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Aspyr Media has announced that Sid Meier's Civilization V: Gods & Kings, Firaxis Games' expansion pack for the award-winning Civilization V, is now available for the Mac in North America and will be available internationally on June 22, 2012. The expansion "takes players from founding the first Pantheon of the Gods and spreading religion across the world, to deploying spies in enemy cities to steal information and technology, and much more."

“Sid Meier’s Civilization V: Gods & Kings coming to the Mac and the Mac App Store day-and-date with the PC release is great for Civilization fans,” said Ted Staloch, executive vice president of Aspyr Media. “Gods and Kings is the ultimate Civilization V addition, and we think fans and newcomers both will enjoy the rich new content’”

Developed by Firaxis Games and brought to the Mac by Aspyr Media, Sid Meier’s Civilization V: God & Kings takes players through time as they engage in new quests and global competitions, interact with new types of city-states, and master exciting new systems for land and naval combat. Nine new civilizations, each ruled by a new leader; nine new wonders; three original scenarios; and dozens of new units, buildings, technologies and resources have also been added, offering even more ways for players to expand their empire on their quest to rule the world.

Key features include:

• Expanded Epic Game: The core game experience has been greatly expanded with the addition of new technologies, 27 new units, 13 new buildings and nine new Wonders;
  
  
• New Civilizations and Leaders: Gods & Kings features nine new civilizations, each with unique traits, units, buildings and leaders;
  
  
• New Game Scenarios: Three new scenarios let gamers experience the medieval period, the fall of Rome, and embark on a new adventure in Empires of the Smoky Skies, a Victorian steampunk scenario;
  
  
• The Return of Religion: A first for Civilization V, players seek out Faith, choosing a Pantheon of the Gods and creating Great Prophets to found and spread their customized religion across the world;
  
  
• World Domination: The fight for world domination is more dynamic than ever. Gods & Kings features a reworked combat system and AI that places more emphasis on a balanced army composition. Additionally, the navy is now split into two different ship types, melee and ranged, making coastal cities vulnerable to a surprise naval attack;
  
  
• Enhanced Diplomacy and Espionage: Establish embassies at foreign courts for closer ties or clandestine operations. As the religions of the world start settling in and the world moves into the Renaissance, spies can be unlocked to establish surveillance of foreign cities, steal advanced technologies from your strongest competitors, or garner influence with City-States through election rigging, or even a coup;
  
  
• City-States: Two new city-state types have been added, Mercantile and Religious, adding new gameplay to a greatly expanded quest system to further the narrative of the game and making diplomatic victories more challenging.

To view more of the game check out the pictorial first look available at GrogHeads.

Aspyr Media

Civilization V: Gods & Kings

GrogHeads: Civ V Gods & Kings First Look

Buy Civilization V: Gods & Kings

Bioware's Dragon Age Legends is now available as a single player title. Originally a Facebook game, the adventure has been repackaged as a free Adobe Air application and will soon allow players to download their old characters as save game files for the new version.

Enjoy this epic, free RPG adventure game from BioWare. Battle demons and darkspawn with your friends, earn loot and build the ultimate castle.

Updates to Dragon Age Legends:

Dragon Age Legends is now a downloadable single-player game that replaces the online social game previously available on Facebook and Google+. Several updates have been made to the game to make it an interesting and entertaining solo journey! The main changes are: Energy limits have been removed, so you can play for as long as you want, you no longer need Friends or Guilds in battles and raids, and everything in the game can be purchased using Gold.

Online Characters:

If you have played the online version of Dragon Age Legends on either Facebook or Google+, you will soon be able to download your character as a Saved Game and continue playing in the single-player game. We are gathering all the data now and it will be available within a few days. Check back soon for instructions on how to download your character from the online game!

System Requirements:

Adobe Air 3.1: http://get.adobe.com/air/

OS: Mac OS 10.6 or later. Windows 7 32/64, Vista 32/64 SP 2, XP 32/64 SP 3

Processor: Intel Atom 1.8GHz, Core2Duo 2.0GHz - i7 or equivalent AMD

Memory: 1GB or higher

Hard Disk Space: 240MB

Dragon Age Legends

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Sinister Design has posted a new blog post about development on Telepath Tactics. Set in the world of the Telepath RPG universe, the turn-based multiplayer tactics game will feature support for up to six players in hotseat mode, a new art style, redesigned UI, and a new combat engine.

Telepath Tactics hotseat mode is pretty close to being feature complete, mechanics-wise. The game now has full support for custom attacks, custom battlefield objects, custom items, and custom tilesets; Last Man Standing and Capture the Flag game types; highly customizable match rules; competent AI opponents; working music and GUI sound effects with independent volume sliders; a clickable mini-map; random item drops; elevation; status effects; environmental hazards; swimming; bridges; object creation and destruction; a full-featured map editor; support for player-created maps; etc.

There are still a number of things I need to add before I can call this done, however:

• Diplomacy. A feature is in the works to dynamically form alliances with other players and demand tribute in the form of collected items. It’s not mandatory, but I really want it in there. Political machinations fit really well with the setting and overall dynamic of the game.
  
• Team matches. 2 vs. 2 and 3 vs. 3 matches need to go in. I’m not as excited about these as I am about the dynamic alliances, but I recognize that people are going to miss this feature if it’s not in there.
  
• Inventory management. Characters can grab, carry and use items, but that’s the extent of it right now. I’ll need to add in a function to drop items and transfer them to other characters.
  
• Character animations. These are in progress (see below), but are in no way complete. Once the artist has finished creating their animations, I’ll need to code an animation system into the game.
  
• Character sound effects. Once the animations are in-game and working, I then need to sync up sound effects to character actions (footsteps, attacks, and so on).
  
• Voice acting. I’m going to keep things simple for this one: grunts and death cries, mostly.
  
• Character portraits and GUI art. There are no character portraits in the game at present, and all the GUI art you see is placeholder. That needs to change.
  
• Internet multiplayer. I started working on this feature before, but I’ve put it on hold so I could polish and fix bugs in anticipation of showing the game at various festivals and events (where everyone is going to be playing in hotseat mode anyway). Internet multiplayer is still going to happen, but the aforementioned bug fixing and polishing takes priority for now.

There’s also the possibility of a single-player campaign. I’ve been asked about adding one several times now. Right now, I’m focused on making this the best multiplayer game it can be, so while a single player campaign will be a nice bonus if it makes it in, it takes a back seat to the game’s core focus.

Telepath Tactics June 2012 Update

Telepath Tactics

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Stoic recently updated its website with new information about the company's upcoming strategy role playing adventure game, The Banner Saga. The update includes a new art blog on the design of characters for the game as well as a five part lore section now available on the game's site.

The Sketch

We start every character (Re: class) with a sketch phase where we try out different looks and styles. What's this classes job in combat? Are they heavily armored or are they a damage dealer? Since we've set the Banner Saga in a low fantasy setting it's important to us to make a viking look like a viking, not some random fantasy barbarian with huge shoulder pads and spikes and...whatever. Keeping every class looking like they could exist in a real world is the major motivating factor behind each design. Here's the final sketch of the Axeman, which eventually became the Backbiter, one of the upgraded, or promoted versions of the base Axeman.

The Combat

The next step is to take the sketch we've got and design it to be used in-game on the combat board. Even though the combat design is, in this case, different than the sketch you can see the similarities and the reason for doing a sketch phase previous to this. You may wonder why we didn't do a larger, more detailed phase before this, but the way a class appears in combat is of the utmost importance to us. I've kept the details in his design simple, not just to help time estimates during the hand animated process, but also because I believe this is in keeping with what I see in the older animated movies. I favor burly beards and macho mustaches on my vikings so I went that route for this guy. Since we're using an animated style it's important for us to use colors that aren't garish, but rather a bit desaturated to go with our real world approach. We throw the concept onto our game board and see what he looks like in context with all the other classes. It's very cool and rewarding for us to see all the classes in our game on some big combat board all sized correctly and posed next to each other to see how they interact with each other visually.

The Banner Saga: Character Art Design

The Banner Saga: Lore Section

The Banner Saga

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