Happy Friday all!

We've just pushed this week's update so please ensure you get that installed in time before trying to join the incoming experimental Flurry World.

We've been pretty ambitious and squeezed in a lot of major gameplay reforms so please bear with us if anything misbehaves in game, we'll be watching feedback carefully for bug reports and also listening in on the general consensus for how the game feels with all of the new systems.

The faster paced Flurry World will start on 17 January 2025 at 18:00 GMT.

Gameplay

New Army Overview Overlay

This handy little collapsible overlay is a mirrored counterpart to the active mission list. It will display all units currently stationed at the settlement that are not currently on a mission. In addition, this new overlay has tabs that will let you see units that have been transferred or even garrisoned from external locations.

Initial Settlement Protection

• Your initial settlement cannot be captured until you've acquired four additional settlements of your own (5 total).
• Does not protect from raids or siege damage, however colonise units will always fail.
• There is a new graphic to show protected settlements on the World Map.
• You will be given a notice that the protection will end if you successfully take your fifth settlement.
• Beware - once the protection ends it will not come back, making you vulnerable to being defeated!
• We've added an additional graphic to show our previously implemented 'Beginner Protection' which will still automatically be removed after 12 hours.

Combat Score

The leaderboard has been updated so that you can now hover over a player's score to see the breakdown. We want the combat score to be more supplementary towards the overall score instead of the primary driver. Destroying (not wounding) enemy units in combat will grant points to the defender or attacker. Siege damage will also grant a small number of points, but this is going to be a much lower ratio in relation to the building's diminished point value. We don't want to encourage people to feel like they are being forced to wantonly destroy buildings in order to be competitive on the leaderboard, nor risk people exploiting the mechanic. Combat score is not awarded for faction infighting.

Duality by Default

As part of the experimental settings being used for the Flurry World, the Barracks will now start with the ability to recruit two unit types at once and unlock all four at level 30. We want to see how this affects gameplay in conjunction with the slower settlement scaling. If this change is positively received, we will explore making this baseline for all future World types.

Global Coloniser Recruitment Queue

Coloniser units now can only be trained once at a time at the global level. For the Flurry World each subsequent order will increase the increment by 30 mins (we expect this to be around 12 hours for the next Classic World). This increment will be refunded if one of your settlements is captured. The team are very excited to see the results of all of these changes combined as we expect them to dramatically change the scaling and general chemistry of the game for the better. We will continue to watch closely, building on top of these systems and tuning accordingly.

General

• New display logic on unit cards for speed. The number now indicates how many tiles can be crossed per hour.
• For now only defeated players can delete their characters. This system will be reworked in the near future.
• If all units are lost in battle the pop up report now displays "?" instead of reporting the rival army numbers.
• The mission list and new army overlays now instantly refresh when changing between settlements.
• Skeev is no longer feeling festive but is very much looking forward to Valentine's.
• The number display format is now nicely standardised throughout the game.
• The World Map seems different.

Fixes

• Fixed a bug that caused the Barrack/Factory recruitment overlay to freeze when ordering units from the other building.
• Fixed issue where lighting from the shop would be baked into the previous scene on exit.
• Fixed Beginner Protection expiring early due to interactions with Scuttlers (bad rats!).
• Fixed unit experience bars failing to update from the default values.
• Fixed units in combat failing to display their initial health pool.
• Fixed a typo in the pop up reports "Remaining" is now "Lost".