Meet Gharf! As the leader of the Zombie faction in Athena Crisis, some call him The Dead Honcho, the Brain Gourmand, Gharf…Esquire?!? If you need someone bitten, infected, or just plain eaten, Gharf is your…thing.
It’s not just about conspicuous consumption, though: Gharf has trained its troops to be *extremely* effective on the battlefield. They are persuasive fellows, capable of infecting anything they touch and turning them to the zombie’s side with a single attack. We’re not just talking infantry units, either: these zombies can turn *anything* they hit into a friend, whether it’s the lowliest Pioneer or a Mammoth tank trundling down its rails. The targeted unit will take damage from the Zombie’s attack, and will also manage to use the last shreds of their sanity to counterattack the Zombie (if capable of doing so), but after that, you will now have a slightly dinged-up new unit to use on your next turn. Needless to say, if you can convert your enemy’s most expensive units to your side, you’ll both negate a large resource expenditure of theirs, and also hopefully use your new toy to turn the tide of battle.
But wait, there’s more: Zombies are capable of all of the battlefield actions that the Pioneer units are, meaning they can construct new buildings at construction sites, Capture buildings, build rail tracks, and Rescue neutral units that they come across. They’re *mostly* about eating brains, but don’t think that that’s all they have to offer.
(Thanks to Legend on the Athena Crisis Discord server for naming Gharf!)
August Updates
Beta Campaign Now Available!
If you missed it earlier this month, the entirety of the main campaign of Athena Crisis is available in Beta form! You can find it by going to Campaigns, then Official Campaigns at the bottom of that screen, then selecting The Athena Crisis - Beta. We’re still working on balancing changes to the campaign to ensure that it is both fair and challenging, so if you play, please drop by the Campaign channel on [the official Athena Crisis Discord] to give us your thoughts!
New
- Based on a random reddit comment suggesting to change the water color for the desert we brightened up the water colors for the desert, and darkened them for the snow biome. This should give both of those biomes a more distinctive look.
- Added an explanation for how many units need to be defeated to achieve the Power star.
- Spaceship biomes now have a building that corresponds to Barracks so you don't have to rely only on the HQ/Command Center on those maps.
- `no-skills` and `no-fog-change` labels: Add these labels to a map, and players won't be able to select skills or change the fog setting when creating a new game. The `no-skills` tag also works for campaigns. This should be very useful for puzzle maps.
- A “Try Again” button has been added when giving up or losing in a PvE map.
Balancing
- The Maximum Sniper skill was changed to only apply to the current leader unit. The passive power is still applied to all snipers.
- Increased Anti Air defense from 15 to 30, increased Anti Air attack against Low Altitude by 10, and increased Sea Patrol attack against Amphibious and Ships by 10 each. Without skills, an Anti Air will now beat a Helicopter that attacks the AA first.
- Low Altitude units can now enter Space in the Spaceship biome. It makes no sense, but is more fun to play.
- Increased charges for "Bazoo's Bond" from 3 to 6.
Fixes
- Action Cards in the editor were showing units that had "self", "team" or "opponent" colors as neutral.
- Moved the button to show the opponent's attack radius from `shift` to `a`.
- Medbays can now be placed in the Spaceship biome in the editor.
- Gaps between multiple skill selectors were fixed in the player selector on the pending game page.
- Fixed an issue with Research Labs showing through fog in the game preview on the user profile.
- Units that are not allowed in a specific biome no longer show up in the unit or tile cards.
- The game no longer applies poisong twice when reloading a map with poisoned units at the begin of a turn.
- App Scaling: The Athena Crisis app should now automatically scale the game much better on 4k+ screens with a low device pixel ratio. No change is expected on small screens or on screens with a high device pixel ratio (often referred to as "Retina Displays").
- Fixed a bug where selecting a map in local mode with a gamepad would navigate to the main menu instead of the create game screen.
- My Games Menu Button: The "My Games" menu button should now correctly show up both in the main menu and in the overlay menu if you only have local games or if you only have finished games. The logic for the button in both places was aligned, cc **@CoconutTank**.
- My Games list: The "Finished" button in the header now also shows up if you only have local finished games.
- Snow Biome: Fixed a small pixel bug with single Rail Track fields that were broken in the recent water color update.
- Sandbags: Sandbag decorations were recently limited to trenches only, but there are many existing maps with sandbags on plain fields. The change was reverted and sandbags can be placed on many regular fields again.