A little bit of everything

Last time around the highlight of the day was a new fat hippo. Now two weeks later I can confirm I’ve probably only seen it in action once, so that was time well invested for sure.  

So while we contemplate whether to increase the spawn rate of hippos, we’ve been working on a few other things. These changes might seem a bit all over the place, and that’s probably because they are. Many of the changes that we do are mainly based upon outcomes of our weekly Wednesday games. It could be newly discovered bugs, reoccurring ones or just random ideas/features that we think might improve the gameplay. 

Many of the changes below are just that. Some changes are however with single player missions (and CO-OP) in mind. Aliens are one of those. Sure, aliens play a somewhat important role in multiplayer games. But in single player missions they are crucial. Therefore we remade the hives, where aliens spawn. The new hives will lead to more predictable alien spawns for the player, and easier to adjust for us while making these missions. 

Next up might just be to make aliens a bit more difficult as most of them get obliterated by an army of tanks. And we can’t have it like that now can we? 

Also, watch out for a first version of a new solo mission coming up during the next week. More on that next time!

Patch notes 527

Buildings

• Remade the logic of tower influencing. A defensive tower will now, as before, convert nearby neutral buildings to your team. It will no longer convert non-neutral buildings to your team if there are other towers protecting them with its influence. 

• Increased the storage size of each inventory slot from 50 items per slot to 100 items per slot. This change affects Ports, Warehouses and chests.

• Increased the damage output of the Gatling Tower (lvl 3 tower) by 50%.

• Fixed an exploit enabling the player to feed houses despite the hero not being close to the house. 

• Stone towers will no longer miss nearby targets. They shoot faster and do slightly more damage than before. 

Aliens

• Added new graphics to alien hives. Hives will now evolve and change color during a game. Default color and difficulty is blue. Blue will evolve into red which will later evolve into black. The color of the hive indicate what kind of alien that will spawn from it. 

Visuals

• Added new visual effects when ships are destroyed.

• Building pavements now disappear when the building is destroyed or deconstructed. 

• New effect when the hero is swimming. 

• Added a few more building alert icons: low ammo, no ammo. 

Other

• Fixed an arbitrage exploit with buying coins on the open market. Issue handled by disabling the option to buy coins. 

• Implemented new explosion sounds for destroyers, rocket artillery & land mines.

• Solved an issue causing ships to sometimes move outside the “map border”.