Empires and Tribes News

With this patch, we are releasing the promised overhaul of the AI and integrate new resident tasks in Empires and Tribes.
The AI now recruits its combat units from the population just like the player. The size of the AI's armies are thus directly dependent on the number of free workers and thus the size of the city. To support larger armies, the AI now continues to expand its city and, depending on its diplomatic status with other cities and its own progress, prioritizes the construction of residential buildings and marketplaces to varying degrees in order to expand its city. This results in a realistic attack and defense behavior that is adapted to the player's speed. The AI in the highest difficulty level - the Earl Rothenstein - continues to present even experienced players with a challenge that should not be underestimated. Furthermore, we have replaced the tasks of the inhabitants. More varied tasks such as fighting a disease or crafting items now promise far more valuable rewards such as armor pieces or higher-quality tools.

Your Empires and Tribes Team

Version 1.37

ENGINE

- Unit recruitment of the AI revised
- City expansion of the AI reworked
- The AI now also builds a castle as fast as possible when it declares war on another AI or gets war declared by it
- Added running and training animation for AI inhabitants
- The AI now builds additional marketplaces to expand cities
- When building walls, towers and gates, the builders no longer run in circles at the construction site, but use the work animation instead
- When a construction site is located to the left of the town hall, construction workers now take the direct path to pick up resources at the town hall and no longer walk to the waypoint directly in front of the town hall entrance
- The main town hall can now no longer be destroyed
- The player can now sleep during the day when he is exhausted
- Terrain textures revised
- Grass distribution in the dry biomes revised
- Residents' quest system revised: Dweller quests are now more varied and difficult and involve multiple NPC's. In turn, the rewards are more valuable.
- Added new quest items: poisoned well water, community book and tunic.

- Fixed a bug that could cause builders to run in circles in front of their houses when building walls, towers and gates
- Fixed bug in AI castle building that could lead to wrong placement of towers and walls
- Fixed a bug in AI castle building that could cause the AI's build orders to stop when repairing a castle after an attack
- Fixed a bug in AI castle building that could cause the AI to try to repair its castle several times
- Fixed a bug that could cause the AI to build the castle inside the monastery
- Fixed a bug that, after loading, could cause the AI to train multiple soldiers at once
- Fixed a bug that, after loading, caused the AI to commission new armies even though not all of the old armies had been fully recruited yet
- Fixed a bug that, after loading, could cause the AI not to increase its armies further
- Fixed a bug that in rare cases could cause a crash after loading when the AI attacked the enemy
- Fixed a bug that could lead to a crash in rare cases due to a faulty build command from the AI
- Fixed a bug that could lead to lag due to incorrect resource management by the AI
- Fixed a bug that could lead to a performance crash in the lategame due to excess generated items in the bakery of the AI
- Fixed a bug that could cause the quest signs to remain displayed above the inhabitants even though the task was already completed
- Fixed a bug that could cause the wrong progress of the construction site to be displayed in the left mini-panel
- Fixed a bug that could cause the player to move while sleeping
- Fixed a bug that could cause the water carriers to sit below the chairs at the fountain
- Fixed a bug that could cause the player not to be able to talk to the water carriers after loading them
- Fixed a bug that could lead to deletion of the data of the noble title and the state servants if the player had employed city guards and other state servants

UI
- Added tooltip about food production
- Added tooltip explaining the automatic division of workers by interests
- Added tooltip showing the missing resources of building sites in the building menus
- Added text in the overview menu showing the time until the next city council meeting and the next court case
- Added button to go directly to the recruitment menu from the castle building menu
- The cursor is now highlighted when selecting the demolition tool
- Added icon to indicate in the buttons during communication with NPC's whether it is a question about a court case or a quest
- The panel of the monastery now indicates that only 2 of the 3 available extensions can be built

- Fixed a bug that caused the wrong interests of the resident to be displayed during communication if the resident had a quest
- Fixed a bug that caused the cost to upgrade the farm to be calculated incorrectly when using the building menu

Dear Community,
enclosed is our roadmap for the coming months.
Since we took care of the bugfixing and the stability to a large extent in the past months, the planned features have fallen behind our plan, mainly in the area of sound design. We plan to add those features and content in the coming months. A big part of the current development is the writing of the campaign, which we will probably be able to publish in January. It will include 12-16 maps, which are interconnected and will challenge you with different military and economic tasks. The first part of the roadmap will be released soon with a new patch, which will include new tasks for the inhabitants and an improved AI - especially in the area of recruiting units.

Your team from Empires and Tribes

This patch replaces the model of the monastery, adds a quest menu and fixes some bugs.
From now on, the quest menu will display all active tasks in the city. In addition, the compass function has been reworked to display the position of events and items in the world in an updated way. The end of the world is now displayed more realistically thanks to new geometry at the edges of the map, as well as new skybox shaders. We were also able to fix some bugs in AI castle building, market cart management, and UI.


Your team from Empires and Tribes

Version 1.36

ENGINE

- Added new building model for the monastery
- Added LOD data and occlusion data for the monastery
- Road construction revised: When placing roads, they now snap to existing roads much more smoothly
- City guards can now be hired in the state servants menu to protect the city from light attacks, e.g. by wolves, even in the early game
- The recruitment cost for civil servants has been increased
- Attack tracker revised: The positions of attacking units (armies as well as wolves) are now updated on the map and in the compass, showing the actual position of the units
- Beadle warning of upcoming battles revised: After the warning, all armies sent into battle by the AI are now displayed updated and not just the position of the expected attack
-Textures of the following NPC's exchanged and partially randomized: Priest, Monk, City Servant, Messenger, King's Messenger.
- The fog is now calculated on the skybox, making the transition between distant terrain and the sky more fluid
- Added new terrain geometry to the edge of the maps

- Fixed a bug that caused a crash when saving or loading if the AI upgraded the bakery to level 2
- Fixed a bug that could cause a crash when loading savegames due to incorrect calculation of castle courtyards
- Fixed a bug that could lead to incorrect camera movement in the building menu
- Fixed a bug that could cause cart drivers to stop in front of warehouses instead of driving to farms in cities with many farms
- Fixed a bug that caused the positions of the castle's extensions to not be reset when the extensions were demolished
- fixed a bug that caused workers to stop in front of the pillory
- Fixed a bug that prevented the market from being built in places where residents were located
- Fixed a bug that caused bandits not to stay near the player's town in some cases
- Fixed a bug that could cause the AI not to attack the player if part of the path was blocked by walls
- Fixed a bug that could cause a crash when a combat unit died in rare cases


UI

- Added quest menu that shows all current quests, their patrons and their remaining time
- Added shortcut to get directly to the quest menu from the diplomacy menu
- Tooltips in the state servants menu revised
- fixed a bug that caused the wrong display of archers in the towers, because archers currently running to the tower were not taken into account
- fixed a bug that caused tooltips to persist during town council meeting when the menu was updated
- Fixed a bug that caused the headline to be displayed incorrectly in the news tooltips
- Fixed a bug that could cause the cost of public servants to be displayed incorrectly in the overview menu
- Fixed a bug that could cause the writing room not to open during the search for evidence for a court case
- Fixed a bug that could cause the circular marker marking the attack position on the map not to be cleared
- Fixed a bug that could cause the location of quest items from crates and lamps to not be displayed correctly on the map and compass
- Fixed a bug that caused the message to appear when changing weapons that a new item was picked up

This update brings Empires and Tribes back to version 1.35. We were able to fix initial problems in the version, which means that the performance and memory management optimizations are now available to all players. We have also been able to locate and fix a number of other issues. The bugfixing mainly revolves around pathfinding, dynamic occlusion and AI combat behavior.

Your team from Empires and Tribes


CHANGELOG

- Fixed a bug that could cause units with optimized pathfinding to not find their way and thus run in circles
- Fixed a bug in the Dynamic Occlusion system that could lead to incorrect occlusion of buildings on mountainous maps
- Fixed a bug that could cause the additional buildings of the grain farm to be hidden when the player was standing close to the farm
- Fixed a bug that could cause the grain farm's interior to be placed too high
- Fixed a bug that could cause parts of the grain farm interior to be placed twice
- Fixed a bug that could cause the priest to run to the edge of the map after upgrading the church to a cathedral and not return from there
- When building multiple churches, only one priest is now spawned per map
- Fixed a bug that could cause residents to run through the air to the location of their bed after loading it
- Fixed a bug that could cause some residents to not close their eyes at night while sleeping
- Fixed a bug that could cause the grain farm to be disconnected from the road network after loading
- Fixed a bug that in rare cases could cause the cart drivers to not be able to reach a farm even though there was a road connection
- Fixed a bug that could cause residents to get stuck in the pillory
- Fixed a bug that could cause residents to continue carrying the blasphemy stone after the punishment ended
- Fixed a bug that could lead to incorrect pathfinding of residents when the way to a farm was blocked by a closed gate
- Fixed a bug that could cause the AI to recruit an army more than actually supported by the current city size after loading game saves
- Fixed a bug that could cause combat units to run to the edge of the map after loading
- Fixed a bug that could cause combat units to be rotated incorrectly after loading
- Fixed a bug that could cause AI combat units to get stuck on the bridge in rare cases
- Fixed a bug that could cause the AI's combat units to attack the castle and its annexes even if they were behind a wall
- fixed a bug that caused the mouse text of gates and towers not to be displayed correctly
- Fixed a bug that caused the trader's character to appear briefly when entering the menu when trading at the marketplace or opening the warehouse menu

Dear Community,
with the patch 1.35 from 07/23/22 there are currently problems in the pathfinding, so we have decided to return to the stable version 1.34 and to revise the patch in the following weeks. We would like to apologize for any inconvenience caused while playing. Contrary to our assumption, the hotfixes of 07/24/22 and 07/26/22 did not fix all problems. We are currently testing the roll-back and preparing for the release within the next 24 hours.

We will keep you up to date.
Thank you for your understanding!

Your Team of Empires and Tribes