Lead a barbarian kingdom to glory during the final days of the Roman Empire. An empire builder by Jon Shafer, designer of Civ 5.
Hello! I'm Jon Shafer, founder of Conifer Games and lead designer of Civilization V. I'm very excited to share with you all my latest project: At the Gates, a historical turn-based strategy title for the PC.
At the Gates is an empire builder similar to Sid Meier's Civilization. Starting with a small tribe, you must explore the world, exploit its scarce resources, and eliminate or outsmart potential enemies. The game starts simple but grows in complexity until you command a mighty economic and military powerhouse.
Over the course of a single game your tribe will migrate to more lush and bountiful lands, conquer and barter with other clans, work alongside the Romans, learn from them, and finally destroy them. Along the way, you'll need to master the art of war and craft cunning plans to strengthen your kingdom - all while enduring the worst mother nature can throw at you!
Probably most of the graphics are placeholder at this point.
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The art style is solid, but there's a significant amount of polish work we'd still like to do. Portraits have been completed for only one out of the ten leaders. There’s zero animation work done for either the units or the landscape.
Dont construe them as them redoing major gfx, but who knows. The premise sounds fun(Especially the winter mechanics) but unless this gets released to something mobile the graphics and art style dont cut it for me.
At the Gates interview with Civilization V designer Jon Shafer
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Civilization V designer Jon Shafer has come down from the mountains, into our frozen world, to reveal At the Gates. To develop it, Shafer’s new studio, Conifer Games, is asking for $40,000 in funding on Kickstarter. Check out the video above for an overview of the game, then dive into some finer details in our interview with Shafer below.
Let's take a look at the first year (24 turns) of gameplay in At The Gates and see how things are shaping up! Along the way we'll check out the new watercolor art style, clans system, economics, seasons, and much more.
NOTE: Footage from an early alpha version made on October 16th, 2014.
Last edited by WhiteBarbarian on Fri, 3rd Apr 2015 04:30; edited 1 time in total
Dunno... Sounds iffy. In one of his previous posts he clearly suffered from some mental problems mentioning all kickstarter funds are long gone, but he is selling a car, a house and going thru pension savings cause he is the kind of person that doesn't need all that And then he disappears for almost 4 years and suddenly now the game is ready for release
EDIT:
- All development updates are gone from the site
- All Forum's posts are purged
i do have to admit its good he released, not like many other kickstarter vaporwares, just his communication was abysmal, yep i kickstarted this for 25 bucks i think , the only kickstarter that almost didnt come trough that i backed, was pretty lucky out of my 10 kickstarting endevours with 10 out of 10 delivered
Weekly Update #4 - Asymmetry, Factions, and Victory
Welcome to the fourth pre-launch weekly AtG update! Every Sunday afternoon a new article will go up, and each week will have its own theme. This past week our theme was asymmetry, and you can follow along with future (or past) daily updates on Twitter. You can also check out previous weekly updates here.
Your starting location can be very different from game to game.
Roguelike Asymmetry
One of the biggest differences between AtG and nearly all past 4X strategy games is that AtG has fully embraced an asymmetric single-player approach. Similar to the roguelike genre, every playthrough will vary in difficulty and feel thanks to being unpredictable in terms of the terrain, climate, resources, and clans you'll strategizing around. This isn't a game with a smooth, predictable arc from start to finish. You'll have to adapt strategies, and some starts will just be a bit unfair. This isn't the kind of game for everyone, but that's part of what makes AtG unique. The goal wasn't to build a game for everyone. The goal was to make something new.
That said, I've added some normalization to ensure the first few games are always pretty close to the middle of the road, just so new players have a chance to get their feet under them. After that the training wheels come off though and there's no telling what you'll face. I still get excited every time I start a new game, just to see what the procedural world builder has in store for me. This is a game with a truly immense amount of replayability, and I think it's why even I as its designer still really enjoy playing it. Every game is different, and I'm still constantly trying out new strategies. That's pretty incredible after working on this thing for almost 7 years now.
This was only possible though because I was willing to forgo including any sort of multiplayer mode. If your objective as the designer is to ensure a balanced experience for a symmetrical set of players who you all want to have an equal chance of winning then you're really binding your hands. Don't get me wrong, playing a strategy game in multiplayer can be incredibly fun (I have literally thousands of hours of Civ MP under my belt), but it changes how you're able to design the game.
Sure, maybe in a theoretical world where there was no such thing as opportunity cost and you could work on something forever you could make two completely separate game modes that were optimized for each, but in the real world you have to make compromises. Give one player a gold deposit and start another in Greenland and you have a recipe for a game that feels really unfair in multiplayer. In single-player though? That's part of the whole point of playing. It's certainly possible to have asymmetric-but-balanced starts or factions, but that requires a huge amount of design and balancing work.
Add that to the large amount of work required just to get MP functioning, let alone how it warps how you develop the game (make sure you send everything via messages!) has meant that my decision on day one to forgo multiplayer was clearly the correct choice. Future games? Who knows. But for AtG being single-player-only was the right move.
Factions
Another element AtG borrows from roguelikes, Binding of Isaac specifically, is how the factions work. In BoI you start with only a single character and unlock more as you play. Your original character is pretty vanilla and provides players with the "base" gameplay experience, whereas all the others are basically interesting variants distinct in one or two important ways. This adds still more replayability to AtG's already-robust foundation there. Purists will want to always play the Goths though, as the game was basically designed around and for them, whereas Attila starting with a powerful Horse Archer and being unable to own structures is very much not how the normal game plays.
The way you unlock new factions in AtG is either by conquering their capital or forming an alliance with them (the latter being quite difficult now, but will become less so after diplomacy is fleshed out in a future post-release update). This gives the factions an "achievements with actual meaning" feeling, something I also really like in BoI.
Factions vary dramatically in strength and strategy.Cerdic starting with a Galley makes for a fun, unique early game.
Victory Conditions
There are two ways to win in AtG: conquer the capital of either the Eastern or Western half of the Roman Empire, or replace the emperor peacefully by sending five clans to Rome fully-equipped as new Roman Legions, after which you can take over the army and declare yourself in charge. The former is obviously a military victory condition, the latter an economic one.
Similar to the rest of the game the difficulty of meeting each condition will vary quite a bit from playthrough to playthrough. If you start incredibly far away from the Empire off in some corner of the map your path to the economic victory condition will be far easier than marching an army through several hundred kilometers of winter snow.
It should also be noted that AtG isn't a "race" like other 4X games. You're not competing with any other factions in the game also trying to win, and many of your neighbors will start off stronger than you'll ever become. AtG is more like a Paradox game where part of your job is the navigate between the big fish as you try to enact your strategies. They won't always be the smartest on the battlefield, but even so if the Romans ask you for a favor you might want to pay close attention.
Can you replace Rome?
Next week I'll be sharing some stories behind the curtain of how AtG has been made. It's been a long road, and as you might expect there have been both a lot of both ups and downs. We're not quite to the finish line yet, but it's close enough now that I don't mind looking back at the journey a little bit.
You can follow along throughout the week on Twitter, or check back here next week for a new article.
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And then he disappears for almost 4 years and suddenly now the game is ready for release 
, the only kickstarter that almost didnt come trough that i backed, was pretty lucky out of my 10 kickstarting endevours with 10 out of 10 delivered
