DevBlog: Arriving in Aegyptus

Welcome, governors, to the first of three DevBlogs on our upcoming “Dawn of the Delta” expansion!  Discover the province of Aegyptus, build sprawling cities in its river delta and use the regular floods to your advantage.

Decide to Romanize the local population or support their ancient traditions and deities while dealing with new challenges to your governorship.

In this first article, we’ll focus on the province itself, its distinctive features, how and where to settle and how we set about creating it.

In the second and third article, we’ll introduce you to the new population tiers, production chains, technologies, characters and other features of the expansion.

Let’s get started and visit Aegyptus.

Aegyptus – a land of contrasts

Imagine you’ve only just arrived in this new province, are seeing the landscape for the first time and are eager to learn more about its population, its culture and technology.

Your first impression of Aegyptus will be that of a region blessed by the sun: wide stretches of desert and sandy dunes, small cliffs and rocky hills all shine in the bright light – and comparatively little green is to be seen on first glance.

The second thing you’ll notice is the might river: flowing from the south towards the ocean, it branches widely, creating a river delta with many elongated islands, just waiting to be settled.

Maybe you can spot the ancient pyramids in the far distance, or the port of Naukratis, closer to the ocean.

Accordingly, the province of Aegyptus offers a few differences to the other two provinces:

Not the ocean, but a river now separates buildable areas. While this means you’ll still need ships to transfer goods, the “islands” are closer to each other. The elongated shape of the different landmasses can still add to the travel time of ships, however.

We also differentiate between river and ocean (in the far north), with the river not only having a flow direction, but also slowing down the heavy Roman ships you’re used to. For travelling the rivers, you will want to use the new Aegyptian ship types – more on that in the next blog.

The province can also only be entered from one direction – north – which requires you to make strategic settling decisions based on location, building space and fertilities.

Building space is somewhere between what you have available in Latium and Albion.

Each “island” is separated into three zones: Floodplains, Farmland and the Arid Zone. More on that in a second.

Finally, you will need to keep an eye on seasonal floodings in the area near the river.

Island areas – Farmland, Floodplains and the Arid Zone

Let’s assume you sailed a little bit upriver and found a nice little place to settle. What are these three areas we just mentioned?

Right at the coast is a stretch of green with grass and trees: the Farmlands are useful for agriculture and the only place to build your harbour. The biggest area right next to the river are the Floodplains which get regularly flooded and impact the production of buildings placed in them. Finally, going further inland you’ll cross into the Arid Zone, where nothing grows (for now!) but where there’s plenty of space to build cities.

To give especially that last zone the right mood, you’ll notice the occasional small sandstorm. We had a ”snow drift” effect from before that we could re-use, and actually already used in a modified way for the ash rain in “Prophecies of Ash”.

“For Aegyptus, we gave it a visual update. Besides that, our artists created completely new particle effects. And our engine already provides a large set of ambient parameters with which artists were able to give Aegyptus its hot, desert feeling.” – Frank, Expert 3D Programmer

The limited Farmland will be the zone for the agriculture at the beginning, growing dates, oats, and later also grains like for example wheat or barley. Ultimately, you’ll reach the limits of what this zone can supply and will likely have to create more fertile land – at the cost of the Arid Zone. This is where irrigation mechanics come into play, more on that in the next DevBlog.

The Floodplains are located right next to the river and can be used for a variety of purposes, like harvesting valuable mud and reed to turn into sun-dried bricks or growing wheat and barley for bread and beer. The fertile mud increases the production of buildings in the Floodplains but be aware of the flood season!

Finally, the Arid Zone does not support agriculture (not without irrigation, at least) but that makes it the perfect place to build your cities. On these vast, and mostly flat, stretches of land you will want to build residences, public service buildings and – of course – your Governor Villa. To save valuable fertile space, it’s also a good idea to place your production buildings here – plus, you may profit from useful area effects, as you’re already used to from the other provinces.

Connected to the Arid Zone are cliffs and smaller mountains, ultimately limiting your building space. On the plus side, these cliffs usually have mountain slots to mine valuable ore or rock.

River islands can have Floodplains and Farmland on both sides if located in the river, with the Arid Zone in the centre of the island; however, some larger ones are also split by a mountain. There are also buildable areas on the sides of the river (“valleys”), those only have one coastal strip but have a larger Arid Zone compared to river islands.

The river, of course, is omnipresent (like the ocean in Albion and Latium) and your way of transporting goods from A to B. It flows from south to north – which impacts the speed of your ships – and ultimately flows into the wider ocean. It could be worth having a trade hub here so that your ships don’t need to travel all the way upriver to load or unload the goods that are being shipped between provinces.

Behind the Scenes with Level Art & 3D Programming

Creating an entirely new province always brings in plenty of work for the 3D Programming and Level Art teams; to give you a bit of a look behind the scenes, we talked to our Expert 3D Programmer Frank and Senior Level Artist Simon.

For the 3D Programming team (often also called RnD team by us), a new province means a need for new render features, like material shaders for the very different landscape features including bright rocks, lots of sand and – of course – the river.

“We helped our level artists by giving our material shaders a visual update: We improved sand lighting and added a subtle sand glimmer effect. A much larger challenge was the province landscape itself: Aegyptus features a big, continuous surface. Our game engine, tools and render engine are optimized for individual islands located in ocean. But Aegyptus presents players a single terrain surface with river meshes placed in between. In a large team cooperation, we had to develop a completely new workflow pipeline for our level artists while ensuring that typical engine stuff like data streaming still works correctly.” – Frank

The Level Art team approached creating the new province by essentially dividing the region amongst themselves, each part being (mostly) worked on by one Level Artist each. This was possible this time around since the overall province layout is not as random as Latium or Albion which are both made up of “normal” islands in a wide ocean.

“For Dawn of the Delta we did not want the province to look and feel like just another archipelago but rather have the feeling that you are in fact now sailing on a river delta. We quickly realized that random island distribution would not work here and opted instead for a more static connected terrain that better supports the feeling that a river carved its way through the province towards the sea.” – Simon

The above-mentioned river was another topic for the team in itself: We did indeed use the existing river tech here, only the very northern part of the province is technically an ocean. The small rivers you know from Latium are neither wide nor deep enough for ship travel, of course, so, additional work was needed:

“We already had some basic support for modifying the water height but additional work was needed for proper ship placement. Shaders also needed an improvement, as the river can easily cover the whole screen now. To an extent, we were able to re-use existing shading features from the ocean tech, but had to carefully adapt them. In Aegyptus, the river waves are much more diverse. Wind gusts on the water surface provide a less uniform look when watching along the river. And we added a whole bunch of new shading parameters to support different river appearances for the dry and flood seasons.” – Frank

As usual, the Level Art team also put a lot of time into the various smaller settlements and outposts you can find on the map, as well as the smaller details and slightly hidden part – or, as Simon puts it:

“For the explorers brave enough to venture out into the sands, there might be some things to discover.”

Your first settlement in the river delta

We talked so much about the land and the river, don’t we want to settle somewhere before we end the blog?

Knowing more about the different zones now, we picked this island here, in the north of the delta. The first population tier are the Threshers, local Aegyptians whose main focus is agriculture.

To satisfy their need for public services, we built a Firepit (which gives +1 Population and +1 Belief), and then built a Date Farm in the fertile Farmland to provide some food. The Date Farm requires trees in its vicinity to function.

When starting to build in Aegyptus, you’ll also immediately notice that you won’t require wood: instead, you’ll have to produce the aforementioned Mud Bricks from reed and mud. Both are produced in the Floodplains; this is also where your people can collect beads to create Wesekh Collars, fulfilling the need for fashion.

That’s only the first step, of course, and you’ll not only want to increase the number of Threshers soon but also upgrade them further – and decide if you want to Romanize them or not. However, that’s a topic for the next blog post.

It’s important to note that Aegyptus can serve as a starting province when setting up a new game, or can be explored in any existing savegame with the DLC enabled. Accordingly, inter-provincial connections can be a great boon for your Empire: turn Aegyptus into a breadbasket while, for example, importing luxury goods from Latium back into the province.

Next blogs and the pyramids

So much for the first of our three DevBlogs: the next one will release on October 22^nd and go into more detail on the population tiers, the topic of Romanization, production chains, technologies and the flooding and irrigation mechanics.

The “Dawn of the Delta” expansion releases on November 5^th on all platforms.

If you want to watch a teaser for a topic we’ll cover in our third blog… then have a look at the trailer below which premiered at the IGN Fall Fan Fest this week: it will give you a first look at the pyramids and which role they play in “Dawn of the Delta”, as well as simply more video scenes from Aegyptus.