Sovereignty: Crown of Kings enters Early Access

[Tpek]

Approaching full release? Huzzah!  O0

[FlickJax]

Does that include the engine change? haven't fired up for quite a while.

[Nefaro]

Does that include the engine change? haven't fired up for quite a while.

Pretty sure that changeover happened months ago.  They've been testing & fixing since.

[mikeck]

Yes. Engine change was several months ago

[FlickJax]

Excellent thanks chaps, as I said long time since i fired this up..

[FarAway Sooner]

Woo hoo!  Looks like I bought it just in time...  :)

[Lord Zimoa]

Yes guys, the engine change was from 1.9 to 2.0 and was completed in June.

For the last six months we have been updating, patching, fixing, changing, adding and polishing the game based on all the fantastic feedback we got during Early Access.

We will continue this as long as possible, but the game is now almost good to go and officially being released.

[Tpek]

Man, I just came back to this game only to discovers it still suffers from many of it's previous problems.

It's really too hard to play a small nation, no resources, no allies, too few agents (can't really deal in diplomacy that way), and invaded by everyone.

The A.I is still ultra-warlike, by turn 3-4 nearly the entire world is at war with itself, there's barely a nation that is not at war with several others at the same time.
All the while, the A.I nations cheat left and right. They spam troops, even though there's no way their recruitment queue could hold that many or they'd have enough resources,
and then invade my provinces en masse with Garrison units (these units are not supposed to be able to attack provinces, just defend. That's how it is for the player at least)

Just got my ass handed down to me as Palemoor pretty damn quickly.

[Nefaro]

Man, I just came back to this game only to discovers it still suffers from many of it's previous problems.

It's really too hard to play a small nation, no resources, no allies, too few agents (can't really deal in diplomacy that way), and invaded by everyone.

The A.I is still ultra-warlike, by turn 3-4 nearly the entire world is at war with itself, there's barely a nation that is not at war with several others at the same time.
All the while, the A.I nations cheat left and right. They spam troops, even though there's no way their recruitment queue could hold that many or they'd have enough resources,
and then invade my provinces en masse with Garrison units (these units are not supposed to be able to attack provinces, just defend. That's how it is for the player at least)

Just got my ass handed down to me as Palemoor pretty damn quickly.

The AI nations don't operate under the same constraints as the player?!  That's not good. 

[Tpek]

^That really seems like the case unfortunately.

[Nefaro]

^That really seems like the case unfortunately.

Is it a difficulty setting, or just like that normally I wonder?

[HoodedHorseJoe]

From my experience AI entities getting buffs & shortcuts to better compete in the game world is fairly common - the trick is making it less obvious, I guess. The thing is that no matter how good a game's AI is (and to be frank, few have managed to code 'truly' good AI), they can't compete with a living person. It's like God coming to play amongst the ants.

The Total War games commonly made up for lack-lustre AI by secretly buffing stats in both Campaign and Tactical modes (which was then also scaled by difficulty). I play EUIV a lot and you see the AI get away with many things that you just know as a player you wouldn't be able to do (debt comes to mind). Without these the AI would get steam-rolled by a player pretty quickly.

Sovereignty's case seems especially bad though, from what you've said. I imagine there are things they can do to make it less 'In your face' but it will still be there, because it kind of has to be.

[FarAway Sooner]

Yeah.  I used to be good friends with one of the two guys who had the design lead on Imperialism and Imperialism 2, and he was emphatic that "Unless you design easy AI handling into a game from the very start, you're going to have AI problems.  Designing a game that's great for human players won't be very satisfying if you don't also make something that the AI can handle."

Of course, in the same breath, he admitted that Imperialism 2 struggled to get rival factions to generate and conserve enough money starting with the mid/late-game period. 

I think that's one area where Arcen Games' AI War introduced a great innovation that's seldom been followed in other 4x titles:  assymetrical play.  Having an AI that plays a "human faction" competently without buffs is extremely hard.  This is a convention that's been with us in 4x titles since at least Sid Meier's original Civilization 25 years ago.

But if you design the non-human players to play using a different dynamic, because they themselves are different (e.g., a god-like slumbering machine intelligence that is busy thinking thoughts of inscrutable godliness so it won't readily notice your early pin-pricks of resistance; a sprawling and bureacratic Evil Empire ponderously moving to crush rebels; a random series of viruses popping up over the world that need stopping), you avoid the whole "the AI has to cheat to compete" problem.

[Lord Zimoa]

A new patch for Sovereignty, with more bugfixes and more balancing done!

http://steamcommunity.com/app/312430/discussions/0/152391285457881490/

Changelog Sovereignty patch RC1:

Prisoners now added automatically to trade table when sending peace treaty
Remembered trade offers now remove invalid items
Necropolis hero power no longer works on forts, siege, naval or undead units
Poison Vial hero power no longer works on forts, undead and phantom units
Fixed all prisoners auto-releasing at end of wars
Fixed possible crash when province with allied armies changes owners
Fixed possible crashes when looking up prisoner lists
Fixed possible crash when opening foreign affairs
Fixed graphical glitches on move/attack overlays in tactical battles
Fixed another case where promoted units causes a crash
Fixed non-working Rally unit ability
Fixed tutorial issue when Garrison units are present
Fixed a lot of German texts which were not appearing
Fixed issue causing some Rebel armies to be invisible
Fixed crash when losing the game as Aevinwode
Fixed crashing after notifying user that graphics hardware is not supported
Fixed shader compiler issue which caused seemingly random crashes
Fixed player being able to initiate trade with dead realms from resources pull out panel
Fixed crash when sending AI trade offer immedately after a counter-offer is made
Fixed being able to edit trade deal before clicking the counter button
Fixed removing treaty from trade table only removing from one side
Fixed canceling out of trade counter-offer freezing the game
Modding: Game now passes target unit when requesting Healer status

[FarAway Sooner]

Love that you guys fixed the Tutorial issue quickly; I'm going to fire this up just as soon as I win my Polaris Sector game!