Catching up

Long time no see friends! Last time I made an update/patch post we were talking about a new map generator. A few months have passed since. After we felt that the map generator was up to a good standard, we continued to work on improving unit handling. 

Making the units move and attack in a more proper manner is of the utmost importance for the game. It’s hard to think of more annoying things in life than spending a good hour or two building an empire, just to see all of your troops piling up into a perfect straight line, march right into the ocean and watch your opponent’s navy blast them all into smithereens. Good times. 

Instead of making this a regular event, we want to make sure that the units behave more independently. The first way to accomplish this was separating a “move command” from a “attack command”. Ordering a unit to move (mouse right click) anywhere on the map will result in an attack command, meaning they will engage any nearby enemy. Double left click will instead result in the units ignoring hostiles and moving to the intended target. Still in progress but I would estimate that 60% of the time, it works every time. 

Apart from improving the units, our short term focus is finalizing the first two campaign mission maps and challenge map, both single player and CO-OP. 

Below you will find a shorter summary of a few things that have been added during the last weeks.

Patch notes summary 535-547

General

• Aliens will no longer attack the NPC trader’s buildings.

• All players can now see which items the NPC has available for trade (highlighted in green). 

• Minimap now shows buildings, hills, coasts and fertile soil.

• Hills are finally back! Units and buildings have increased range when placed upon hills. 

Units & buildings

• New building: Factory. Will replace the forge when making higher level items. Also supports one additional worker.  

• Increased the HP of all buildings when upgraded. Making it a little slower to destroy opponents cities.

• Remade the tank and added a new model. The turret can now rotate 360 degrees and will, similar to the destroyer, adjust the turret depending on its target. 

New tank model, inspired by the German Tiger Tank

Game Modes

• Rebalanced the “challenge mode”. This includes alien difficulty, starting items & trade demands. 

• Added three levels of player/team handicaps in multiplayer: Easy, medium and hard. Difficulty settings affect starting items & tech costs. 

Graphics

• Unit markers are now bigger and should be more visible.

• New graphics for the tank unit. 

• Fertile soil is now easier to spot. 

• Fixed an issue causing buildings built upon hills not to have pavement graphics.

Sounds 

• New footsteps sound when walking on swamp and desert.

• New sounds: underwater explosions.

• Added sound when throwing grenades and molotovs. Also added a bounce sound. 

• Remade the ambience/working sound of the forge.

Other

• Pressing “P” while in the building menu will no longer pause the game.