Hello Steam !
This new update comes in a little early because of a crash that has been occuring that needed urgent fixing. That crash started occuring when the engine was updated in v2.2 for unrelated reasons and went unnoticed until recently.
Be assured that the whole team at Metaphore Games is being violently slapped with slippers as punishment.
The aforementioned crash is occuring in the engine code which I cannot fix on my end, I have however been able to identify its specific location and thus, setup a work around. In this build you will not see cities and battles in the minimap and as well as in the new endgame replay map feature (real bummer, was quite fun to watch after a game !).
Fear not for this is only a temporary solution, and as soon as a new version of the engine with a fix for this is available there will be a new build that enables it back. I hope you all understand and agree this is the best solution at this time. The team at Unity is very responsive and I have high hopes this will be sorted out quickly.
Now about the meat of the update
It comes with a grand 32 new achievements listed bellow ! (and yes typing those labels was quite fun)
There's also as mentionned a replay map shown on the game over screen so you can see what everyone has been up to during the game. This feature is not fully implemented for MP clients yet.
WotA is blessed with really great musics from Thomas George Music aka @TLATWuk on twitter. He his a great artist, very listening and involved, I hope you all appreciate his work !
When selecting an army, you're finally going to see which one it is you selected.
Frontiers and colonizing tiles visuals now benefit from a new see through improved shader, it respects transparency of the base texture allowing to preserver width of the frontier and properly show the color of each player in the of frontier shared with another player.
And there's more all listed bellow:
Gameplay
(achievements will be posted later today)
- New achievements: Four Stars General 1 to 4, gather lots of troops in a single army
- New achievements: Troop Hoarder 1 to 4, total troops created throughout all your games
- New achievements: Land Lord 1 to 4, biggest territory size in a single game
- New achievements: Cern Scientist 1 to 4, win with as many technologies as you can (level 4 will be unlockable in a future update)
- New achievements: Pro Roulette Player 1 to 4, win against the AI as many times as possible
- New achievements: Social Hacker 1 to 4, win against other players in multiplayer as many times as possible
- New achievements: Mukbang Streamer 1 to 4, highest upkeep ever reached in a game
- New achievements: Iron Man* 1 to 4, Win the game with as much food upkeep as you can (*as in a regular, legit, man made of iron, not some popular IP with my favorite character and that I have no right to use, obviously)
UI
- Added on the gameover screen a map showing the full replay of the game, can be speed up, paused, resumed and also browsed using the progress bar underneath
Sound
- New (awesome) musics from Thomas George Music, @TLATWuk on twitter
Visuals
- Moved atmospheric clouds that were in the center of the screen to the side
- Now showing a visual over selected army troops !
- Updated the selected tile visual to somewhat match with the selected army one
- New improved see through shader for frontiers, respecting the base texture transparency in see through parts, making frontiers remain at the proper width and also with accurate colors for both frontiers in case of neighbouring with another player
- More relatable visual for the army colonizing tiles visuals, also uses the new see through shader instead of being fully overlayed (no longer shows up above clouds yet is well visible through forests)
- Slightly increased camera shake range when erosion occurs since it seemed no longer effective
- Tweaked defensive forts materials to be more in harmony
Performance
- Lowered vertices of ocean in intro scene to work better on lower end hardware
- Now using a merged version of the crops model when completed to spare draw calls compared to the "growing" version
Bug fixes
- Fixed show mp invite in SP option off by default and not saved to playerprefs
- Fixed food 3 tech icon
- Fixed engine time not stopped when in pause menu in SP so that animations and other relevant systems being stop visibly moving
- Fixed case of city menu not closing when target area is no longer owner or is destroyed
- Fixed improper behaviour when an army colonized tile with an occupying army, it was leaving both armies on the tile instead of merging it
I also want to sincerely apologize for any inconvenience that crash issue may have caused you when trying to play over the last few days.
As always, thank you so much to everyone providing feedback. Feel free to join us on Discord, Twitter or the hub here on Steam !
_met44
