Hegemonia Q&A Questions regarding Hegemonia

What is the storyline for the game?

The story begins in the near future with the conflicts between Earth and the colonists in the Solar System. The player has to resolve this conflict, then start colonizing the nearby systems. There will be encounters with friendly and hostiles alien life forms. And there will be something behind the scenes as well, the player will of course have to clear this issue.

What kind of goals will the player have to achieve in the single player game of hegemonia?

The single player mode will be mission based and will feature colonizing missions, spying missions and of course missions where you have to fight an alien race somewhere. Sometimes you have the initiative, sometimes you are only driven by the story... Moreover, you have to build up your own career, that is to say that in the beginning you will be a simple captain of the army, and you will raise in ranks as the story progresses and more and more responsibility will be put on you.

What's the maximal size of one player's army?

We are thinking of squads in hegemonia, and their number will be limited, but if you build them from fighters, then there can be battles involving hundreds of ships!

How big will the ships be? Will the players meet some of those super-great capital ships?

There will be big size differences : the biggest ship to ship ratio will be around 20:1, maybe more. (This is way more than in any strategy game up to date).

What is the size of the universe in final stages of the game?

In the whole game, there are around 35-40 solar systems altogether, but you never play in all of them simultaneously. At the latter levels you will play in around 10 systems.

What kinds of things will the player have to manage in order to maintain the space empire in the game?

As we said, we will decrease planet micromanagement in hegemonia. The focus will be on the management of your fleet, planetary defenses, production capacity and of course research. To find the necessary balance between these will be a hard task. We aim for a more simple approach but with some interesting opinions even for the new players.

Can you tell us more of the multiplayer game?

Right on! The multiplayer is going to be very special, with some fields no one has ever done before. We now feel like the first pioneers in space- venturing into the unknown where no one has been before! But seriously, the ideas we have could change the strategy multiplayer gaming forever- and it is too early to reveal these ideas.

Could you be a little more… concrete ?

Ok. First there will be the classic skirmish mode, with lots of customizable parameters. There will also feature a cooperative campaign, in which the players will have to take decisions together. The last mode is the Scenario based multiplayer mode in which you will go through pre-defined conflicts with varying goals to achieve.

What will be so special in hegemonia?

Next to the tactical emphasis of battles, the heroes that you can manage like in an RPG, it will be a massive huge space opera. We have a new spying system idea, that will be put to test, and it will be very intuitive and easy to use- the missions are really cool that are based around it.

What are you the most proud of in this game?

We are very proud now of our brand new 3D technology, which pushes 100.000 polygons 30 fps on a PIII 500 with a Geforce 2. The minimum configuration will be TNT 2 and similar cards. This new 3D engine simply puts most other engines to shame- it took us over a year to realize it. It has so many new technologies built in, its hard to list them all. It has even convinced some major video cards manufacturers who want to use the game engine as a benchmark for their latest device ! I am also very proud of the potential of the game.

What is your goal with hegemonia ?

Our goal is that the players should forget the time and place they are in when playing the game. We want the players to be very much surprised when they look at their watches after wanting to sit down to play a few minutes with this game.

What happened after the release of Imperium Galactica II? Why don't you call your next space strategy game Imperium Galactica III?

Well, Imperium Galactica I and II had a list of distinct features that separated it from the other space strategy games, like Masters of Orion or Homeworld. We placed a larger emphasis on story, we had ground battles as well as space battles, and we offered a lot of varieties and options for the players.

With hegemonia, we decided to start a new series, which has all the best aspects of Imperium Galactica I and II, and is different from these series. We decided to incorporate a heavy dose of multiplayer elements as well as strong single player storyline. This was not possible in a gaming environment, which allows multiple battles to go on at a time (e.g. ground and space battles). Imperium Galactica II has a heritage which we did not want to change or disturb. It seems that Infogrames has sold the sequel rights to Philos Laboratories.