Hi again,
This is the first update for Fire & Maneuver since launch, "General Improvements." A rather dry name, but there have been adjustments to every single part of the game, we didn't gear this update toward one specific thing. We are going to try to do weekly updates for you guys and communicate with you every step of the way leading up to full release. Next week we hope to add in the animal cosmetic system, work on the buggy melee system, add in historical scenario battles, and importantly, add in an interactive tutorial along with an advanced nested tooltip system. A lot to look forward to!
Update 1.1 has been released this week alongside Patch 1.0.4 which you can read about here: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1679290?emclan=103582791470379479&emgid=5154949827504636802
Balance Changes
- Units with 3 cohesion are 5 points cheaper, this means that militia and the Union/Confederate volunteers are slightly more affordable.
- Efficiency now increases a unit's price by 5 additional points, making Prussian and Confederate infantry slightly more expensive.
- All modern artillery (Prussian Krupps, British Armstrongs, Russian M1867s) now have a 2 limit, we are not happy with players taking an army of artillery and putting themselves into the corner of a map so this is a band-aid solution to this problem. In the future we will be adding an objective-based game mode which should prevent people from camping in the corner. Until then, we kindly ask our players to play fairly and properly engage your opponent without employing tactics that make the game unfun.
- US/CSA cavalry now have carbines as their default weapon in both the early period and late period, which is more historically accurate.
- Austrian Line Infantry now all come with the "Melee-drill" perk. We felt like Austria felt too vanilla and similar to France. The melee-drill for all Austrian line infantry helps reflects the Austrian "Stoß Taktik" or "Push Tactic" of the time.
- Austrian Hoch & Deutsch unit given "Melee-drill" instead of "Range-drill." This means Austria has no units with "range-drill" and therefore can't rely as much on mass-equipping the superior breech-loaders to pick off enemies.
- 3 Speed units are now cost 10 additional points. We've found light cavalry has been too dominant in the Quick Match "meta."
- 2 Speed cavalry is now 15 points cheaper. We've found that players often times completely ignore heavy cavalry in favor for light cavalry which is much harder to predict. In this game, prediction is one of the most important skills and heavier cavalry are much easier to predict than light cavalry, so we believe the price cut should make them a more attractive option.
Fixes
- On the lobby list every match displayed it's map as "map" and not the actual name.
- Movement lines/arrows weren't appearing on hills and cliffs making it difficult to properly maneuver.
- Swapping reserves was completely broken and would also flip your unit backwards.
- The advanced options menu was not available in battles, only on main menu. Now you can properly adjust your graphics even when in a fight.
- A bug which gave units bonus movement speed when orders were cancelled has been fixed.
- Changing formation and then cancelling the formation change will revert your movement speed to the correct amount instead of setting it to the incorrect amount.
- Players sometimes experienced a bug in which cancelling orders simply broke on the order card, and we believe this has been resolved.
- On occasion the client's (non-host) orders would get thrown out without reason and we believe we've fixed this issue.
- If you alt-tabbed out of your game while selecting a nation your mouse would duplicate thousands of times and we believe we have fixed this issue. If players find that you can still break the mouse, we'll get it patched first thing next week.
- The formation button should now automatically update to the unit you have selected.
- You can no longer put cavalry/artillery in a formation by selecting your infantry first and opening the formations tab.
- The chat in lobbies is now working.
- Some settings were being reset upon confirming on the options menu, which is no longer the case.
- The camera spawns for the Overland campaign are now correct.
- The corps text headers for the Overland and Peninsula campaigns are now correct.
- Some spell-checking has been done in the campaign mode.
- Some troops were spawning in with sabres-only in the campaign mode when they were given rifles, this is now fixed.
- Some troops on the unit cards weren't properly holding their weapons when assigned a new one, this is now fixed.
- Quick match can't be selected more than once, this was previously queueing people into multiple quick-match sessions.
- Players should no longer be joining empty lobbies in quick match.
- The load button on campaigns was displaying the wrong saves.
- Players can only equip the sharps-rifle to sharpshooters in the campaign.
- Regiments with 0 men left should now properly dissolve.
- The campaign casualty system has been overhauled and now yields more realistic and consistent results. Auto resolve still needs some work though...
- Administration policies in the campaign would randomly reset.
- Some players weren't experiencing the victory screen on the tutorial scenario, which is now fixed.
- The campaign portraits showed the wrong generals for Overland.
- Commas are now correctly displaying to merit amounts.
- Players can now replay the tutorial battle from the main menu under "learn tab."
- Fire-at-will mode should be more consistently firing but work still needs to be done on this firing mode.
- Leaving/rejoining lobbies has been stress-tested and improved. Previously there were issues with players leaving, coming back, switching slots in a room, and doing so repeatedly.
Quality of Life
- Unit cards now have blue and orange pips above their health/cohesion bars. The blue pips symbolize how many maneuver orders that unit has remaining, and the orange pip represents how many fire orders that unit has remaining. When all orders are spent, the card will darken. This makes it much easier to tell at a glance which units have yet to receive orders.
- Percentage to win numbers are now: 60%, 75%, 80%, 85%, 90%. Previously there was an option for 25% kills to win which confused players who thought that they'd win once the enemy had 25% forces left, when in reality it meant the game would end once someone lost only 1/4 of their men.
- Some hotkeys added. R,F,C now quick select the options for fire at will, firing, and charging. T,G,V now quick select the options for swapping reserve, moving, and changing formation. We will be improving hotkeys and making them rebindable in a later update.
- If the player doesn't have any factions unlocked they can no longer access quick match/custom match menus and will instead be repeatedly prompted to select their 3 free factions.
- When selecting a unit in reserve it will darken the firing buttons making it clearer to players that reserves can't shoot.
- UI now completely darkens when no unit is selected.
- An info panel has been added to the armory which informs you how to use it.
- While in a melee players can no longer select firing buttons and formation buttons.
- There is now a filter for password protected games on the lobby list.
- There is now a filter for Steam friends on the lobby list.
- A timer now appears on Quick Match letting you know how much time you have before the match launches.
- When a weapon is equipped it now plays a sound to confirm you've equipped a new piece.
- All UI now darkens during execution phase making it easier to tell the difference between the two phases.
- Server region added for Asia.
Content
- New Dynamic Game speed option which is now the default way to play. Dynamic game speed makes the first few turns have instant-animations and then slows down the action when the two forces engage. This way setting up troops for the first few turns is much quicker. The dynamic game speed will be improved with time and become smarter so that it can speed up turns toward the end of a match when few units are remaining as well.
- Quick Match now has random map selection which adds more variety. Seasons are also randomized.
- Quick Match time period is randomized, some matches are early exclusive and late exclusive.
- New historical 2v2 map "Antietam" for owners of the American Civil War DLC.
- New fictional 2v2 map "Delta."
- New fictional 1v1 map "Frontier."
Graphics & Optimization
- Players now have the options to turn off shadows.
- As previously stated, the advanced options menu can now be accessed while in battle.
- Unusual lag on the lobby & faction selection screen is gone.
- Players can turn off "advanced sprite layering" which reduces GPU usage.
- UI elements are batched when going into the battle which helps everyone's FPS.
- Added a Confederate Snake animation.
- Added a Union Eagle animation.
- Tabletop texture remade, now it's not blurry.
- New lighting update which makes foliage match their environment better and improves lighting across the map as a whole. This will continue to be improved, in some cases the foliage can be far too bright still.
- The time of day was set to very early morning it hard to see on maps, we've fixed this and set it to a later time in the day. Dynamic time-of-day has been temporarily removed so we can work on it more.
Known Issues
- Spawning on Antietam puts your camera at the wrong area and spawns troops backwards. Will fix asap.
- After playing on quick-match some players will experience trouble hosting a lobby, this will be fixed asap. For now, the player must restart their game.
- Charging is buggy when it includes more than 2 units on a tile, we will be setting aside an upcoming week to overhaul this system.
- Tooltips are still unhelpful, the nested tooltip system will be added very soon.
- Hard cover damage is inconsistent.
- Players can't add more than 1 AI in a match.
- Hotkeys need improvements and rebinding. We will allow players to remove the WASD camera controls.
- Ready button UI needs to be moved somewhere more obvious.
- Some invisible unit issues after melees.
- Units crossing bridges look ugly when not in column as they spill into the water, will fix.
- The scenario battles we tried to add in in this update are not displaying on the map and the locks are still displaying on the map even if the player has the country unlocked. These issues will be fixed soon.
- The tutorial needs to be made interactive, we hear you!
- Players aren't able to put cosmetics on their animal avatars. This has been disabled since launch and we decided to hold off on finishing it until the game was more stable. Hopefully next week we can get that feature in along with another round of bugfixing and polishing!
- Delta map has some visual bugs that'll be fixed shortly.
+ General bugfixes, UI, polishing tasks...