EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT 0.1.0

Hello Stormgaters,

Before we begin, we want to let you know that some of the biggest upgrades we’ve been working on will be coming in future updates. For example, you won’t see major progress on our campaign missions in this update, but work is happening behind the scenes and includes things like updated dialogue and facial animations for our in-engine cutscenes. You may notice some light testing of these facial animations in this build if you decide to revisit those early campaign missions, but most of the work is yet to be done, and we don’t expect our campaign mission improvements to be ready for prime time until 2025.

We are also actively working on performance and optimization. This work will continue throughout Early Access and beyond. Some hardware configurations and situations will see improvements before others, but this will be an ongoing effort.

Now, it’s time to present Stormgate’s first content update, 0.1.0!

In this build you’ll find all sorts of new things to play with. Whether you’re looking for a new Hero to try out, or maybe a new Versus map to play, we’ve got you covered!

Just a few of the things coming in this update include:

• New Celestial Hero
• New Versus Map
• Visual Upgrades for Maps and Terrain
• Weekly Mutation Challenge
• Amara Glow Up
• Customizable Hotkey Modifiers
• Improved Observer and Replay UI
• Improved Pathfinding
• New Spooky Boneyard Custom Map
• Balance Updates and Designer Commentary

Support:

How to Install the Update on Steam:

• Open Steam
• Click on Library to see your games list
• Click Downloads at the bottom of the Library window
• If the new build does not download automatically, click the Download Now button to manually download the new update

How to report a bug or provide feedback on the latest build: https://playstormgate.com/feedback

Still having trouble? Visit our Stormgate Help Center.

Help us out by leaving a review over on Steam: bit.ly/stormgate

Please Note: As part of updating this latest build, replays made on previous builds will no longer function.

Looking for balance notes? Check out the Balance update: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2012510/view/6977853536156285133

Build Spotlight:

New Hero - Kastiel

We’re introducing a new Celestial Hero in 0.1.0, and his name is Kastiel, the Orphan of Wintros. As the ruthless and amoral warrior-Regent of Arkhos, there is no hope in escaping his Nethersword. Devoted to the pursuit of victory at any cost, Kastiel abandoned his people's traditional reverence of Animus. He now drives the Sovereignty of Arkhos towards a secret, heretical objective–the collection and weaponization of Animus in order to destroy all his enemies. Be it through his will, or at the end of his lethal blade, the culling has begun.

Everyone can play Kastiel for free, with progression capped at level 5. Players who purchased the Ultimate Early Access pack on Steam or the Ultimate Founder’s Pack on Kickstarter or Indiegogo will have Kastiel’s progression fully unlocked and don’t need to purchase him again. Players who don't own Kastiel can fully unlock his progression (including his unique Gear) from the in-game store, or purchase an Ultimate Early Access Pack on Steam, which unlocks Kastiel’s progression as well as lots of other playable content and cosmetics.

Kastiel represents quite a twist to Celestial gameplay taking a page from the Infernal playbook:he absorbs Animus from fallen enemies to power his abilities and to charge up his signature Arcship variant with its Soul Cannon.

These are Kastiel’s core abilities:

• Darkfire: Kastiel charges towards an enemy ground unit or structure and slams it with his shield for 100 damage.
• Soulblade: Kastiel ignites his Nethersword, gaining 40% attack speed for 5 seconds. His attacks with Soulblade deal 80 damage in a cone in front of him.
• Cull the Unworthy: Kastiel sacrifices a target unit (his own or an enemy’s), restoring 33% of his maximum health and 10 energy per supply of the unit. Kastiel also gains 4 stacking bonus damage per supply cost of sacrificed units until he dies. The Cull the Unworthy buff stacks up to 100 (and up to 200 by level 9) accruing more and more bonus damage as well as earning +5 bonus armor for every 50 stacks. Targeting one of his own units decreases the cooldown on Cull the Unworthy by half. The cooldown on this ability is dependent on the current health of the targeted unit.
• Firefall (unlocked at level 5): Kastiel channels for a second before warping up to the fleet above and rocketing back down to Earth in a column of dark flames. Upon impact, the ground around him explodes, dealing 200 falloff damage in a large area of effect.

In addition, Kastiel’s affinity for Celestial vehicles means the Vector and Saber cost 50% less to produce. Conversely, Kastiel is not known for his subtlety, so Celestial scout and caster units, the Cabal, Animancer, and Scanner, each cost 25% more to produce.

One of the coolest things about creating new Heroes is when we can create signature units that modify the standard faction tech tree and powerfully impact how the army feels to play.

• Kastiel has a special variant of the Kri called the Kuzuri, which is stealthed while out of combat. Kastiel begins with a single Kuzuri at the start of each game. The Time Repulsors upgrade makes it so the Kuzuri can’t be slowed.
• The Eradicator is Kastiel’s variant of the Argent. Its Polarized Shield protects the Eradicator while it’s above 50% health, reducing incoming damage by 20%. The Time Shift upgrade creates a time-altering vortex at the target’s location. This field slows the movement of enemy ground units that pass through it for 2.5 seconds.
• The Arkhos Arcship variant can unlock the ability to Harvest biomass at level 8, which turns trees and corpses into resources. Each harvested tree grants you 20 Luminite and each corpse is worth 20 Therium, which seriously shakes up his approach to resource gathering compared to the baseline Celestial army.

Progression with Kastiel is your path to unlocking several powerful new passive abilities that you’ll want to take advantage of.

• If you’ve ever enjoyed repelling an all-in attack with a well-timed Sovereign’s Watch, you’ll love upgrading it to King’s Watch at level 2 and casting it on Kastiel himself. It also removes the requirement for a targeted structure to be near a Collection Array to bring the heat.
• At level 3, he becomes a Cascade Conduit, emanating a Cascade Field around himself at all times.
• Kastiel is a thirsty guy and his bases tend to also want unlimited juice–Insatiable Power (unlocked at level 6) increases Power output by 25% and also makes it so that Collection Arrays can build Prisms.
• What does a Celestial vampire do with Animus? Well, he channels some of this energy into Animus Shields that protect friendly HQs, and even diverts some gathered Animus into the Animus pool of his signature Arcship variant, the Arkhos Arcship. This extra protective barrier extends to friendly units through his Guardian Barriers, which grant a shield that blocks damage from one attack or spell every 60 seconds.
• Kastiel’s Cascade Flex grants a pair of helpful bonuses within Cascade Fields: Link Nodes construct in 1 second when created within a Cascade Field, and Eradicators, his signature Argent variant, power up their weapons twice as fast.
• At level 10, Kastiel earns the Spectral Warrior ability, which allows him to create a ghostly clone of any Hero, including its abilities, passives and weapons, which is yours to command for 30 seconds.

For those of you who enjoy the customization options presented by our more advanced progression Gear system, check out some of the fun unlockables Kastiel can offer. (Did you know that unlocked Gear can be used by your other Heroes as well?):

• Mass Production: Mech units cost 30% less, Bio units cost 10% more. Units with both tags split the difference.
• Maximum Control: After capturing a Creep camp, spawn starting units for all allies.
• Resilient Defenses: All units gain +25% Health and cost +1 Supply

When we increase the level cap for Heroes, all Heroes including Kastiel will be able to unlock even more Gear options for this system. We hope Celestial players enjoy what Kastiel brings to the battlefield!

Weekly Mutation Challenge

For fans of Co-op play, we’re adding Weekly Challenges! These challenges come with a unique set of conditions, giving 3-player Co-op teams a chance to earn big XP boosts by tackling new, exciting scenarios each week. Think of it as a way to keep things fresh while earning serious rewards. We’ve revamped our XP system in other ways too, to help make Co-op progression feel better.

Some of the challenges you may encounter include:

• Energy Infusion: Allied units have +100% energy regeneration.
• Gotta Go Fast: Allied units have +50% movement speed.
• Infested: When any unit dies, it spawns an enemy Fiend.
• Infantry Assault: Every 2 minutes, an enemy Barracks spawns somewhere on the map. Kill it before it unleashes a devastating attack wave.
• Ready to Blow: When an enemy unit dies, its corpse explodes after 1.5 seconds.
• Reconstructed: When an enemy unit dies, it resurrects two seconds later with 50% health, movement speed, and attack speed. #Zombies.
• Speed Kills: All enemy units have +50% movement speed.
• See and See: The Fog of War is disabled for ALL players (including enemies!).
• Swift Assembly: Allied players have +100% construction speed.

New Versus Map - Furious Resolve

We’re adding a new versus map to our rotation called Furious Resolve. It’s a macro-based map with four random spawn locations where each player has access to three highly defensible bases. The center is fairly open to handle major battles and the reward for claiming it is a Siege camp that’ll help turn the tide in your favor.

Visual and Lighting Update to Environment

After listening to all your feedback, we have done a visual pass on the environment of our maps. We have made several changes, including updating many of the terrain textures. Lighting angles were also changed to make the terrain more readable and pop. This accentuates the normal maps and helps add shine to the terrain.

Amara Character Model Update

Amara has received a glow up! Based on community feedback, we redid the proportions of her entire body. The head was re-molded and retopologized to properly support facial animations. This includes the addition of eyes, teeth, and a tongue! New texture and shader pass finishes off the head styling. The hair was remade from scratch to read better from a closer camera. Last, but not least, animations were created or edited to support the new body proportions.

Although “new Amara” will now be the model used throughout gameplay and in our in-engine cutscenes, she will still temporarily remain as "original Amara" in our pre-rendered videos. This includes interludes such as “A Good Man” that takes place right at the start before Mission 1 of the Vanguard campaign. We're planning to update those as well, but the switchover involves some extra complexities and will be included in a future update.

Customizable Hotkey Modifiers

While the hotkeys remain command based, as another player-requested feature, we have added the ability to add any number of modifier keys to your hotkey configuration. You can now modify your hotkeys with any combination of Ctrl, Shift, Alt, and so on. Try it out and let us know how it feels.

Improved Pathfinding

We've heard your feedback about pathfinding issues, especially with Weavers and other large units. In 0.1.0, we’re rolling out improvements to our push priority system, making it easier to navigate maps and reducing frustrating moments when units get stuck or act unpredictably. This is a quality-of-life improvement we believe will have a big impact for players who love tight, tactical control. More pathfinding improvements will be coming in future updates.

Observer and Replay UI Improvements

The user interface for the observer and replays now adds a match timer, map names, and map scores for tournaments. We’ve also added support for different aspect ratios.

New Custom Map: Spooky Boneyard

As we head into spooky season, we’ve added a new custom Versus map called Spooky Boneyard, where a zombie spawns after every unit dies. They live for a limited time, and generally stay in-place where the death happened. Taking a Creep camp sends a small pack of zombies across the map at your opponent. Available in both 1v1 and 2v2, this nighttime map is a bit chaotic and has revealed some… unexpected strategies. You can find this encounter under Custom Games.

Patch Notes

Co-op

Heroes

• New Hero: Kastiel: Orphan of Wintros
  • The Sovereign of Arkhos is wise in the ways of war; having survived the Desolation of Wintros, Kastiel knows all too well that tomorrow is not promised. To his ends, he gathers resources across worlds to increase Arkhos’ power, biding his time until he can enact his final plans...
  • Kastiel is free to all players who purchased the Ultimate Founder’s Pack or Ultimate Early Access Pack on Steam or Kickstarter. Like all Co-op Heroes, Kastiel is also playable for free up to level 5. Full progression for Kastiel can be purchased in the store.

• Auralanna
  • Auralanna starts with two Stasis Cores.
  • Heal Burst
    • All life (including goats) is important. Auralanna can now heal critters.
    • Auralanna no longer remains stuck in her casting animation when attempting to cast Heal Burst. The dance party is over.

  • REMOVED: Resurrection Field
    
  • NEW Ultimate Ability: Meteor Shower
    • Auralanna opens a gateway to the stars, slowing enemies by 20% and removing 50% of their armor and damaging them in a large radius for 6 seconds. Afterwards, the terrain in the targeted area remains glaciated and revealed for 60 seconds, creating an icy field that slows all units moving through it by 10%.

  • NEW Top Bar Ability: Vivus Field
    • Briefly capture and store the Animus of fallen allies. Allied Heroes are globally revived, including allied units in the area of effect.

  • ADJUSTED: Cryo Tank
    • We’re giving you the best of both worlds. Instead of replacing Sabers, Sabers can now be transmuted into Cryo Tanks - a two-for-one!
    • The Cryo Tank’s attack visual effects were a little too intense, so we’ve cooled them down a bit.
    • Cryo Tank attacks now remove 20% of their target's armor. This effect can stack up to 5 times.

  • ADJUSTED: Seeker
    • New Ability - Zephyr’s Respite: While Perched, Seekers passively heal friendly biological units in a 4 radius around themselves.
    • The Detection Ward ability is now a researchable upgrade.
    • Seekers are now permanently Stealthed.

  
  
• Blockade
  • Base Stats
    • Starting Health 1000 -> 1200.
    • Starting Armor 10 -> 20.
    • Starting and Maximum Energy 100 -> 150.

  • ADJUSTED: Revitalize
    • Revitalize now heals Blockade at level 1 instead of level 3.
    • Revitalize can now be autocast.
    • Revitalization Radiance and Relentless Healer no longer require research and are instead available at level 3.

  • ADJUSTED: Guardsman
    • Guardsmen now deal +5 additional damage to Air units.

  • FIXED: Heroic Leap
    • Blockade has decided to follow orders, and now lands in the exact targeted location.

  
  
• Warz
  • ADJUSTED: Shrouded Protection
    • Now, while not moving or attacking, Warz gains +10 armor.

  • ADJUSTED: Void Goo
    • Void Goo should feel a lot more impactful: damage from Void Goo explosions has been increased from 10 to 35.

  • ADJUSTED: Fiends
    • To cut back on the sheer numbers of Fiends Warz is able to have at a time, Warz’s Fiends now have a 60 second Timed Life.
    • All of Warz’s Fiends now have the Void Goo trait.
    • When Warz’s Fiends are stored using Fiendish Storage, their timed life is removed. Unloading Fiends resets their Timed Life.

  • ADJUSTED: Gaunts
    • Sure they can’t Infest, but they can help out Warz by clearing the skies! Gaunts now deal an additional 4 damage to Air units on initial attack and an additional 2 damage to Air units affected by the Gaunt’s Bouncing Bone Axes.

Maps

• Abyssal Gates & Ritual Woods
  • On game start, the AI will now not immediately spawn flying or high tech units to protect the Gates.

• Crooked Canyon
  • We’ve made taking the center expansion a little easier: now you’ll have more time to take on those invisible convoys!

Weekly Challenges

• Experience Co-op with new challenging mutators and earn bonus Hero XP.
• Mutations
  • Energy Infusion: Allied units have +100% energy regeneration.
  • Gotta Go Fast: Allied units have +50% movement speed.
  • Infested: When any unit dies, it spawns an enemy Fiend.
  • Infantry Assault: Every 2 minutes, an enemy Barracks spawns somewhere on the map. Kill it before it unleashes a devastating attack wave.
  • Ready to Blow: When an enemy unit dies, its corpse explodes after 1.5 seconds.
  • Reconstructed: When an enemy unit dies, it resurrects two seconds later with 50% health, movement speed, and attack speed. #Zombies
  • Speed Kills: All enemy units have +50% movement speed.
  • See and See: The Fog of War is disabled for ALL players (including enemies!).
  • Swift Assembly: Allied players have +100% construction speed.

Progression

• Primary XP: Earn XP by Winning/Losing the game, as well as Kills, and game duration
• Bonus XP: Earn XP from the chosen Difficulty and Chosen Mutators
• Boost XP: Earn XP by playing in a participating PC Cafe/PC Bang
• Bounty XP: Earn XP by completing the Weekly Mutation Challenge

Rejoin

• Following a loss of connection, crash, or power outage players can now rejoin an in-progress Co-op game once connectivity is restored.

Difficulty

• Flayed Dragons have dominated the skies on too many Co-op maps, and no longer spawn as part of attack waves or as base guardians.
• Chosen difficulty level now factors into the tech level of enemies you’ll face.

Performance-related Change

• Maximum Supply cap in Co-op for all factions has decreased from 300 to 200. We are exploring the impact of this change in addition to the technical work we are doing to address overall performance.

Campaign

• Amara Character Model Upgrade
  • Amara's model has been updated to better reflect our vision for her and the Vanguard campaign.
    • The new Amara model is also used in Co-op.

  
  
• Campaign Item update
  • We’ve made adjustments to in-game items for discoverability and functionality.
    • We have removed redundant items and item types to make inventories fill up less often.
    • Healing items are now targetable instead of being strictly self-targeted.

  
  
• Vanguard Mission 6: Stormlands is now more challenging on Brutal difficulty.
  
• Some Mission Objectives have been renamed and reworded for clarity.
  

Versus

• New Map: Furious Resolve
  • Introducing our latest 4 spawn macro map. Furious Resolve features more easily defensible natural expansions encouraging longer games.

• Isle of Dread updates
  • The main player's main base is smaller and easier to defend.
  • The nearest expansion location is closer to the player’s spawn location.
  • Double therium nodes have been added near the vision camps.

Custom

• New Map: Spooky Boneyard
  • New Zombified Boneyard is now available to play in Custom!

Audio

• Overall, the game volume has been increased by ~50% which should help improve our audio clarity.
• Battles should be less confusing, fewer attack sounds will play with large unit counts.
• Updated Exo sounds have been increased to feel more impactful.
• New custom Announcer Voice Over when playing with Kastiel

General

Lighting and visual updates

• All maps across all modes have received a visual pass to improve lighting and clarity.

Smart Attack

• New option added to reduce the need to choose between move orders and attack orders.

Pathing and Push Priority updates

• Weavers can once again path over other units.
• Larger units can once again push smaller units.
  • Units cannot push other units that are Holding Position.
  • Units cannot push other units that are channeling.

UI updates

• Area of Effect Targeting
  • Area of effect abilities will now show a targeting reticle of the affected area allowing better precision.

• Unit Info Panel Improvements:
  • Units now display exactly how much bonus damage they do to various tags in the unit info panel.
  • Units' stats that are changed by upgrades and buffs are now correctly reflected in the unit info panel.

• Tooltip Improvements
  • We’re making adjustments to our tooltips to make them more accurate more often. Please note this is an ongoing effort and one that will continue in future updates.

• Offline Invites
  • Invites can now be sent to Steam friends that are not actively playing Stormgate.

Various quality of life improvements and bug fixes

• We have been hard at work fixing a variety of issues, but here’s a few worth mentioning specifically:
  • The Versus selection screen remembers which faction you last queued for.
  • After completing a Campaign, Co-op, or Custom game you’ll now be properly sent to the correct screen.
  • Removed the extra “Log in with Steam” step on startup
  • Unbound hotkeys no longer list “None” and now appear empty.