King Arthur's Campain (Amiga) - Alpha Demo V0.3 Launched

This is the first demo of my game, and it is still quite rough right now, and most of it is just a slideshow. Some might say it is boring at this stage, but later I will add mini games to make the game more interesting. Hopefully it works fine with 1mb chip and 1mb fast, KS3.0+.

This is a High Res Interlaced game, played using the mouse, so A500 Mini users be aware, and original Amiga users may stuggle with flicker.

Main Menu

When you launch the game, you will find the menu.  From here there are some  unique options:

- Information - This will eventually contain full instructions, but for now there is little here.

- Raid Slideshow  - This a manual slideshow of 64 colour EHB images, press Next to advance.

- Quick Battle - Starts an example Quick Battle, where both sides have weak (10% HP) battalions, and are evenly matched.

- City/Shop - This is part of the main game, so having it on the menu is simply a quick way for me to access it for now.

- Play Intro - This is the intro to the game. Newbies should watch this first.

- Start Campaign - This is the main game, although it currently plays without playing the intro first!

Campaign

This is the main Map Mode/Story Mode of the game, although there really isn't much the player can do until they grow up after 20 to 30 turns. If you want to speed up this process, click the BACK button to move forwards to a later date, where you can buy a big army, although this skips the education section. If you want to read the story normally, press NEXT.

When Arthur is old enough, he will be able to buy a battalion. You cant do this until you are crowned King of the Pennines. At this point, you will be moved away from York and to a new home at Brougham, near old Pen'ryth. In the next year, you can start to move about. Just hover over the city flag where you want to move to, and then click to move there. Each city within Ebrauc will be open to your war efforts, and 10% of the citizens of these towns will offer to join your army per turn (which is one year). So if you clean out a city, just wait for the next turn. But be careful that you dont deplete the city of cizizens, or the number of volunteers will go down as the population decreases. To buy troops, you must visit the city square, by clicking the Shop button.

The City /Shop

The City/ Shop screen will enable the player to buy weapons and gain other things. At the start of the game, you cant go in to the city, but once you are old enough, you can go in and look around. There is a School Education button here to train if you are young enough, but the adult education system is not in the game yet. Players can only ask ONE question per turn, from a random pool of 21 questions. You'll have to wait to grow up before you can use the other city functions.

When this happens, you can buy a battalion, and buy soldiers in groups of 10. You can only assign the role of soldier to volunteers once they have a weapon, so everyone must carry one. If you dont have 10 men to carry 10 weapons, you cant buy them. The weapons have a fixed city within Ebrauc, a fixed price, and a fixed damage bonus rating (the latter is not used in the game yet). So the more expensive weapons will eventually deal the hardest blows. 

Later in the game, more citys will open up, so you can explore the map. Cities not under the influence of Ebrauc will only offer 150 troops per city per turn, and the weapons in these cities are randomised each time. If the destination city is held by the enemy, you can raid it, and maybe gain some more money or a princess (not yet in the game).

The citys will also be where you can call upon a crowd for Diplomacy, and haggle for more money and troops, but this is not in the game yet.  You can also rename your battalions from the city shop screen, but currently these names are only visible in Battle Mode with the stats bar option enabled.

Players can have a maximum of 3 battalions with 2000 units in each one in this demo, so 6,000 troops in total. The game will eventually have 12 battalions (24,000 troops) per side, so 24 battalions (48,000 troops) in total.

Battle Mode

The battle mode is not currently linked to the story, but you can go into battle mode whenever you choose, by clicking on the Battle button from the map screen. Here, your current campaign loadout will be tested against a small (10% strength) force of enemies. But later in the game, after 480AD, this changes to a much harder force of 90% strength, so the player is going to need a huge loadout to beat them.

In battle mode, you must first place down all six field units somewhere on the map. Click on one of them, and then click again to drop them. For some reason, this control system is a bit sticky right now, and you have to stop hovering the mouse to drop them. After you place everyone down (friends and enemies), you can click the options or click start to start the battle. It is important to note that the battlefield areas is maybe 30 miles in length, and the units can only see enemies at a maximum of 10 miles away, which is activated if the units are totally lost and without a target for 5 turns. Otherwise, they will only target enemy units which are up to 5 miles away. So you must place them down fairly closely for them to be able to see each other. They begin by looking ahead and behind, and then further afield, and then far off. If they still cant find anything, the cycle begins again. In the full game, all enemy and friendly starting positions will be fixed in place, so the ability to drop them around the map using drag and drop is just for the Quick Battle mode, accessed from the menu, so players can set up their own battle scenarios.

- Stop - Press this if you want to stop the action, although it will take a full set of turns before the game finally stops, especially with Debug enabled!.

- Stats Panel - Press this and then Start to see some stats on the units. This is designed to handle all 24 units, so thats why the stats panel is very long. I wanted this to be in the game, but recently it seems this takes too long to keep drawing it on the screen, and so I made the status bar with the energy bars at the bottom instead. Most of the flickery buttons will also be moved to the stats bar, and made invisible, so no more annoying flickering.

- Debug Mode - Press this and then Start to watch each command being issued in turn, with a short delay. This is best used along with the Stats bar, so you can see what is going on. Sometimes the status of a unit on the stats bar goes blank when the same unit is targeted by more than one enemy, but a list of all of the Aims/Targets of each unit are listed on the left, so you can see where each unit is aiming towards at all times. If you want the delay time to be quicker, press Debug, then Stop before starting the game, for a 2 second delay. This change is built in to the Stop button.

Moving Your Units - If you want to move a unit, or force march them to somewhere else, you can click on them during the battle, and move them by moving the line somewhere on the map, and clicking there. The unit will then walk blindly to that spot, ignoring any enemies, and WONT deal any damage to enemies. This mode is purely in case you find enemies far away from the vision of your units, or if you want to pull them back, and ignore the fight completely. When the target is reached, the search modes should switch back on. If you feel that moving the units while the battle is happening is too tricky to work, just Stop the battle, and then move them all one by one, and then click start again. It is not possible to target enemies directly for now, just the land surrounding them, so its best to inch forwards bit by bit.

Searching - The units will wander about at random until they find a target, and then they will march towards it during an Attack phase. If the target is not the one standing in front of them, the unit will ignore the local one and go for the first one it finds instead. During the search or attack phase, the unit WILL inflict damage on any enemy units which it touches. If a unit reaches its destination and finds no enemies, it may get lost and wander on the spot. For this reason, I've enabled a more aggressie search mode, so enemies re-locate their target after every hit, even though it means they constantly re-target for now.

There is a surrender button in this demo, so you can always stop the game and return to the map, with any troops you have remaining. Surrendering does not have any other penalties, for now.

Targeting is shown on the map as a large box if you hae debug enabled, which shows the area in which they can see. In normal mode, a line with a small circle is drawn to indicate the target. This may be turned off in the full game, but for now it means we can see when the units are looking and finding targets.

Damage is currently a random number based on half of the enemy total numbers (but without any damage bonus). So if you face 1000 troops, they can inflict a maximum of 500 hit points of damage, but in reality, the number will be random (e.g. 0 - 500). If you face a small unit of 10 men, they can give a maximum of 5 hit points. So as the enemy HP numbers grow smaller, their ability to damage other units goes down along with it. The number of hit points taken away is often printed in yellow above the units as they are hit. So it is says 188, then 188 hit points were taken away from that unit. Once all of the units and half-dead bodies are killed, that unit will be removed from the map. The other units will then re-target other enemies, but this can sometimes not work if the enemies very distant and too far away to target, and in this case they will wander blindly unless you Move the Units manually. This is meant to happen, because units cant see the whole area.

There are a few bugs with the damage system. For one thing, sometimes the numbers for the damage appear in the top left corner of the map during a refresh. I dont know how to prevent this. There is also a bug where a single enemy can inclict damage on x3 friendlies if they are touching, and as this number is random, sometimes the enemy will inflict more damage on the friendlies (and knock them back) faster than the x3 friendlies can harm the single enemy unit, and it wins. I think this will mostly be fixed once the specific weapon type damage bonuses are put in to the game, because these make sure that 100 Spears or Pole Axes will always beat 100 Clubs, etc, and this will enable more of a weighted damage range rather than just random numbers.

Conclusion

So this is just a demo. If you have any feedback or ideas you want to share, please drop me a message. Perhaps something is not right or could be improved. Pay no attention to the buttons and things which are out of place, as these will be fixed. Similarly, there are still plenty of bugs I know of, and some which I dont. But this was only meant to be a demo released for my Birthday, I'm 49. Born 27th Feb 1976.