Hi, the last 4 months I've been working from time to time on the new update, spent time researching about the Japanese Sengoku and Edo periods, which was really interesting btw, and trying to get things more stable (ah, believe it or not things were unstable as hell before).

Down below you'll find the changelog containing every change made, but before that, I'd like to talk about some of them separately, since major ones deserve more explanation.

Language Localization

The game was always planned to support multiple languages, being English the main one and then Spanish the second one (because that's the one I speak natively).

The thing was, I've only implemented localization once before even starting working on this side project, and I did it in a really awkward way back then, so now 99% of the entire thing is available in Spanish too. I've implemented my own loc system from scratch because I didn't like any of the other free solutions, and since this is also where I prototype and research stuff, I wanted to work on something alike on my own, under training and research purposes (?). As of now it works like a (custom) csv reader, parsing custom tags and stuff into dictionaries for every language, process taking place only when I make the build, so no one will experience any lag due to loading languages.

And as I always say, everyone is welcome to support the Eng or Esp version, you can just tell me about alternative words, texts or whatever in order to make things easier and more pleasant to read. Please ignore the tutorial, I'll soon replace it with an actual interactive one rather than the bible-like long text.

The Japanese Faction, tweaks, and a new Japanese-Themed map

I originally started modeling two factions to start with: the Roman Empire, and the Oda Nobunaga Clan. Because I played Son of Rome, watched 300, and I also like anime, which is more than enough reason to introduce them both as the first ones. So basically, both assets were already done (kind of.. there were placeholders of both at least). You can now play as the Oda Clan, a faction also focused on infantry but in a different way, featuring spearmen, archers, ninjas (to be added, as well as some other Romans units) and samurai. This Japanese faction also features new cute low poly models and more resources (one of them being Honor, gained by killing enemy units and used to train disciplined samurai).

So, what's actually the difference between playing as one or the other? In short, Romas have really good infantry, they feature better armor and weapons just at the start of each match, yet, Japanese feature units able to train faster, and in exchange for fewer resources in comparison. Both factions feature upgrades of all kind, but in terms of infantry upgrades, Japanese has better ones available mostly in the late game, and it's kind of weak in the middle, the focus on the honor as a resource for certain end-game things make the act of attacking and killing an actual resource on its own too.

I also created a Japanese-themed map too (bigger than the old one), so one can again test things up in a different context. For this map, I decided to sculpt and texture it in Blender, and then added some details upon that. I think it looks way better than the other one, an artist friend of mine helped to conceptualize it. Pretty cool. It features different kinds of effects, and I also worked on quality itself (shadows and lighting mostly).

Factions also got rebalanced in order to make things more playable despite the faction.

Reworking Pathfinding, Map tools & AI

In the prev build, a weird kind-of-wrong approach of Dijkstra's algorithm was implemented in order to handle pathfinding. This horrible as hell implementation would break everything up on certain occasions, so now I ended up implementing a simple BFS one, which works 10/10, and no one will ever notice the difference since my levels are up to 30 nodes in total so far with only one path (still, since I plan to escalate upon it, I needed something stable first).

Regarding the custom "tools" I use for map making, I've tried some from the asset store but as usual, didn't stick to any, and so far I'm working with my own set of custom inspector functions to handle level-nodes, small buttons to help me subdivide nodes, add new ones in the correct position automatically, delete, link/unlink nodes, rename every node accordingly, etc.. One of those things no one notices since it's something dev-sided.

Regarding AI, I've been working on an AI able to think more about what to do considering what's going on around her (yes, it's fem, google it in Spanish if you didn't know). Previously, it would just spam units and research stuff, now it will try to detect the best units to train so it can try to overcome current user's units. Current AI should be able to also "launch attacks" (whenever it thinks it's ready that is). I really hope this will work out for now. AI is still in the work (and will probably stay like that until Battle of Ages 8 gets released in 2077, what a reference) and any kind of feedback is of course totally welcome, as usual.

UI changes & Saving/Loading

UI changed in many ways during these last months, I've tried to change the design a bit so things get easier for users, one of the changes, for example, is the settings menu during a paused game (yes, why wasn't there before? Well no one knows but now it is), and problems regarding settings themselves were also fixed too. Others are just visual things, such as the changing-background (I've been redesigning it visually, without leaving the compact-minimalistic look).

Regarding the saving/loading system, so far I've been using player prefs just because it was easy to setup for testing purposes. Still, since saving many things such as level/faction/ai/units created/units killed/research done/time spent and so on per match was just too much to save that way, I decided to implement my own saving/loading system, operating on a save file (same system I started using years ago, literally the same script). So in short, it is now easier to save and load more advanced types of data. This may change in the future, but as of now, I can use this to load and save whatever I want.

General Changelog

• Added a new faction: The Oda Clan (Japanese faction)
• Added a new map/level (Japanese-themed one)
• Added new upgrades to research to most buildings, including some Roman ones (still in progress)
• Added fast-forward buttons so you can now get to x2 velocity (you can also use the ' [ ' and ' ] ' hotkeys)
• Rebalanced Roman faction (units and buildings)
• Added localization support (featuring latin-american spanish language)
  
• New custom saving/loading system (way better than the previous one which was based on playerprefs)
• Separated scoreboards depending on the map (now also saving more data regarding each match, such as units killed, trained, level played and so on)
• Fixed settings menu issues (regarding sound-volume and screen resolution)
• Added more particles to units when walking, spawning and dying. Along with some new effects after dying (that also look cute as hell btw)
• BFS-based (yet more stable and properly implemented) pathfinding which will later on move towards A*
• Reworked AI
• Reworked projectile system (that will blow your mind mostly due to how bad previous one was rather than how good new one is)
• Reworked unit's attack system (now depending on animations)
• Reworked units themselves (the entire way they act and react, this still needs a lot of work)
• UI: New images used in order to make things look prettier (hopefully), along with cool bg images on the menu
• UI: Progress bars for units in training (so you can tell whenever a building finished training some unit)
  
• UI: Settings menu available during paused games in case you want to change something during a match
  
• UI: Most stuff got positioned differently in order to make things easier to see for the user
• UI: Many tweaks everywhere, from fading in/out background music, to images to more details in some menus
  
• UI: Tweaked some UI parameters such as the velocity panels are displayed
• Many, MANY bugs fixed, old and new ones
  
• Experimental stuff is sadly still experimental. Excuse my prototyping.

Resumen general en Español

Siendo que no pienso escribir un resumen de todo cada vez que hago algún posteo en reddit o donde sea, resumire todo aquí al final del posteo principal:

A causa de estudios la update de 3 semanas me llevo en total 4 meses (originalmente pense en tenerlo hecho unas semanas despues tras la update #1, claro como no).

Localización de idioma: Battle of Ages [Rx] ahora soporta multiples lenguajes, siendo el español el único sin contar ingles. Si alguien tiene sugerencias respecto de como mejorar la redacción en Ingles/Español (Latino-Americano neutro de momento), como siempre solo basta con contactarme y comentarmelo, toda corrección es bienvenida.

Nueva facción: Ahora es posible jugar como la facción del Clan Oda (Japón), una facción con foco en infantería, y en el late-game, capaces de ser entrenadas relativamente rápido. Los Japoneses cuentan con unidades como los lanceros (rápidos para moverse pero un tanto lentos al atacar), arqueros (largo alcance, aunque debiles cuerpo a cuerpo), ninjas (aún no disponibles) y samurai (lento, pero fuerte y resistente). La facción Japonesa cuenta además con un recurso único: el honor, que se obtiene tras matar enemigos.

Cambios en la UI y fast-forward: Estoy en ese proceso de limpiar la interfaz, junto a esto a ultimas horas decidí agregar la función de fast-forward (aumentar o disminuir la velocidad del juego).

Pathfinding via BFS: Un algoritmo que (al fin) logré implementar de forma limpia, sin bugs, y del cual nadie notará la diferencia a pesar de que las unidades constantemente estan buscando caminos (aunque por ahora solo exista uno, si, totalmente lineal).