News Archive - Nov 2002

I-ChallengeU is running a new Emperor contest, Leantimes, a population contest, for December.

As the mighty river constantly changes its course, so does the population fluctuate up and down. For many years you were able to farm these lands and gather great quantities of resources. The riches of this land are still available to the daring, but many workers have long since given up on farming this area because the markets are no longer readily staffed. So much food has gone to waste, and now you must try to provide for all of your citizens with the few skilled market and mill workers left.

For those citybuilders who would rather play in Greece than China this month I-ChallengeU are also running a Poseidon contest, The Armories.

Angel Park mailed me a rather interesting link. If you look at the lefthand column, you'll see a 48 Hour Madness special offering you Emperor for $19.90, 30% less than the regular street price.

What are you still doing here?

Do you like the Emperor music? The Emperor musical composer Jeff Van Dyck, who has posted on our forums as Nozehed, and also composed the music for Medieval Total War and Shogun, has a site DNA Multimedia Audio that you should check out. As well as some background information on Jeff and his company you can download MP3's of some of the Emperor music so that you can enjoy listening to it outside the game. More MP3's from Emperor are also available from MP3.com

Currently HeavenGames has two user databases, one which covers the Citybuilder (Emperor, Zeus, Pharaoh and Caesar3) and Age of Empires Heavens forums and another which covers all our other forums and the Emperor Heaven downloads section. Within the next couple of months these two databases will be merged which should make things a bit simplier for us.

To facilitate this it would be helpful if members who are registered with the same login name on both databases could ensure that both accounts have the same email address. This will minimise the number of accounts that we have to manually merge. Thanks in advance.

It's been a while, but the City Builder sites have decided to increase their staff count once more.

We'd like you to welcome someone most of you will know from his designing of fiendishly clever and difficult scenarios. As such he will join us as, how shall we put it, Contest Cherub. With his help we'd like to go back to the days when we could offer you the odd City Builder Contest.

Please welcome Granite Q as the latest addition to an excellent team. Anyone wishing to congratulate him can do so on the forum in this thread

Gobi Bear has replied in this thread in the Game Help forum about the strange figures the number crunchers were getting when trying to work out Food Farm production numbers. It seems we can look forward to the harvesters getting larger baskets in a future patch.

"1. Irrigation is working fine for single-crop farms and sheds (tea, lacquer, raw silk, and hemp).

2. There IS a problem in the harvest cycle for the Farmhouse. That is what is causing the inconsistent results that Pecunia first identified. The problem is not in the irrigation, fertility or iron age calculations. Those work fine. Rather it seems that the harvesters are not bringing out large enough baskets!

If a harvester visits multiple tiles before returning to the farmhouse, there is an overflow (okay in the code itself, not his/her basket) and all of the harvest from that worker is not credited back at the farmhouse. The problem wipes out much of the benefit of irrigation since irrigated farms produce more (and thus have more of the crops "spilt" on the ground by this bug).

Rest assured this will all be addressed by us. The farms were balanced so the current volume of farm output IS what we intended ... the benefit of irrigation is what is being compromised. We will rebalance everything so irrigation has its intended bonus effect going forward."