcome. I expect this to become a common multiplayer map since human players can play the first 16 regions in the list and this also leaves lots of AIs to interact with. It’s also interesting to try some of this map’s smaller regions. Playing from Denmark is certainly a challenge but you begin in contact with only two other regions so the threats are at least minimized. Even countries like Hungary and the Czech Republic have an impact by the raw materials they can sell, or not sell, to the other regions. Geography also plays a part in the naval strategies since the French and English share control of the English Channel, the Spanish own the Straight of Gibraltar and access to the Black Sea requires passing through Greek waters. Some countries certainly cannot survive alone in a military campaign, but the right set of allies can make even regions like Estonia or Albania military or technological significant. Its just takes some work.

-- Chris

It's just the beginning!

2005-04-26T08:44:00.000-04:00

Well folks, the day (and hour) have finally come - the "Gold Master" for Supreme Ruler 2010 is being sent off to our publisher as I type this. And the last few weeks have seemed longer than all the combined time since the project was first started (on February 15th, 2000!)

Through an incredible effort by our core team (Chris, Dax, David and myself) we have pulled off finishing up our first release version of SR2010. And now starts the debates among our long-time supporters and testers about what made it in, what didn't, and what's still to come. (Actually, the debate has already started, but I'm sure it will get even more intense!) While not everything came out of the oven according to the original recipe, I'm very proud of the result, and I think it is certainly time for the public to get their hands on what I believe is a landmark strategy title.

But there's more work to be done - not counting the demo version, which should be coming out shortly, we are also planning additional content to come soon as a free upgrade (more missions, future equipment types, feature upgrades). We have a lot of excitement about the future potential for the Supreme Ruler 2010 "engine", there are a lot of capabilities that we've only just started to scratch the surface of in the initial release.

And the biggest challenge may be getting the word out on this product - a lot of resellers and distributors consider serious strategy as a very small "niche" and are not willing to invest their shelf space in titles of this type. So if you don't see it on the shelf at your favorite software-o-matic store, make sure to bug them to get it in!

Keep a lookout - street date mid-May in North America!

So close that we can smell it...

2005-04-18T04:11:00.000-04:00

Or is that maybe due to the fact that we’ve been neglecting personal hygiene? Hard to tell... In any case, we’re getting very close. Still working on some issues regarding running the largest maps (ie the world) on systems that are close to our “minimum spec” – the huge number of units, facilities, types of units, and such at this level are certainly a challenge. As mentioned before, our World Scenario is BIG. Not recommended as the first thing you try! In fact, some people simply will not like the World scenario for a few reasons, including its huge scope, massive number of units, and ‘overwhelmingness’. The continents also create a situation where you have to use invasion landings and airdrops much more. Of course, for these exact same reasons some people will love the World scenario.

We’re also being delayed a bit by not yet receiving some items required for our GameSpy matchmaking services. Hopefully that will be resolved soon, we’re know that everyone is waiting to hear the magic words “Supreme Ruler 2010 has gone Gold” ... Soon, real soon!

(PS – The World Scenario contains a total (for all players) of 13,600 units and facilities. Compare that to the “unit limit” imposed by many other games, and you’ll understand the technical challenges we had to overcome – and it all has to run in real time!)

Stress? Pressure? Nah....

2005-04-12T03:11:00.000-04:00

But I wouldn't recommend coming near BattleGoat's offices unless you want to be caught up in a caffine-induce whirlwind of work, debates, and last-minute to-do lists. Well, except for Chris, he doesn't drink coffee. (He does occasionally drink Mountain Dew, but that's a different story...)

As discussed on our forum and in recent blog entries, not every feature is falling into place exactly as hoped for, either for technical or time reasons. All the "big" features are in. But we all have our favourites on the backlist... David wants future-scheduling in, Chris wants biological covert attacks, Dax doesn't like the fact that as the campaign progresses you could get caught being attacked with your units in reserve (they get reserved between campaign scenarios), and I don't like the fact that our big-map performance is below expectations on low-end systems. So we debate a lot...

But even given all that, things are moving along briskly. Good thing, though, that our "countdown to gold" whiteboard supports negative numbers :-) But soon, soon........

40,000 tasks done, 100 left to do

2005-04-09T01:06:00.000-04:00

I wrote a blog here yesterday, but the blog system ate it – I guess it just wasn’t meant to be. So I’ll try again, but time is short so I gotta be quick – lots of work to do…

As you can probably tell from our recent blog entries, a lot of discussion and debate is spent around here on the topic of just what really needs to be in Supreme Ruler 2010 in order for us to be ready to “go gold”. Not really sure if 40,000 is the accurate number for the features “in”, but we are certainly down to less than 100 tasks that “must” be done to finish up (some more difficult than others). We’ll probably be debating the final feature list right up to the point at which we press record on the CD Burner.

By however you measure it, SR2010 is an epic-sized project with a huge amount of effort put in to making things accurate, and then just as huge an effort into making it all playable and fun.

One disappointment for our upcoming release is that it will be English-only at first launch. The huge amount of data that requires translation (“localization” it’s called in the business) is enough to scare off all the foreign distributors for now. To those in other regions, our apologies that you won’t be able to get SR2010 in your language at day 1, but hopefully we can get the localizations rolling soon after the initial release.

One last thing for today, in case you didn’t catch our press release, we were very pleased to announce this past week that bestselling author Larry Bond has worked with us to provide a foreword for our manual. It was terrific to have Larry on board for this, and he seemed quite enthusiastic about SR2010 as well… to quote,

“This simulation is the most detailed and realistic model of a country that has ever been commercially produced . . .. Supreme Ruler 2010 is a great game”

Time flies (like a missile?)

2005-04-01T05:27:00.000-05:00

I was just reminded today that the clocks get set forward this weekend in this time zone - a real pity, since I'm going to miss that extra hour of programming time...

The release date is now "official" at May 10th, 2005. (Give or take a few days, of course.) Which means that our 'Gold Master' date for wrapping up development is very close. The manual goes to press early next week (over 150 pages!). The box art is done. The ads are being assembled. And nobody's made coffee yet this morning...

I've posted a few comments recently on our forum about the 'features versus finish' issues - ie what (may) get sacrificed to actually get things out on the shelves. As we've said all along, we will not release a buggy product. We think we have that element wrapped up - no crash issues, no stability issues, no serious operational bugs that we know of.

But what about features? There's always more we can do, but things have shaped up pretty good with all the important features getting in. Some lesser features are on the borderline and may not get in for our '1.0' version - for example, assassinating cabinet ministers is the one I just looked at a few minutes ago. However, we have also made a commitment to continue working on SR2010 after the initial release - we think of this as an epic title that people will continue to play, not a "throwaway" that gathers dust after the game is "solved". We'll continue to listen to players on the forum and look at ways we can improve what we've done.

And in case you missed it, a great preview was just posted on WorthPlaying.com:
http://www.worthplaying.com/article.php?sid=24371&mode=thread&order=0

"...here I was with an incomplete preview build of a game from a company I've never heard of that gripped me with the steely claw of game addiction not felt since the last installment in the Civ series."

The incredible 'Task-o-Matic'

2005-03-26T03:21:00.000-05:00

Here at BattleGoat we use our own custom task/bug tracking system, which we so affectionately like to call the 'Task-o-Matic'. As we approach 'Gold' date we have the fun of going through and finding out which bugs/tasks must get done, and which are ideas that we can put aside for the future. One thing about these last few weeks going towards our release date is that we see just how big the Supreme Ruler 2010 project really is.

I think it is a compliment to our User Interface (which was redesigned 4 times) that most people will not really see how detailed and comprehensive SR2010 can be; unless you really 'drill down' in the UI, you'll only be seeing the surface of the game, and everything else will either be just rolling along under the hood, or will be taken care of by your Ministers. However, when we have bugs to fix and features to test, we have to look at everything - and there sure is a lot!

Oh well, I better get back to tonight's task list - including work on Missile Silos, Minefields, Campaign defaults, Map resizing, testing Victory Conditions, Map/Region Grouping, and maybe another cup of coffee...

-- George.

Déjà Vu

2005-03-24T21:34:00.000-05:00

Having worked on our maps for more than four years now, I’m certainly very familiar with some of them. Development of a game with such depth has caused us to make major changes a number of times over the years, changes that caused the balance of all existing maps to be thrown out the window. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve gone back to Australia, the first map I ever did, and started over the balancing of the eleven production commodities. Since the maps and the game engine where works in progress we had to leave some things for later on. Preset diplomacy between regions is an example of an element that is only now nearing a functioning stage. However, this means once again returning to maps that had previously been set aside to flag any pre-existing treaties or state of war. Can’t have North and South Korea making nice on the first day, just would not be realistic.

Since we are nearing completion of the project, there was a need to go back to most of the maps for finishing touches anyway. Most needed some boat that was previously unavailable in the equipment list or to mark a technology we recently discovered they should have pre-researched. It is nice that our map work in some cases is getting to the quality control stage and getting away from the hours of mind numbing drudge work. It’s just not much fun looking up the crime rates for the Ivory Coast or the life expectancy for residents of Nepal.
But at least we still get to spend some time playing the game testing new features and looking for bugs. Our test game this week got off to a slow start thanks to a misplaced “S” in a line of George’s code which was messing up multiplayer. We made sure he heard about that one for a while :)

-- Chris

Round and Round and Round she goes...

2005-03-21T01:38:00.000-05:00

Of the 40+ Scenario maps that we include with Supreme Ruler 2010, there is one that is unique compared to the rest. In the program code I refer to it as the top level map, but in discussion it is simply called "The World".

The World Map has a few unique features to it. First, and most obviously, it is our largest map, at 900 hexes wide. Not the type of map you'll be able to play an conquer in a single night. The world is a big place.

Secondly, it is our only map where there is no 'external' World Market organization. In each sub map there is an off-map force - the new "UN" - that controls external trade and also gets involved with subsidies, military interventions, sale of arms, and so on. (Much like the United States does today.) In the World Level, what you see is what you get - the borders of the sandbox are defined, and nobody can come to help if you start getting beat up by the bullies.

However, the biggest internal engine difference is the fact that, unfortunately, the world is not flat. Ignoring for now the protestations of the Flat Earth Society (http://www.flat-earth.org/), the world has this roundness to it that is a challenge to represent in a strategy game. Some games have pulled it off, but nothing with the complexity of detail that SR2010 stores about the world. Even just moving around - internally units use a very sophisticated "A* Path Search Algorithm" that can scan thousands of possible paths to determine the best way to get from point A to B. We don't just take into account terrain, but add in unit movement types, bridges and bridging units, supply zones, transit treaties, and a few other elements, and you have a pretty complex process. Now you also need to toss in the fact that you can go off one end of the map and appear on the other - or more precisely, you just keep going round and round.

This 'wraparound' implementation is something that has just been, well, "wrapped up", and is being incorporated into the game engine. It works pretty well, though there are a number of oddities to address (such as the mini-map display). Of course, this isn't really a "round" world, since we only allow East-West scrolling. North/South scrolling would just be too confusing to the player, and so it really isn't worth attempting. (For example, if you scroll up from North America without changing viewpoint you would end up seeing Europe upside down, etc). Maybe someday we'll do a truly round tactical world, and really give the A* pathing a workout...

So, welcome to the Cylindrical World of Supreme Ruler 2010...

-- George.

As the days count down...

2005-03-18T20:56:00.000-05:00

As we get closer and closer to the infamous "Gold Date" things can certainly get "interesting". There's a flurry of final bugs, unfinished features, incomplete scenarios, and a mix of "I wish we could change this..." and "There must be a better way to do that..."

Supreme Ruler 2010 is like no other game the PC has ever seen, in both its depth and vast array of gameplay styles and features. A lot of our design debates center around elements that other games have never even tried to pull off to this level of detail.

We're at the 'feature freeze' state, but now that we are approaching completion it's pretty impressive to see how all our existing ideas have come together. Just a few hundred more 'to-do' items to complete and we'll be ready to go...

Time for the last "Performance Tests"

2005-03-11T21:00:00.000-05:00

In a game engine like Supreme Ruler 2010 where we have so many "no limits" elements, performance bottlenecks can become a major issue. A lot of other games solve this problem with the simple "you can't do that" solution, such as a unit maximum, a map size maximum, a buildings limit, and so on. We like to think more like that credit card commercial, "No pre-set spending limit"...

So now that most features of our engine are complete, it is time to take one more look at performance testing to see where we can make things go even faster. As an example of how important even small performance elements can be, consider the fact that SR2010 gives each unit the opportunity to react to orders once a minute - 1440 times per "day". If you have a huge number of units, say 10,000, then there are over 14 million "unit slices" in a game day. In those slices units will need to use their spotting, their supply capabilities, scan for targets, scan for opportunities, avoid threats, and respond to their commands and rules of engagement. And leave enough time for the other 14 million such scans that have to happen on that particular day.

It has required some very innovative design ideas to pull this off, and I'm pleased to say that we do a pretty good job of it. Even with our final optimizations, large maps with large unit counts will probably still end up moving a bit slow on older hardware, but I think we've taken the standard a huge step beyond anything else out there.

-- George.

Where in the world is the Supreme Ruler?

2005-03-09T11:20:00.000-05:00

Until now we have been marketing the fact that Supreme Ruler 2010 has over 200 starting regions to play from. Scenarios will be used for multiplayer or single player games when you want to play a particular map or region of the world in non-campaign mode. Introduce our new feature of "grouping playable regions" and things get interesting.

Take the Canada map for example... which is divided into 5 regions. Ontario, Quebec, The Prairies, The Maritimes and The West Coast(which includes Alaska). When you play the campaign, starting as Canada, you will play as one of these five regions. But when you play Canada as a scenario (in either single or multiplayer) you'll be able to group these regions together, if you wish. You could play the east versus the west with the dividing line between Ontario and Quebec or you could play in another other combination you can think of.

Another way to look at groupings is how it will provide its own levels of difficulty and challenge. If you find yourself overwhelmed with running a country when you are starting out you could take a scenario and give yourself all of the other regions except for one. As you get a handle on things you can hand off regions to AI control and eventually play as one region in a 16 region map.

So, just think of the possibilities... How will you divide the world?

-- Daxon.

The World is MORE than Enough!

2005-03-07T18:26:00.000-05:00

All the cities in the final scenario (The World) have now been placed. But now is the challenge of adding all the population to each region that is not in the big cities but in the surrounding areas. This would be easy if we didn't have to keep the population distribution accurate... Don't worry though, we are keeping the world map as accurate as all the sub-maps! So if you needed to know how I'll be spending my week --- that's it!

- David

Challenge of the Big Maps

2005-03-07T01:58:00.000-05:00

I think one of our challenges with Supreme Ruler 2010 will be making sure people know that not every map we include will appeal to everybody, and they shouldn't judge the game on a map that they think is too big/small/cluttered/sparse etc. This is made even worse by the different gameplay options - for example, a large map like Europe may be very interesting and challenging in single-player turnbased mode, where it may very well take a few weeks to wrap up, but it will be utterly overwhelming to most players in real-time multiplayer mode. The world will be even worse in this regard. However, a map such as Michigan, Mexico, UK, and even larger areas such as France, US SouthEast and Australia, can make very good Multiplayer games.

I know that large maps such as North America, Europe, and the World will be attractive targets for people to try in Multiplayer mode, so we have to try to cool expectations that these are NOT good beginner/multiplayer maps to try. One of our technical innovations is that we've allowed creation of tactical maps larger and more detailed than any other strategy game, players will need to know that "bigger" does not always mean better gameplay if a large "epic" game is not what you wanted that particular evening...

Tag! You're It!

2005-03-03T16:35:00.000-05:00

Now that North America is finished the World map has become a shared task. The terrain layer and most cities are placed into the World so the next step is setting population. David and I have started sharing this scenario so it's a matter of taking turns as we work towards our gold date. Most mornings and afternoons I work on the World map and David takes over in the late afternoons, evenings and past midnight. We've decided to focus on areas of the world we are familiar with based on who created sub maps. When we are not working on this scenario we are compiling numbers and figures towards future work such as regional supply and demand numbers, military units and combined figures such as debt, treasury amounts, research and tech levels. If only there was a way to work on the World Map at the same time...

I am already seeing requests to share the map editor before we release SR2010 and can only theorize what maps will emerge in the future. Perhaps I'll have to create a section of our web site dedicated to map design. It can cover BattleGoat Studios' approved maps, instructions on map design and other suggestions on getting started with using the map editor. I should also create a new forum at our BG Forums web site dedicated to discussing map design. As for sharing the map editor, there are still some improvements to be completed. Good luck to all of our future cartographers.

-- Daxon

Maintaining Focus

2005-03-02T21:50:00.000-05:00

Like all jobs, even making video games includes drudgework. Sometimes it is difficult to get the small things done. Who wants to stop and check if the railroads in China are right when we still need to work on the World map, add more future units to the equipment file and implement Covert Operations? I had to pull myself away from map editing today to take some screenshots of the game. Strategy First is in contact with various press people and needs a batch of new screenshots fairly often and this became one of my duties. Other things kept me from map editing such as a meeting with our graphics guy and another meeting about campaign progression mechanics. As we get closer to our deadlines, many elements are fighting for attention and we’re working hard to be sure no element gets missed.

-- Chris

War in Europe, continued...

2005-03-01T23:12:00.000-05:00

Our weekly Dev Team testgame was the freshly-completed Europe map. Definitely going to be a popular map, with lots of options and regions of different capabilities. We also tested using the "31 Region" version, which is actually an internal test case since the "official" game specs say 16 regions maximum... There is some thought that we may release the 31 Region version as an option or a later downloadable file, depending upon time schedules. (Of course, not a lot of people will be successful taking over Europe from Croatia or Estonia...)

The battles started with Germany launching a surprise attack against the Benelux AI region (as if that has never happened before!), but this time France and Germany were allied and so carved up the remains. Denmark soon fell as well. After that, France and UK both rushed to take Ireland, which resulted in an accidental "war on incursion" declaration between the two. As the UK I decided to keep the war status and drive France out of Ireland, however French air superiority won the day - after a number of rebuffed air drops, a cross-channel sea landing at an undefended port was the clincher.

The remaining human players then worked on eliminating the AI regions, which was inevitable under the weight of the German, French and Italian armed forces. Unfortunately there is not enough time in one night to entirely finish a multi-player map of this size, so there is no "Supreme Ruler" to be declared...

-- George.

The Europe Saga Continues

2005-02-26T23:41:00.000-05:00

Balancing the map took longer than expected but was done before the weekend. I lost a day helping a friend move but unit placement has begun. This process is going to also take a while but I had anticipated that since combined together, there is a LOT of military equipment to be found in Europe. Looking at the lists it seems that the units from France, Germany and Poland are some of the largest lists but with so many countries crammed into this map there’s just a lot to do. I still hope to have the map finished in a few more days if I can keep plugging away at it.

-- Chris

Will anyone notice if...

2005-02-26T01:47:00.000-05:00

Will anyone notice if the border between Argentina and Chile at the bottom of South American isn't quite right? Will anyone notice if some cities along the Indian Ocean are moved slightly to accomodate river terrain? Will anyone notice if the Trans-Canada highway isn't quite in the right place? Will anyone notice if the National Debt of Portugal is incorrect?

These are just a few examples of questions that came up in recent days as we try to model the world with a very high level of detail. It's quite a task, but our main guideline is "do it right"; I guess that explains why we've been 5 years in development! Cities, populations, industries, roads, economies, debtloads, and so much more - all modelled on accurate world data.

Those players that play SR2010 as a tactical military game will probably never notice all the details, but we think that some people certainly will notice, which is why we're taking so much time to get details as accurate as possible. I'm sure we won't get everything perfect the first time (hey, the world is a big place!), and the variable scale of different scenarios is causing us to make some generalizations, but all in all SR2010 is going to be a very impressive "simulator of the world".

-- George.

North America at War...

2005-02-23T02:15:00.000-05:00

This week's Dev test game was North America, the map David has just finished. (Well, almost finished, the units for Mexico and Central America still to go...) This is one of the handful of 'big' maps that will come with SR2010 - hundreds of hexes wide, 25 km to the hex. In other words, big. In fact, this is the size of theatre that just can't be done with most other strategy/wargames, whether they be games such as the Civilization series or more traditional wargames.

To some extent, a game map this large doesn't make for the best multiplayer games, at least not one that you want to finish in a single sitting. Two of the players, 'Canada' and 'US West', have regions so large that they are hard to monitor and manage in real-time mode. For many players, this will be a good type of map to play over time in turn-based mode.

In the end, Mexico/Central America made a good showing, using cheap labour to build up a Military infrastructure from scratch, and used the 'but it's only Mexico' sympathy ploy to trade for the best technologies from the other regions, eventually launching a Tomahawk attack on Florida. There was a 'Hunt for Red October' type chase as two of Mexico's aircraft carriers (purchased from the US West) made a daring raid and then escaped back to home waters. But in the end, a web of intertwined alliances and attacks had everyone at war, and the large land and air forces of US West and US NorthEast dominated. It was called a draw between those players after over 6 hours of play.

Touring Europe

2005-02-18T20:59:00.000-05:00

Well, I’m fairly certain David will win. I’ve only gotten one of the eleven products balanced and it’s taking some time. The game uses a map wide variable to set output levels of each product and getting the right value for the right levels for 32 players and then setting the industries for 32 players is turning out to take some time. I spent most of the day still working on it but was also distracted by some graphics work that needed to be done and testing aircraft carriers each time George thought he got it working. Generally it does but there are some minor issues about what happens when 5 squadrons are sent to a carrier that can only carry 4. Looking at the Kentucky map I can imagine that players will be able to make some interesting attacks since they start with F-14s, F-18s, multiple Nimitz class carriers and amphibious assault ships. Perhaps I could load them all up and take a Florida vacation :) …

-- Chris

The race is on ...

2005-02-17T21:13:00.000-05:00

There's a challenge to see who can get their maps done first. Chris is working on Europe, David on North America and I'm plodding through the World. I guess you can say that I won't be done first. I think I've been placing cities for over a week. After cities comes setting non-city hex population (exciting stuff), then placing upgrades such as bases and facilities. Then it's a numbers game to get joined regions working properly in areas of production and commerce by setting items such as GDP/c, treasury, debt and supply and demand of all eleven game resources. Setting technologies and placing units will complete the World map just in time for release. The only thing that will save me time is it's all a matter of copying from sub maps. All research is done. All regions are decided.

While looking over the World map and how it could play out, I wonder who will get Greenland and Iceland as they are not part of any of our sub maps. They will certainly make viable hopping points for regions planning on crossing the Atlantic Ocean. Are there other islands that are being overlooked that could be used for strategic points of entry or defense of a continent? I guess it's a matter to decide when I start drawing regional borders.

So, who will win between David (North America) and Chris (Europe)? Stay tuned...

-- Daxon

Recurring visions

2005-02-16T23:38:00.000-05:00

Having just finished the Germany scenario there is something strange about working on the population of Germany again, but I’m now working on the map of Europe. This map is moving along at a good pace since for once I have no research to do. All players for Europe are the winners from the sub-Europe scenarios. The players are Italy, Balkans, Germany, France, Nordic States, British Isles, Greece and Ukraine, all of which are sub maps where a winner would already have been decided. This map does still pose many challenges since the map scale is at 18km/hex and all the maps I’m copying from are smaller, usually 10-12km/hex. Fitting all the bases, industries and cities into such tight quarters is proving interesting. I doubt it would be possible if we did not support two sizes for on map upgrades, a larger one as default and a smaller size for the large scale maps such as Europe or the World.

-- Chris

What, another war in Germany?

2005-02-16T02:52:00.000-05:00

We tested the Germany scenario in our weekly multiplayer dev-team slugfest. A new twist was the fact that AI regions were now getting randomly involved using their new "kill all humans" strategy (this is more for testing purposes than anything else, they will be a little bit more diplomatic in regular games). The two most powerful regions on the map (NW Germany and Southern Germany) were left in AI hands, and caused some tough moments before they were taken out. (Latvia, on the other hand, fell quite easily!)

When it was down to just the 5 humans, the diplomacy and influence-peddling began. Against his better judgment, Chris (Hungary) settled for a land deal that gave me (Belguim/Netherlands/Luxembourg) a chunk of land bordering Daxon (Poland). (Maybe the $5 billion and high tech fighter aircraft designs helped convince him). Some heavy "meat grinder" battles ensued, and after over a thousand battalions destroyed the eventual winner was David playing as East Germany. Sometimes the best way to win is to keep a low profile until everyone else is beaten and bruised!

While the Germany map is somewhat crowded due to the density of population and industry in Europe, it should certainly be a popular map due to its interesting strategic options coupled with its strong historic elements.

Midnight Oil

2005-02-15T00:27:00.000-05:00

Well, half past midnight, but Germany map is balanced and units are placed. We're planning to use the map for tomorrow night's (tonight's?) Dev team test game, a weekly ritual, so I needed to get it completed. It should prove very interesting as it offers a number of powerful players. As part of the storyline Germany is divided into North West, South West and East. Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg are united as the BeNeLux region but Poland, Austria, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary are each their own region. Kaliningrad, Latvia and Lithuania finish the set. With so many players pure chaos should follow. The only down side is that there aren’t any carriers in the map so even if George finishes the implementation we’ll have to wait for next week to see carrier battles.

--Chris

Here come the Aircraft Carriers...

2005-02-13T17:52:00.000-05:00

One of the last major unimplemented unit features, "Aircraft Carriers", has just started to see the light of day. A few quirks and issues still to work out, but now carriers will be able to do more than be expensive resupply ships. Should be interesting to try to use them in really large maps that have a major water portion (the world map comes to mind...) Of course, now I need to make sure I build carrier-capable planes if I want to use them on a carrier!

-- George.

Working weekend

2005-02-12T20:14:00.000-05:00

It's been a fairly standard weekend for me, spent the day working on maps. Completed placing starting units in South Asia's Vietnam player which owns Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Myanmar by that point in the campaign. Took another look at the Ukraine map that I'd been reworking but couldn't get the numbers to work right so set it aside for now. I also finished balancing the Germany map so that all players have the right quantity of industry and produce enough to keep their GDP/c semi-stable. I'll be spending the evening placing the military units into that map. Hopefully I can finish it by lunch tomorrow.

-- Chris

I should have stayed awake during high school geography...

2005-02-11T21:16:00.000-05:00

The terrain layer in the WORLD scenario is almost complete. At 405,000 hexes in size this one element of our largest map has taken us several days to complete. Research on the world for resources and land types are all complete so it's just a matter of visually copying from each of the nine sub maps in the campaign tree. There is a challenge with working with a larger hex size. As a point of comparison, the sub map of Europe is 18 km per hex while the world map is 35 km per hex. Trying to fit resources into hexes that span larger areas while still keeping locations consistent and relative to our satellite imagery is not always easy.

While map editing isn't as fun as playing the game itself, it does allow us to improve our geography knowledge, which does come in handy during our development test games.

-- Daxon.

Lots of little details...

2005-02-10T20:18:00.000-05:00

Have been working to make our Production Commodities make a bit more sense - in particular, items like "Consumer Goods" that used other raw materials (ore, oil, power) did not take into account the price of the raw products. Now they do.

This will make it easier to profit from exporting finished goods; and a bit more painful if you have to import the stuff. Even Power generation has been affected, since it is dependent upon the cost of the individual raw good - hydro electric power is now a lot cheaper to generate than Petroleum power.

Also been working on the equipment list, taking into account unit weights (goods cost) and other factors. Now when the game reports a dollar cost for something, that will be a combination of the treasury dollars and the goods cost (the 'real bottom line' cost)

-- George.

Welcome...

2005-02-07T23:07:00.000-05:00

Welcome to our latest venue for keeping you up to date with our development efforts as we approach the release date for Supreme Ruler 2010.

While our forum ( www.bgforums.com ) has been an immense help in discussing ideas and development plans, this blog will help us to further communicate what we are working on as the weeks go along. For those of you on our beta, it will give some details as to what is being changed or implemented from our latest beta releases. For everyone interested in SR2010, we hope to include some tidbits of the design process and the decisions that we make as we put together what is shaping up to be a very "epic" title.

For more information on SR2010, be sure to check out our website ( www.supremeruler2010.com ). For questions and feedback on the game, or on topics we touch on in this blog, please feel free to join us in our forum and ask away.

-- George Geczy, Lead Programmer, BattleGoat Studios