Story Act 3 + 6 Players Skirmish

Story Act 3 Campaign Missions

The journey continues in 4 new campaign missions. Mutti and his family enter the lands of Babylonia. Can Mutti find a new home in these promised lands? What challenges await them? It is the collapse of the Bronze Age after all, and like any other faction, it hit the Babylonians too.

This looks like fertile lands with the potential to prosper! Have we finally found our new home?

We're very pleased with the feedback from the first two story acts. We took it as a sign that we are heading in the right direction, and so we're aiming to add more of everything you enjoyed so far.

6 Players Skirmish (offline and online)

This is a big one, because it's been requested for a long time (for the first game). Until now, we never felt confident that the performance was good enough on low-end devices for this amount of players. So, for about a year now, we've been working behind the scenes to slowly improve performance.

There is a lot happening in an RTS game. Units moving around, AI making descisions, fog of war updates, visibility updates, etc. All of it has to be optimised to a point where the late-game won't completely derail the experience with annoying performance hicks. Will more players add more strain to your system still? Absolutely. However, the game is now more optimised than ever, and we hope you enjoy the increased chaos more players can add!

As a bonus, we also added the options to pick random map location and map type.

Release date for 1.0

We are happy to announce that the 1.0 will release with the last story act and Map Editor on 6th of November.

Change Log v0.509

New

• Story Act 3 with 4 new campaign missions
• 6 players can play in skirmish offline or multiplayer (up from 4)
• Can pick random map type and random map location in offline and online skirmish

General

• When double-clicking to select villager that is idle it will only select nearby villagers who are also idle
• The food trend indicator only takes into account gathered and consumed food and ignores training and cancelling training of units, trading, etc.
• Reversed individual selection boxes in units view when less than 12 units to always grouping units except heroes instead (per community feedback)
• Room items in multiplayer lobby now shows number of players that can participate and no longer adds number of additional spectators on top of max players (which could be confusing)
• When winning wonder victory the villagers who constructed it will no longer keep playing constructed animation in explore map mode but idle instead
• Tactical Pause overlay close info panel nudges you with a bounce animation
• Tactical Pause overlay close info doesn't show when bottom selected controller hud shows
• Indicators like missing housing for villagers bounce straight away on display to better nudge player, and reset timer for next bounce is reduced
• Health bars, idle indicators and others are hidden at game over
• Changed villager trained sfx
• Changed military unit trained sfx
• Added move sfx to Semiramis' donkey
• Added smooth fade in for advice panels
• Added smooth transitions from menu to game loads
• Added smooth transitions from game back to menu
• Updated idle villager indication
• Updated building production indicators
• Updated health regeneration animation
• Updated militia symbol
• Improved Babylonian wonder sprites
• Improved Egyptian wonder sprites
• Doubled middle mouse button drag camera movement speed
• Adjusted fade in dialogue timing
• Changed desktop icon design

Missions

• Mission 8: you have visibility of Semiramis' vision
• Mission 8: food crates don't show +25 given we get food from Semiramis this mission and food stock shows '-'
• Defne has new animation sprites from mission 8

Technologies

• Renowned Garden has completely changed to: Granaries are upgraded to temple granaries that extend your influence range. Each time a villager delivers food to any building, it adds 2% progress toward a knowledge point.

  Dev Notes: the previous tech was too complicated, too slow to see the effects of it in most cases, spammable and overpowered in other cases, and useless for the AI, so we changed it into a powerful knowledge boost that fits with the Babylonian theme of "bigger population, more power."

  

• Royal Quarries cost 4 knowledge points (from 3)

Balance

• Heavy Axeman has 7 movement speed (from 8)

  Dev notes: the high movement speed for its type made it overlap too much with Light Axeman's role.

• Wall has 375 hit points (from 300), costs 6 clay (from 4) and takes 12s to construct (from 10s)
• Gate has 550 hit points (from 450), costs 15 clay and 10 wood (from 15 clay and 25 wood) and takes 15s to construct (from 12.5s)
• Watchtower has 225 hit points (from 175)

  Dev Notes: the aim is to make defensive buildings slightly more worth the investment of resources and construction time (while ensuring spamming is also sligthly less viable), and force axemen in general to spend more time destroying these, so that siege units become more relevant.

• Assyrian Foot Archer has 14 attack range (from 12)
• Egyptian Archer has 14 attack range (from 12)

  Dev Notes: to further differentiate them from slinger (that has lower range)

• Egyptian Spearman has 150 health (from 140)

  Dev Notes: these are the only "tank-ish" units Egyptians have access to, so we made them slightly better at this role, but they are generally already a very versatile unit for their cost (perhaps the most in the game), and so we don't want to make them too much stronger.

• Egyptian Medicine improves health regeneration within influence radius by x5 (from x2)

  Dev Notes: very underused tech because the impact felt too low, but still don't want it to be too strong in certain cases.

• Babylonian Royal Guard doesn't get equipped with bronze armour in Furnace
• Mutti has 360 hitpoints (from 320)
• Mining is 20% slower
• Hills map type has more hills
• It costs 40 food to trade 10 metal (from 50)
• Granary has 16 vision range (from 1)

Bugs

• Babylonian Royal Guard can be equipped with copper and bronze spear in Furnace
• Fixed wrong pixel values for farm in construction
• Fixed stray pixels and cleaned up unexplored fog of war tiles
• Fixed a rare crash that could happen when Skirmish AI tried to place a resource delivery building at the edge of the map
• Pixel burst on hits no longer render in front of UI indicators
• Shield description applies to War Chariot (that has shield) instead of Battle Chariot (that does not have a shield)
• Fixed a problem that could render unit behind objects like building in a UI scroll section
• Unit no longer renders see through color for world object shadow pixels (like a tree's shadow)
• Fixed color of wonder construction progress bar
• Can place straight wall segments
• Fixed holding over wonder title tooltip showing wrong bonus number
• Clay Pit decreasing fertility of tiles now carries over when saving and loading campaign missions like it does for skirmish
• Fixed aggressive animal vision range checks causing wrong behaviors
• Fixed a pathfinding problem that could cause units to cycle back and forward forever when finding a path to a target building
• Can no longer spam next dialogue hotkey to reset dialogue fade out sequence