As the keen-eyed among you may have already noticed, earlier this week Chapter 2 of the Día de los Muertos event unlocked, and the End Conditions Patch for the Fabius Maximus Update released. We're sure many of you have already delved into the challenges and changes, but for those who have not yet had time to look into the game, we've prepared a summary.
Día de los Muertos Chapter 2
On Tuesday we kicked off the second chapter of the Día de los Muertos event! If you complete all three challenges in this chapter, you will earn two more symbols and another border decoration, and if you have also completed Chapter 1, you will earn the Catrina avatar to use in game! Here are the challenges you can complete until the end of the month:
- Necropolis: As the Maya or the Aztecs, sacrifice over 30 population to complete a construction.
- Army of Darkness: As a Militarist Culture, use the Iron Reserves ability 4 times in the same Era.
- Civil Evolution: Enact 50 Civics across multiple games.
End Condition Settings
With the patch released today, you can toggle individual end conditions and tailor your experience to your desire. Want to spend more time playing with the powerful bonuses from endgame technologies like Exosuit? Want to go to Mars without prematurely ending your game? Turn off that end condition. Looking for a particularly aggressive game that only ends once only one empire remains? No problem, just turn off everything except “All Empires Eliminated.” You can even turn off the turn limit and pollution threshold (though not its effects), so your game doesn’t have to end unless you want it to.
Military Balancing
This patch also includes a major balancing pass on military units. While most of these changes are focused on costs, upkeep, and resource requirements, there were some changes to Combat Strength or abilities as well. Overall, this should create a smoother progression across generic and emblematic units, and avoid some oddities in upgrade paths our players have been talking about. Here are some notable examples of changes:
- Swordsmen (and Shotelai) no longer require iron, to allow all players to have some up to date units in the classical era
- Roman Praetorian Guards now unlock with Standing Army and replace Swordsmen (you can still build Swordsmen if you have no iron)
- Javelin Throwers and Noble Javelineers have had their Combat Strength and ability improved
- Mortars now upgrade into Siege Artillery so you no longer lose indirect fire capability along the upgrade path
- Howitzers gained some Combat Strength and upgrade into Helicopter Gunships for direct fire support
- Cossacks are now stronger than Dragoons
- Mongol Hordes have increased Combat Strength to fare better against the common Pikemen
- Siege Elephants, Gajnal, and Varangian Guards lost a lot of Combat Strength to end their undisputed battlefield superiority
- Cruise Missiles and SOMs now only costs a fraction of a Multirole-Fighter
You can find the full list of changes in the patch notes. We hope that these changes will lead to a clearer, more satisfying progression of warfare across the eras of the game.
A Little (Digital) Extra
We've heard a lot of praise for the Día de los Muertos variant of the Humankind art we used to promote this event, and quite a few requests for a wallpaper version. So, we've put together various formats of this art to use on different devices and profiles, which you will find on your Games2Gether rewards page starting next week.
Hope you'll have fun with the new challenges, end conditions, and unit balancing!
- The Amplitude Team