Dear Queens and Kings,
This update brings a ton of experimental improvements to Thronefall. We've been very busy and we're excited to share what we've been working on for you. Let's get right to it...
TOWER REWORK
This is our attempt at making defense towers more useful, interesting, and versatile:
- Defense towers have brand new level 2 upgrades (that are more powerful than before).
- The level 2 tower upgrades also decide the targeting priority of the tower (highest health, lowest health, closest or random).
- Defense tower level 3 upgrades are similar to before but can now synergize with the level 2 upgrades in various ways. You want to build a healing sniper tower? Or an armored tower with hot oil for your front line? You now can.
ETERNAL TRIALS - SEASON 2
While we won't have recurring "seasons" in the traditional sense, we're adopting the model to allow for big balancing changes like this one. We've heard your feedback loud and clear, so here comes our attempt at addressing it:
- A new empty high score table to allow for a fresh start.
- Complete rebalancing of the eternal trials wave generator.
- Reduced enemy spawn variety but increased predictability to make runs fairer (one of the main things you asked for).
- Increased difficulty and faster difficulty ramp-up (Runs should not take 15 hours+ to complete and the first stages are no free wins anymore. Every victory will be earned.).
- New enemy preview before starting a level (allowing you to dodge enemy compositions you don't want to go up against and to better prepare your strategy in advance).
- Unwanted perks can now be disabled before starting a level.
UNIT CONTROL HOTKEYS
You've been asking for this for ages and we know we are late to the party. We finally did it and have to agree... This is quite a massive improvement to the game feel:
- New select all army hotkey, select all melee hotkey, select all ranged hotkey, select all heroes hotkey.
- New select one unit type hotkey (only ever selects or places one unit type at a time, super useful for sorting clumped-up units).
- New toggle command units hotkey (similar to toggle sprint but for commanding units).
- The new hotkeys are not just a quality of life change, but also open up a surprising amount of new room for skill expression. We're excited to see how you use these new tools to defeat your foes.
QUALITY OF LIFE
Some more things you've kept asking us for that we are excited to finally deliver in this patch:
- Snappier keyboard controls.
- Mouse movement added as a control option.
- Next day gold preview in the pause menu.
- Tower range indicators.
- V-Sync should be working correctly now. (You can also use it to limit your frame rate.)
BALANCING
We made many balancing changes to the game and more will follow.
Balancing is a two steps forward, one step backward kind of process. Every patch will make some things better and some things worse. The important bit is that on average it keeps getting better over time. This is what we strive for. Thanks for all of your valuable feedback on this matter!
SELF-HEALING REWORK
Before this update, the self-healing of your character scaled linearly with your health pool. This was not very transparent and also led to a lot of balancing problems. To address this:
- Your self-healing no longer scales with the size of your health pool. Self-healing is a separate value now.
- Whenever self-healing is affected, it is specifically stated in the tooltips!
- You heal at the same rate while you are dead, so intentionally dying is no longer a valid strategy to refill your health (unless you have a ring of resurrection, of course).
PLAYER WEAPONS
We're only making some careful adjustments as we'd rather not break anything here:
- The heavy sword makes you start the game with +20% additional health and health-regeneration now.
- The self-healing of the spear has been reduced by -10% and scales with your self-healing instead of with your max health pool.
PLAYER UNITS
Some adjustments to level the playing field between different unit types and helping each unit to better fulfill its role:
- Berserks have a new jump attack (filling a more unique niche for quick burst damage)
- Flails have health steal (giving them more durability when surrounded)
- Longbow projectiles are +100% faster
- Spearmen have +5% health and +5% attack damage
- Hunters deal -10% damage against non-monster units
- Fire archers deal -10% damage
ENEMIES
Some adjustments to some enemies you found annoying to deal with:
- Quickslings periodically stop firing (giving you a better opening to dive in and attack)
- Exploders count as siege weapons now. (They will be targeted by your sniper towers etc.)
CASTLE CENTER UPGRADES
These are turning out to be rather difficult to balance. Our main goal here is to make each upgrade more situational, so that which one is best, depends more on the level and enemies you go up against:
- Magic armor deals a fixed amount of damage to enemies when you are attacked (instead of a percentage as before).
- Castle-Up now immediately discounts all currently available tower upgrades on the map, making it give a more predictable amount of value depending on how many towers you currrently have.
- Commander Mode now gives units that are on hold position a +20% health and attack bonus.
- A bit of number tweaking on the other upgrades as well, mostly buffs.
MILL UPGRADES
For the mills we recieved some mixed feedback. Some said Improved Plow was not strong enough, but most said it was too much of a must-pick compared to the other options. As the defensive options of the mill are all fairly situational, we think it is okay to buff then up a bit more:
- Scarecrows: Projectile speed increased by +200%
- Explosive Mills: Fields explode as well now. The explosion size has been increased to a fixed size accross all mill levels.
- Wind Spirits: In addition to the arrow blocking the mill also gains a ranged attack with a slow effect.
PERKS
We made tons of little balance adjustments here as well. Almost every perk has been touched in some shape or form. Here are some highlights:
- Warrior Mode is renamed to Warrior Training and no longer negatively impacts the attack damage of your units and buildings. You just become stronger over time (up to +100%).
- Castle Blueprints health bonus reduced from +80% to +50%
- Gladiator School no longer impact the build or upgrade costs of your training facilities.
- War horse damage is increased but you recieve some damage when riding over enemies as well as to somehwat limit how much you can use it.
- Glass Canon no longer negatively impacts your self-healing rate (due to the self-healing rework) but it gives -80% health (down from -66%, reverting a change from the last balance patch).
- Elite Warriors no longer negatively impacts the training speed of your units but their health bonus has been reduced to +50% (down from +80%)
- Archery Skills now additionally gives +60% projectile speed for your archers.
- Fortified Houses attack range drastically increased
- Treasure Hunter gives +10, +20 and +30 gold in the last 3 nights (previously +60 only before the last night)
- Indestructable Mines renamed to Sustainable Mining: Gives +400% health to gold mines and their income never drops below 3.
- Health potions heals a fixed amount of health per second for every unit (instead of a percentage of the max health)
- Many small number tweaks on other perks as well.
LEAVE A REVIEW!
We've been putting a lot of work into Thronefall lately. If you enjoy what we do, one of the easiest ways to help us out is to leave a review on Steam (if you have not already). Thanks so much for all of the love and support!
Join us on Discord!
If you would like to be more actively involved and help with beta testing for new features before they come out, leave feedback and bugs, the best way to do so is on our Discord server: Join us on Discord!
(We're keeping an eye on other channels such as the Steam Forums as well, of course.)
What's next?
Now that we've taken some time to work on balancing and quality of life features, it is once again time to get back to work on more content for the game! We still have some quests from our previous community event to implement, for example, and we know you likely want to see more levels as well. ;)
Thanks for your continued excitement and support! We would not be able to do this without you.
All the best,
Paul & Jonas