Kickstarter

Mark your calendars: Epicinium's Kickstarter campaign launches on November 1st. That's just two weeks from now!

Epicinium is a strategy game with fast, simultaneous turns that drastically reduce downtime. Players balance firepower and resources, as the victor is scored for how much nature remains when the dust settles. The environment influences economic growth and troops, and neglecting it may cause severe weather effects.

If our Kickstarter campaign is successful, we will be able to breach the last stretch of development that includes trying out new units and game mechanics, reworking and rebalancing existing units, building the singleplayer campaign, and making the game even easier to read.

The full game will feature:

• A number of finely tuned unit types, including a new transport unit;
• Multiplayer battles with up to 8 players, free-for-all or in teams;
• Ranked and unranked matchmaking modes;
• An adaptive AI that learns from your strategies;
• A singleplayer campaign with a striking story about tough choices and conflicting interests, written by Loulou Swarte;
• A dynamic soundtrack that adapts to what's happening on screen;
• Separate open-source release (C++) for modders, LAN-ers and tinkerers;
• A well-documented API for writing your own AIs;
• Easy-to-use map editor.

There are a lot more features we would want to add (cough nukes? cough), which will include as stretch goals in the campaign. Look out for more information on that as the Kickstarter launch grows nearer.

The developers, hard at work preparing to shoot the Kickstarter video

If you'd like to keep up-to-date, you can join our community on Discord, or subscribe to our mailinglist via our website.

Fire and Ice

To make sure Epicinium looks the spiffiest it can, we have made lots of visual improvements in beta version 0.30.0. For example, we've animated the logo on the main menu screen.

We saw a lot of players struggling with the large volume and unpredictable placement of Firestorm, opting to keep their units safely inside for the entire Summer. In combination with Frostbite during the Winter, this caused some games to stall out for longer than intended. Therefore Firestorm now specifically targets flammable tiles such as Grass, Forest and Trenches tiles, and the total number of tiles that suffer from Firestorm each round has been significantly reduced.

To make it extra clear which tiles players should be avoiding if they don't want their units to take damage, we added visual indicators for damaging weather effects such as Frostbite, Firestorm and Gas.

This version also introduces lighting effects near gunfire or explosions, and a spotlight on the active unit in the Action phase and on tiles and their surroundings in the Night phase.

Speaking of lights, we have made it more prominent when a building gains or loses power. For instance when a tile is occupied, the lights in its buildings are dimmed to indicate that the tile cannot carry out orders or generate income.

We are currently inviting active community members on our Discord to join the closed beta. Come say hello!