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The Alpha 5 version of Birth of the Empires has finally been released in both English and German language. You can find the game download in our downloads section Here and we've got screenshots in our forums, Here.
The most prominent new achievement is that minor races can now build ships in their homesystems (though they can't explore with them yet), thus posing a threat at the beginning's expansion stage of the game.
Several smaller improvements have been made to the galaxy map, including scrollbars that can now be turned on and off via the bote.ini file, and scrolling on the map by holding the left mouse button and dragging the mouse.
Also a really pressing gameplay issue was the lack of bribe resistance. Resistances have now been implemented to stop minors from being bought so easily. A lot of tooltips have made it into the game at various locations, for example when comparing the strengths of ships in your fleet. But beware to trust the pure numbers, as they are modified by a number of factors during combat, such manoeuvrability of the enemy, crew experience, accuracy rates, flight manoeuvres (still automatic) and firing arcs.
Installation and game control hints:
- The installer is multilanguage. The language chosen during installation determines game language during play.
- Moving your mouse above the end turn button activates the options menu bar. Via this bar, you can save your game or open in-game chat, amobgst other options.
- At first start, a bote.ini settings file is created. This file will be located either in the bote main folder or in your documents and settings folder. If it is not created or nowhere to be found, set yourself write permissions for the bote main folder. The ini file allows you to set the ingame difficulty levels (BABY, EASY, NORMAL, HARD and IMPOSSIBLE in capital letters) and several other options for map creation and music/sound.
- Scrolling on the map has been made easier. Instead of using scrollbars (which can be re-enabled in the bote.ini file) you can now have your left mouse button pressed down and move the mouse around the map to have it scrolled quickly.
- Switching systems in the build menu gets easier when you use your extra mouse buttons or cursor left and right.
The BotE-team hopes that you all enjoy the game as much as they had making it! Again, you can find the download in our Downloads Section, and you can view screenshots of the update in the release thread Here.
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