'Phoenix Rising' Major Update — AVAILABLE NOW!

Royal greetings, kings and queens!

Sound the horns — the long-awaited major update ‘Phoenix Rising’ is finally here! Join us for a lengthy preview of the changes and the patch notes!

Gaze upon the trailer and see if you can spot everything the update has to offer. And then come back to learn the details!

Our first stop is the biggest change in ORX since its inception — specialisations! Fierce, Resilient and Cunning — the three pillars of the new system. In short, it’s as if Rock-Paper-Scissors went a bit extra and had a lot of explosions.

All offensive buildings and units now fall into one of these specialisations:

• Fierce — all about that brute force, and they can break through the most resilient defences. However, that can be too primitive for the cunning rogues;
• Resilient — focus on survival tactics and building mass, and won’t even shrug under anything, but the most fierce attacks. Although, when faced with fierce e;
• Cunning — they’re the ones who outsmart the fierce, but dim-witted brutes.

This doesn’t mean that you are forced to play Fierce buffs only on Fierce units, however. Just like always, it’s a good idea to play something Fierce to grant more damage, or Resilient to buff survivability. However, these buffs would prove most useful when played on units\castles of the matching specialisation.

This is because we’ve also made major changes to how the stats and scaling work in the game. Now there are 3 major attributes — Strength (STR), Vitality (VIT) and Dexterity (DEX). Each attribute serves as a parent category for the already existing stats like health, damage, defence etc. And instead of raising one specific stat, you now buff the attributes, which, in turn, buff everything related to them. You will also find that most of the buffs and attacks now show a scaling formula — while we don’t expect you to constantly calculate everything, it shows which major attribute you should raise to increase the potency of the effect.

All of this might sound complicated, but trust us — when you follow the Rock-Paper-Scissors rules, and keep a healthy diversity of cards, this system feels natural to play! And don't worry, we did our best to smooth out the difficulty curve, so you can have a fair chance at learning the new systems. Of course, this still would be the case if not for a slew of smaller additions supporting this change, so let’s talk about those next.

First of all, now ORX keep pouring from the portals throughout the entire night. However, the day will break regardless if you kill them or not! You still need to kill all of the ORX that spawned that night in order to complete a wave, of course. But this definitely raises the stakes, as now you can easily get overwhelmed if you don’t lay your cards right!

Secondly, missions now vary in map size. Depending on their difficulty, they can be tiny, normal or gigantic. Now you can’t just sit back and let your castles dunk on weak ORX, because you’ve had an entire map to build your uber-castle. When you have less real estate, you start to think how to make the most out of it. You’re also incentivized to build smaller castles, as the giant ones get a penalty to their stats depending on their size.

Thirdly, we’ve introduced Spirits — useful buffs that spawn randomly on unoccupied tiles at the start of the mission. Collected by placing a tile over them, they grant a number of useful buffs, ranging from extra gold to a free tile placement, and more. We hope that they’ll make each mission more exciting on a basic “cool to think about placing tiles” level, and also help you kickstart your defences!

Finally, you have less to worry about when you’ve just begun your adventure. We’ve added “normal” villages, which substitute the elemental ones until you’re ready. There are fewer villages in the missions, and they’re placed closer to the centre of the map. And you can take them back, if you defeat all of the ORX guarding them during the day! The ORX themselves are much simpler in normal missions too, and you will face a great challenge only if you’re looking for it in the Elite missions.

There are now also only upgrade vaults present in the missions, so you have more chances to upgrade your cards, while not getting too many cards that might clog your deck. Aaaand, you also have two Campsites in each act, which provide another opportunity to remove an unneeded card.

However, the main reason why you shouldn’t be afraid to experiment and dip your toes into tough missions is, of course, the almighty Revive button. When you lose all of your Main Buildings, a new button will greet you on the defeat screen. By paying a price in accumulating extra corruption, you will get another chance at fighting ORX — keeping all of the stuff you’ve built!

And honestly, there is SO much more to this update, that we could spend a whole day talking about them. Just to name a few, without extra details:

• Updated UI and card designs
• Various stat changes
• Updates in-game logic
• Branching event choices
• Plethora of new additions to the Global Map (Go read our previous devlog for a preview on that!)
• Brand new cards and updated effects

But we think the best way to experience Phoenix Rising is to see, play and feel it yourself. So go play it! It’s available! Probably even already installed, while you were reading this.

And absolutely let us know what you think about the changes and what you’d suggest next. Tell us here, in the comments, post on the Steam Discussions, write to us on our official Discords. Don’t just keep it to yourself!

PATCH NOTES

General Gameplay Changes

• Added Global Campaign Map
• Added major attributes — Strength (STR), Vitality (VIT), Dexterity (DEX)
  • Spread all of the existing and new stats to fit under STR, VIT and DEX
  • Introduced Haste stat — it affects either the length or the cooldown for all abilities

• Introduced active abilities to the game. Now most effects come from active abilities.
  • Changed basic attacks into active abilities. This doesn’t affect them visually or otherwise, but it does change how they’re considered by the game
  • Added scaling off of major stats to almost all abilities

• Changed the night and day cycle to be static and closely follow the timer
  • Added a button to force start the next night

• Slight changes to how armor and defence work
  
• Small rework of stealth and reveal mechanics
  
• Introduced branching events. Now some of the event have multiple choices and change their narrative according to player choice
  • Introduced ambushes. You can be forced into a mission with unique modifiers as a result of specific choices in some events

• Introduced Spirits — useful buffs that spawn randomly on unoccupied tiles at the start of the mission.
  • Discount Spirit — refunds the cost of the tile placed to get the Spirit
  • Gold Spirit — generates +10 delayed gold when picked up
  • Hand Spirit — adds +1 card slot to your hand
  • Mason Spirit — the card played to place a tile here doesn’t lose a charge
  • Initiative Spirit — adds +1 to your Initiative (redraw charges)
  • Future Spirit — allows to make a single-use copy of any card in your deck. This copy expires at the end of the mission
  • Necromancy Spirit — allows to pick a card from the discard pile, restore all of it’s charges and place it on top of the draw pile

• Introduced building and unit gold buy-out for instant restoration
  
• Changed unlock condition for card slots in shops — they now require Dark Crowns
  • Introduced Dark Crowns — special currency used for unlocking card slots in shops. You can get them from Elite missions

• Boss encounters at end of act now drop unique artifacts.
  • Essence of Ferocity — +15 strength until dawn
  • Essence of Resilience — +1 card capacity to your hand until Night
  • Essence of Cunningness — +1 passive gold rate until Night

• Added Neutral Villages — villages without any special element.
  
• Introduced Village reclaim — kill all of the guarding ORX during the day to dispel Dead Soil around the camp, and then reclaim the village by placing a tile adjacent to it.
  
• Mission wave count and difficulty rescaled depending on map size.
  
• ORX now prioritise the closest village to the player.

Rune Guardians

• Changed Rune Guardian starting relic to allow the Main Building heal 1 object at a time
• Introduced Structural Integrity debuff — castles start accumulating stat penalties once they become larger than 12 tiles
• Changed Rune Guardian starter deck
• General cost of cards from levelling up rescaled
• All castle parts now provide STR, VIT, DEX stats that increase from levelling up a castle part.
• Added new random artefact ‘Super Monolith’ which increases structural integrity of the castles
• Separated all Warrior upgrades into their own separate categories: Militia line tuned to Fierce to work with better with STR attribute, Spearmen line tuned to Resilient to work better with VIT attribute.
• Reworked Spearmen and gave them the ability to walk
• Reworked Farmlands and the Village to grant gold on placement and then every 90 seconds
• Reworked Voidwalker to grant STR buff
• Added Razor Tower — shoots arrows and reflects damage. Scales with VIT
• Added Healing Tower — fires a continuous healing beam a target at the closest target in range

Dune Reavers

• Added starter relic that increases health of all friendly units and buildings for every gold coin earned over maximum gold capacity.
• Introduced ability inheritance for units spawned from a house with said ability
• Introduced 3 new Housing types
  • Fierce — +10 STR and armor shred
  • Resilient — +10 VIT and armor
  • Cunning — +10 DEX and multihit chance

• Dictates now grant abilities
  
• Most dictates reworked to interact correctly with STR, VIT, DEX
  
• Palace now additionally increases amount of warriors in all current camps
  
• All cairns reworked to interact correctly with STR, VIT, DEX
  
• Reworked bonuses from carpets and gardens in relation to bazaars and caravans. In short - bonuses are more impactful.

Boreal Nomads

• When a Boreal picks up a treasure, it generates 7/15/25 delayed gold (depending on treasure tier)
• Boreal warrior is now Resilient spec. Lots of defense and base armor that scales well with VIT. Weapons now give opportunity to scale into more damage or more knockback and defense.
• Boreal archer is now Cunning spec. Weapons now give opportunity to scale into more AoE damage with increased multistrike or into a corrosive hard hitting arbalest.
• Boreal mage is now Fierce spec. Weapons now give opportunity to scale into a devastating chain hit staff that pierces all defenses or into a wand that generates a fast hitting ray that works well against solo enemies.
• Added special fence with stealth reveal ability
• Added a contract with stealth reveal ability
• Contracts, bastions, holidays and runic circles now grant abilities

ORX

• ORX now spawn in smaller waves at start of the mission, but ramp up significantly closer to the end. 'THE END IS NEAR'-style.
• New ORX type — Zeppelin. Flying ORX with considerable firepower
• Changed ORX with torch to be a skin for the ORX Warrior, instead of being a separate ORX type
• New ORX Commander — Cannoneer. A formidable foe, piloting a very crude robot
• Implemented patrolling AI for ORX guarding the village
• Distributed all ORX into the three specialisations — Fierce, Resilient and Cunning
• Elemental Villages now attract elemental ORX from the start of the Night

User Interface

• Global UI visuals and UX rework:
  • In-mission UI
  • Global Map
  • Events
  • Tooltips
  • Tutorials
  • Menus
  • Fonts
  • Cards

• Added visual indicators for the villages and if they’re targeted by the ORX that Night
  
• Added visual indicators for Big Ben and ORXmas Toys events
  
• Added Day and Night indicator and clock
  
• Added a multitude of hover tooltips for a lot of elements
  
• Added hover tooltips for the stats listed in the unit\building info window
  
• Added gold cost tooltip near the cursor when repositioning a military camp
  
• You can no longer reposition units when viewing their info window
  
• On Alt+Tabbing the game will be set to mute and become paused

Visuals

• Introduced attack animation synchronisation
• Final Boss now spreads Dead Soil under it
• Small improvements to explosion visuals
• Added light beams to the victory\defeat screen
• Added armor damage VFX to Towers
• Added selection highlights to Towers
• Vastly improved visuals for laser beams

Bug Fixes

• Fixed Low Graphics option not auto-activating for older hardware
• Fixed damage display for Laser Tower
• Fixed random wave indicators appearing at the end of the current mission
• Fixed Wizurbv totems receiving more than 1 damage per attack
• Fixed wrong cards getting highlighted when hovering over an empty tile

DISCLAIMER While bug fixes section might look underwhelming, this doesn’t mean that we didn’t fix much. On the contrary! However, since this update features a lot of major changes, it also made bugs from the previous systems almost nonexistent — as the systems themselves became obsolete. We do expect that new bugs can arise, however. So please, don’t forget to report them using our Google.Form, messaging us over at Discord or posting on Steam Discussions Report a bug

Congrats! You’ve reached the end of this post! We’ll use this opportunity to once again thank you for your support, and encourage you to share more of your ideas and opinions about the game. Because at the end of the day, ORX is made for you!

This major update is also the first in a giant effort to transform ORX into the best version of itself. Stay tuned for more previews and devlogs detailing the upcoming changes. But first of all, we’re going to re-evaluate our release timeframe — expect an update on our Roadmap soon!

May the Aurus guide your hand, queens and kings! Until next time!