Originally posted on Steam on March 28, 2023. We are catching up on the backlog and will eventually post the devblogs here as they are published.
What is Anvil Empires?
Anvil Empires is a large scale game of conquest played by thousands in a persistent online world. Players will take on the role of an individual citizen and build towns, form empires, and ultimately wage war in ages that last weeks at a time. Wars are won not only through strength of arms, but by having a strong economy and supply chain to feed and arm armies of players. The conflict is fully driven by player actions and takes place in an organic world with no safe zones or artificial barriers to PvP.
While Anvil Empires will share many elements with Foxhole, including a persistent world, sandbox gameplay, mass collaboration, and a "cog in the wheel" player perspective, it will also be very different in other areas. There will be a bigger emphasis on settlement building and the conflict will support an order of magnitude more players, allowing up to a thousand players to march alongside each other on the battlefield.
The World of Anvil Empires
Welcome to Calligo, a land that once birthed an enlightened people who represented the pinnacle of civilization, now finds itself a canvas for bloodshed and conquest. Three desperate alliances vie for control of Calligo’s land and resources.
The industrious Novan Remnant return to long abandoned outposts in a bid to reclaim their lost valour. The displaced Aranic, savage Pagans of the south forced to flee their storm-shattered islands, find hope on Calligo’s shores. The Mirrish, Blood of the Ancients steel themselves with the will of their Calligan ancestors to defend their sacred land from the unworthy.
This isolated continent holds an array of deadly creatures and bountiful features. From craggy highlands, to swaths of verdant fields; North Astria’s dense forests unfurl into the murky mires of Lisinger. The northern mountains of Etenweall are frigid and unforgiving, while the southern islands are home to barren land and fertile soil alike. Dark secrets lie hidden inside Calligo’s primeval mountains, beneath its abyssal seas, and between grains of the very soil itself. Tread carefully, for this land may not be so easy to conquer.
Technology
Anvil Empires is targeted to support a thousand players within a dense battle and many more thousands across a large persistent online world. Many massively played PvP games either support a small number of combatants on the same dense battlefield or a large number of players spread out across a large map. In Anvil Empires, the goal is to support the best of both, with up to a thousand players marching shoulder to shoulder in a dense environment.
To meet these lofty goals, the R2 Engine has been developed from the ground up over the last few years. R2 Engine is a custom server engine that supports up to a thousand players in a dense environment and tens of thousands of simulated and replicated entities in a large world. Several years ago, a real world test was staged with a thousand players in the Battle of Red River tech demo. The current iteration of the engine supports many gameplay features, including the ability to simulate massive dense forests (like the ones in the map below) existing in a local region with a very large number of players in it.
Unlike many general purpose engines, R2 Engine was designed from the ground up to be optimized specifically for games like Anvil Empires. This isn't a miracle technology that "just works", but takes a practical approach to meet Anvil Empire's novel design requirements. The technology will contend with real world constraints like bandwidth and the limits of modern day server CPU performance, but will overcome them by taking advantage of parallel processing, modern day network replication techniques, and application specific optimization.
Pre-Alpha
Anvil Empires will be an incredibly complex game that will require a lot of experimentation and iteration to get right. Like Foxhole, there is no existing blueprint for game design, so ideas must be validated and developed through playtesting in a live environment with at least hundreds of simultaneous players from the community.
To meet this goal, the Pre-Alpha will launch in April which will be used as the platform for further developing Anvil Empires in the coming months. The initial Pre-Alpha will be an early in-development demo, where only a small subset of foundational features will be in place. Many features will be added, removed, or drastically changed throughout the process. The experimentation process won't be without ups and downs, but it'll all be in service of finding the optimal design that meets the goals of the project.
If you have a high tolerance for playing early development builds with bugs and incomplete features, please head to the Anvil Empires Discord to get the latest news on joining the Pre-Alpha. While access will be limited initially, the Pre-Alpha will be 100% free and won't require any kind of buy in to participate.
