After ten years in the making, Clash of Ancient Empires is ready for release. The game's creator, Scott Ohlman, has been a avid gamer and programmer for 30 years. Ten years ago he decided to combine his passions and devote his free time to creating an in-depth strategy war game. His game, Clash of Ancient Empires, is a simultaneous movement turn based strategy game that can accommodate up to 500 players in the same game. Clash of Ancient Empires has an advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and a random map that is highly configurable. The player becomes the emperor of an ancient empire, and must manage the empire's economy, diplomacy and military.
Because Clash of Ancient Empires is turn based instead of real time, Scott was able to devote unlimited CPU cycles to create realistic computer opponents. The computer players do not cheat. They do not use inside information about army movements or strengths when determining where to attack or defend. Although they will not coordinate attacks, they will share general information with their computer allies. Each computer player has its own unique personality based on multiple factors such as emotional/logical scale, aggressive/passive scale, treasury and loyalty thresholds and military unit preferences. The varying AI personalities counterbalance the varying player strategies. Players may develop a strategy that works well against some AI personalities but not others. Even Scott is challenged by certain AI personalities. This advanced artificial intelligence makes the replay value of Clash of Ancient Empires exceptional.
Clash of Ancient Empires can be played as single player game against the computer AIs, as a mulitplayer game against other human opponents, or a combination of both. Multiplayer games are played via an automated email process. The players issue orders for their empires and then email them to the host. The emailed orders are collected and simultaneously processed by the host, and the results are emailed back to the players.
Many different winning strategies are available to the players. The best strategy for each empire may vary at different stages of the game depending on the empire's relative size, economy, diplomacy and military strength. Players could choose to play very aggressively joining many wars, or they could play more defensively and only fight when attacked. They could join many alliances or only a few (or none). Since the orders for each empire are processed simultaneously, the results of a players orders are not known until they are processed by the host. This differs from classic board games like chess where the results of the player's moves can be contemplated in advance. Simultaneous movement games add an element of uncertainty, and they encourage the players to prepare for multiple contingencies.
Clash of Ancient Empires employs detailed and interrelated economic, diplomatic and military models. The economic model is based on the imperial system where local provinces have their individual economies, and they send a portion of their revenues to the imperial treasury. The diplomatic model is based on real world diplomacy where empires can form alliances, declare wars, sue for peace, enter cease fires, etc. The military model is based on the feudal system where local provinces have their own armies but are beholden to their controlling empire.
Battles are processed from the unit perspective. Army units follow the battle strategy selected by the player (or computer AI) and fight autonomously base on their category (infantry / missile / mounted), experience level (veteran / experienced / green / in training), percent casualties, morale, attack strength, defense strength, attack range, and speed. Over 1000 units can participate in the same battle. Units gain experience from each battle, and they can gain or lose morale depending on the results.
Clash of Ancient Empires is rated E for Everyone, but it is designed for the serious game player. It has context sensitive help and a tutorial, and it runs on all versions of Windows. Check out www.clashofancientempires.com for more information.
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