A new community website for real-time strategy gamers has been launched today. It sees the merge of previously separate websites AgeSanctuary (i.e. supporting Age of Empires 3 and Age of Mythology) and DoWSanctuary (i.e. supporting Dawn of War I & II) to form a new community: RTS-Sanctuary.

As part of the launch of RTS-Sanctuary, we have added support for two new games to our website... Age of Kings: The Conquerors and Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty. Every game we support has an automated replays uploader and a dedicated downloads system. This makes RTS-Sanctuary an ideal place to share user-created content with your friends, as well as discuss the latest strategies and developments in our forums.

The merger of AgeSanctuary and DoWSanctuary sees our user base swell to over 90,000 members. We have well over 100,000 game replays in our database, and we expect this number to rise as we welcome new members to our community.

If you were already a member of either of our websites before the merge, your account has been carried forward to RTS-Sanctuary. We welcome any returning members to our community. If you haven't visited us before, click the link below to visit the new website. Please also register if you wish to make full use of the features available on the new website.

Click here to visit RTS-Sanctuary

Apparently, two studios have come from the form Ensemble Studios. Robot Entertainment (which we heard about in the previous news item) and Bonfire Studios. Bonfire Studios' website: http://www.bonfire-studios.com has already posted that they are developing a new game already. According to there website, they have worked on the Age of Empires series (I, II, and III) , Age of Mythology, and Halo Wars. Both Robot Entertainment and Bonfire Studios seem to plan to build new games, though it seems like Robot Entertainment will manage Age of Empires and Halo Wars, as quoted from their press release:

A recent interest in balance changes has been sparked partly by the rumours of the ESO servers future. This news brings the community to wonder whether future blance patches will be released, and questions the future of support for the game.
The result has been an orginised effort to create a fanpatch that will balance the most outstanding issues that cause the game to be unbalanced. A group of experts have been selected to tackle the balancing issues, and discussions are under away at AgeSanctury to create the patch.

Viper has posted a thread at Age Sanctury which will be updated with the progress of the patch and details of any changes planned:

Quoted from the thread 'Fan Patch progress, Updated 26th of September 2008' by Viper:


'"Hello everyone. The purpose of this topic is to keep the community apprised of progress on the fan patch. I'll be updating this as more news come to hand, so look out for those updates"

--------------------------

[25th September 2008]
Fan Patch (hereafter FP) team formed, and private forum for discussion created.
Basic plan formulated for the first patch. It was agreed to make the first patch a relatively simple one to fix the glaring balance issues for India and Japan. Thus the first FP will focus upon those areas of concern.
Balance discussions begun on areas of concern for FP 1.00.'

If you are interested in the proposed fanpatch, then all the details and discussions can be followed here: FanPatch Thread at AgeSanctury.com.

This weeks line-up for the RTS-Broadcast is looking fantastic!

If you have not yet registered at the site then follow the link and sign-up, if you feel like donating then they are working on some cool stuff for the VIP members.