Hi Everyone,

We are still hard at work on the AI Kingdoms update. We are getting closer and closer to our public beta phase. Huge thanks to everyone playing the alpha and providing feedback and bug reports - it's been very helpful! We wanted to show some of the latest progress.

[h3]City Building AI[/h3]
The city building AI has undergone more improvements and now can build large, sensible cities with better organization and an inner and outer wall. It also can make composed city blocks: you'll notice the well surrounded by parks in the screenshot below. Of course, still lots of issue to work out but it has come a long way. We wanted also to take this opportunity to introduce Sam Cook who joined the team and has been working hard on these improvements.




[h3]AI Personalities[/h3]
We've been fleshing out the AI personalities and adding more 3D portraits for the AIs. In the latest alpha build if an AI has an aggressive personality it's more likely to get angry with you and also periodically demands gold as tribute. We'll be adding more diplomatic interactions in the future. Here's the next couple of AIs you'll meet:



On the path toward beta for this update we'll be focusing next on improving the AI's ability to mount invasions and defend against you. We still don't have an exact date for the final release of this update but we're working as hard as we can. If you'd like to try the current alpha version, here's how:

• Right click on the game in the steam library
  
• Click properties, then choose betas
  
• Enter 'alphatester123' without quotes into the box, press enter
  
• Choose the newly available alpha-unstable branch