Now that March of the Eagles is released, we want to summarize our thoughts in a post-mortem developer diary! 
As you all know, March of the Eagles is something quite different compared to our titles. Early on we had an idea of what we wanted to create. We wanted to create a wargame. Not just any wargame, but a wargame that would be a real cutthroat in multiplayer and a game that should have set victory conditions and limited time-frame to make the experience more intense.
Why did we want this, you might ask? We wanted a different kind of game and a different kind of gameplay experience for all you gamers. We all love our grand strategy titles, rest assure, but even as grand strategy fans – sometimes you want to play and win, you want to play and see results and you want to challenge your friends, create alliances or just backstab them in gruesome ways in a shorter timeframe.
For March of the Eagles, we wanted war, we wanted goals and we wanted victory. We hope that it has given you a new gameplay experience with the clear game focus, the set victory conditions.
Now that the game is released, we do feel that your feedback shows that we reached our goals and we are extremely happy about it!
We are also very happy that we created a stable game and we hope that you had an easy time to get into the game. We worked really hard with tutorial and the hints system as well as creating the player guides. One of our favorite things from March of the Eagles is the new Ledger, which taught us a new, better way of making ledgers that we hope we can bring to our other games.
This is our first steps towards our goals to make all our future games more accessible for all you gamers – and for our grand strategy games we want to achieve this without compromising depth and complexity.
We know that there is still work remaining on March of the Eagles, but we are doing our best to polish and patch the game more to make it as enjoyable as possible.
So for all you gamers out there that have played March of the Eagles and supported the project,
thank you for taking this leap of faith with us and trying a new gameplay experience even when it is something completely different!
We also want to thank all our beta-testers that made this happen, without you the game would not be as good and stable as it is now.
What the future holds for March of the Eagles
Future game developers will probably observe that no game ever completely survives contact with the players and March of the Eagles is alas no exception. Because strangely enough, sometimes even the most obvious improvements can be overlooked during development and for March of the Eagles, the mod system was one of those.
When we started the project, there was only one system for mods and it was the Europa Universalis III style mods that we've all loved to hate in the past. Times change though and more recent titles have adopted a more stable system that also allows for multiple mods at the same time. Switching this is definitely one of the main features we will address in the upcoming patch for March of the Eagles.
Another thing is the small armies that the AI loves to have ping-ponging around in your territory during wars. This seems to be what bothers most player the most right now, even though we promise that we really have tweaked it down severely from how it was in the earlier beta. But we will definitely try and make it better in the upcoming patch!
Here is what we are currently working on for the upcoming March of the Eagles patch:
- First we are looking at a change in the AI, so that instead of creating multiple small armies for cutting supply lines and conquering/reconquering undefended territory, the AI will now try to merge those armies into one larger fast army.
- Secondly we are looking at the retreat mechanic and are trying to fix some problems that result in strange retreats. There will still be retreats that aren't obvious to the player, but more often than not the retreating army will seek its home territories, forts and cities.
- Third, we are adding a mechanic where low morale units cannot move into enemy controlled territory. To avoid too easy exploits this will not apply to retreating armies, but it will keep those beaten armies from running around conquering if you don't let them be enough to regain their morale.
- The final tweak we plan to add is that when a low morale flank retreats early in combat, their defense is halved and the attackers’ initiative is set to zero, resulting in heavier losses and less Ping-Pong with armies that don't have morale to fight.
Besides the above improvements that we hope will make March of the Eagles more enjoyable, we also plan to add more information to the interfaces, add more generals to a few countries, tweak the AI peace deals and naturally a bunch of other fixes that you will find out more about soon and specified in the patch notes once it is live!
Again, thank you all for your support,
the entire Paradox Development Studio
Ps. For any of you that haven´t tried the game, but are curious
– we have created a demo and you can download it here:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/227760/
March of the Eagles
Web-page: http://www.marchoftheeagles.com
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/marchoftheeaglesgame
Twitter: http://twitter.com/marchoftheeagle
As you all know, March of the Eagles is something quite different compared to our titles. Early on we had an idea of what we wanted to create. We wanted to create a wargame. Not just any wargame, but a wargame that would be a real cutthroat in multiplayer and a game that should have set victory conditions and limited time-frame to make the experience more intense.
Why did we want this, you might ask? We wanted a different kind of game and a different kind of gameplay experience for all you gamers. We all love our grand strategy titles, rest assure, but even as grand strategy fans – sometimes you want to play and win, you want to play and see results and you want to challenge your friends, create alliances or just backstab them in gruesome ways in a shorter timeframe.
For March of the Eagles, we wanted war, we wanted goals and we wanted victory. We hope that it has given you a new gameplay experience with the clear game focus, the set victory conditions.
Now that the game is released, we do feel that your feedback shows that we reached our goals and we are extremely happy about it!
We are also very happy that we created a stable game and we hope that you had an easy time to get into the game. We worked really hard with tutorial and the hints system as well as creating the player guides. One of our favorite things from March of the Eagles is the new Ledger, which taught us a new, better way of making ledgers that we hope we can bring to our other games.
This is our first steps towards our goals to make all our future games more accessible for all you gamers – and for our grand strategy games we want to achieve this without compromising depth and complexity.
We know that there is still work remaining on March of the Eagles, but we are doing our best to polish and patch the game more to make it as enjoyable as possible.
So for all you gamers out there that have played March of the Eagles and supported the project,
thank you for taking this leap of faith with us and trying a new gameplay experience even when it is something completely different!
We also want to thank all our beta-testers that made this happen, without you the game would not be as good and stable as it is now.
What the future holds for March of the Eagles
Future game developers will probably observe that no game ever completely survives contact with the players and March of the Eagles is alas no exception. Because strangely enough, sometimes even the most obvious improvements can be overlooked during development and for March of the Eagles, the mod system was one of those.
When we started the project, there was only one system for mods and it was the Europa Universalis III style mods that we've all loved to hate in the past. Times change though and more recent titles have adopted a more stable system that also allows for multiple mods at the same time. Switching this is definitely one of the main features we will address in the upcoming patch for March of the Eagles.
Another thing is the small armies that the AI loves to have ping-ponging around in your territory during wars. This seems to be what bothers most player the most right now, even though we promise that we really have tweaked it down severely from how it was in the earlier beta. But we will definitely try and make it better in the upcoming patch!
Here is what we are currently working on for the upcoming March of the Eagles patch:
- First we are looking at a change in the AI, so that instead of creating multiple small armies for cutting supply lines and conquering/reconquering undefended territory, the AI will now try to merge those armies into one larger fast army.
- Secondly we are looking at the retreat mechanic and are trying to fix some problems that result in strange retreats. There will still be retreats that aren't obvious to the player, but more often than not the retreating army will seek its home territories, forts and cities.
- Third, we are adding a mechanic where low morale units cannot move into enemy controlled territory. To avoid too easy exploits this will not apply to retreating armies, but it will keep those beaten armies from running around conquering if you don't let them be enough to regain their morale.
- The final tweak we plan to add is that when a low morale flank retreats early in combat, their defense is halved and the attackers’ initiative is set to zero, resulting in heavier losses and less Ping-Pong with armies that don't have morale to fight.
Besides the above improvements that we hope will make March of the Eagles more enjoyable, we also plan to add more information to the interfaces, add more generals to a few countries, tweak the AI peace deals and naturally a bunch of other fixes that you will find out more about soon and specified in the patch notes once it is live!
Again, thank you all for your support,
the entire Paradox Development Studio
Ps. For any of you that haven´t tried the game, but are curious
– we have created a demo and you can download it here:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/227760/
March of the Eagles
Web-page: http://www.marchoftheeagles.com
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/marchoftheeaglesgame
Twitter: http://twitter.com/marchoftheeagle
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