Shrapnel Games Blog

First of all let me apologize for not publishing news about the development of the game in a long time. We’ve been deep involved in the development and our other jobs so lets start with the new features we’ve added to the game.

First of all you will notice that there are new screenshots of the game in our page. These pics are captures of the map editor, that is already finished. We think that a good game let the players create its own scenarios, and we have the intention to ship Galley Battles with the tools we are using to create the official battles.

We intend to avoid the problem of limited maps that avoid big maneuvers with large size scenarios, and the result is a system that manages maps with 1000×1000 tiles (1 tile=50mx50, so the full size is near 50kmx50km). As this results in a lot of tiles, we’ve created some tools to paint tiles and objects (towns, cities, trees) on a fast way.

The scenario editor. We want to create some scenarios for each battle, so scenarios are able to share a map. Each side will have a deployment area, and although you will position the formations of ships you desire in the scenario editor, when you start a scenario each player will have the possibility to change the positions and formations of the game as he desires, so each game will be different because you don’t know how the opponent will form its fleet. With this concept we try to avoid the problem of many wargames, where you have an army already deployed with no possibilities to modify the position of units.

Each battle will have different scenarios, that represent different lectures of the sources (i.e. the battle of Salamis has three or four interpretations of the History of Herodotus, its main source, with greek deployments absolutely different).

Related to the game engine, the AI of each ship has been modelled, and depending on the orders of movement and formation, and specially on the combat attitude its behavior will be different. You can check this AI in the video attached to this post, where you have two attacking galleys maneuvering to sink an avoiding enemy. First of all we order our two galleys to position on different sides of the enemy. When we give one of them the order to ram, the enemy starts flying away in convenience with its order of avoiding combats. When the other galley starts the attack too, the flying enemy modifies its path to avoid both enemies, but it is finally caught. At this moment the ship will turn to give its facing side to the enemy because it is the best possibility to avoid be sink it has. Finally, the two attacking galleys maneuver to attack the enemy from different sides and sink it.

Next weeks we will finish the scenario editor, and start with the Computer Opponent AI with complex scenarios already created to make the tests. We will try to post news about the development more often if we can

Xavi Rubio