It’s been a busy week and I’ve been able to continue converting the code base as well as doing a bit of work on the marketing and presentation of the game. I hope you like the new Fate of an Empire intro which I plan to use in coming videos.

The main work this week has been on the scout AI. the scout AI is a sub-routine that helps the AI understand the world. It also controls all scouts (armies and fleets) and make sure they keep the map updated. As this part of the code is complex and rely on lots of other parts I also converted the pathfinder and some of the objectives.

What is an objective? The main AI in Fate of an Empire is utility based. This means that it studies multiple possible actions each turn and then pick the one that receives the highest score. These actions are called objectives and when starting a new objective the AI also dedicate resources that the objective control until it’s ready with them. It will only start new objectives when it has free resources or enough finances to support the new objective.

Another thing I’ve done this week is to increase the modding possibilities by moving settlement data (like sight range and such) into a data file. In this file it will also be possible to mod the settlement focuses which will be a new feature for Fate of an Empire.

I also plan to support landscape mode for both phones and tablets this time:

Next week I’ll be away during the weekend and the next status report will be in two weeks time. By then I should be ready to start a beta on the map editor!

Cheers!