The game seems to do well, I'm running it on Vista and had no technical issues with it. I played the original when it first came out and I was surprised at the similarity. (It didn't seem much different) the problem with the original, was that it got boring very easily.

How do you upgrade your buildings? How do you get more labor force?

Are these things not available in the Alpha?

Welcome to the forums. MOE will be here soon to answer your questions better than I can. In brief we will be improving and expanding on all aspect of play.

Hey Admiral, welcome to the forums!

Since you're referring to the Alpha and not a specific game, I first need to ask you which game you are referring to - Supremacy or Birth of the Empires.

If you're talking about Birth of the Empires, you'r going to need to talk to Malvoisin. I don' really know much about BOTE and haven't played it since Alpha 3. (:ahem:)

If you're talking about Supremacy though, that's where I can help.

To upgrade buildings, you have to meet two requirements: you have to build at least one of the lowest level building in the first place, and you need to meet the tech requirements. The tech requirements in Supremacy are different to BOTF - this is for realism reasons, rather than simplicity reasns. For instance, in BOTF, to upgrade a food facility, you just needed to research Biotech. In Supremacy however, you need to research Biotech, Construction, and Energy; but as in BOTF, the research screen can still be accessed via the right-click menu. Once research has completed in a particular area, a notification box will open with a little summary of the new things you can now build.

Once you've built and met the research requirements, upgrading is the same as with BOTF - just click on the upgrade to put it in the build queue, then wait for it to be completed.

As for getting more labour, that's the same as BOTF; you feed your people and you wait for them to have babies. The population totals in Supremacy are starting to look smaller than they were in BOTF. Unfortunately, there is no way to easily increase the populations because the programming that decides such things is surprisingly complex. I've already suggested to Mike (The developer, aka Mstrobel) a couple of ideas on improving the situation, but he says they are either unworkable, would take a long time to implement for relatively little change, or simply would have such a massive impact on game performance that he dosn't want to implement them. So you're just going to have to wait i'm afraid...and make sure you feed your people.

That's why I made a video lately .