What's next for Hegemony III - Development Preview

[penelope.uchicago.edu]

[en.wikipedia.org]

I’ve been promising a post about what’s next for Hegemony III for quite a few months now, but keep getting pulled away by the millions of little things that come up everyday at a small dev studio. As we’ve mentioned in a few posts, there’s still a lot that we’d like to do with the series and one of those ideas has been slowly coming together this year while we’ve been working on a separate little side-project . I was hoping to have a little more to show on this before we made the news public, but I think you guys have been waiting long enough.Continuing in our long tradition of profiling the lesser-known figures of the Classical period, the subject of the tentatively titled, Hegemony III: Taker of Cities, is the Macedonian King and one-time “god” of Athens, Demetrius I of Macedon, also known as Poliorcetes “The Besieger”. I won’t get into all the historical details since you can can get those yourselves from Plutach or wikipedia , but he was son of Philip’s general Antigonus and a brother-in-law of Pyrrhus, and spent much of his adulthood sailing around the Eastern Mediterranean liberating and besieging cities from Athens to Cyprus before eventually getting locked away in a palace in Syria and drinking himself to death.Like Pyrrhus, Demetrius’ career was filled with “great successes, and great reverses” as Plutarch would say, but what drew our attention as something that would expand Hegemony III was his command of one of the great sieges of the Classical period, the Siege of Rhodes (305 BCE – 304 BCE). During this year-long battle, Demetrius developed a wide range of innovative siege engines from giant battering rams to spiked booms that could blockade the harbour. Most notably, he built a 100+ foot tall bronze-covered siege tower known as the Helepolis or “Taker of Cities”, which was eventually melted down after the war and forged into one of the most well-known landmarks of the ancient world: the great Colossus of Rhodes.So, what does this mean for the next DLC? As you can probably guess, the theme of the expansion is siegecraft and we’re working on host of new siege equipment including towers and catapults as well as new types of fortifications and siege-related skills. We’ve also got a new stand-alone map of the island of Rhodes expanded to the scale of Sicily on the base map, so that there’s more room for fortifications and even bringing unit to fight inside the city.We’ll also planning a historical campaign based around the siege, plus the usual selection of new units and factions, and a cool new monument feature so that you can build your own Colossus and other monuments to your victories. And of course, all of the siege advancements will carry back into the base game and will also be available in your favourite mods.The next big question of course is when will it be available? Given my poor track record on predicting release dates, I don’t want to hazard a guess on that one yet. But, once our other project wraps up early next year them we should be able to move more resources to Hegemony and get a better idea on the time.So to sum it all up: Yes, there is a new Hegemony III expansion and its coming sometime next year. Its focus will be siegecraft and it will have a new stand-alone map and a historical campaign based on the Siege of Rhodes by Demetrius I of Macedon.Thanks to everyone for continuing to support the series after all of these years and, while you’re waiting on us, make sure to check out some of the awesome mod content available over in the workshop.