This update features our first official art assets, a rework of the cavalry charge ability, and tons of UI/UX improvements!
Unit and tile art
Placeholder images have been replaced with actual, real art assets! All units (peasant, swordsman, pikeman, archer, horseman, knight) and tiles (grass, forest, mountain, village site, spirit-amber deposit) have been updated. Structures still use placeholders for now.
- Unit attack and move cooldown timer UI has also been updated.
Charge ability rework
The cavalry charge ability has been overhauled to be a lot more clear and intuitive. The game now handles determining the best charge path (i.e. the closest traversable straight line) for any targeted tile and displaying that path ahead of time.
- The charge ability is now available without requiring an upgrade.
Economy changes
- All cooldown timers slowed down by various amounts, ranging from 5%-33% longer cooldown times. Unit abilities are generally 33% longer, and build times are generally 5%-10% longer.
Trying out this larger economy change to see how games feel to play when everything (especially unit movement/attacks) is slower. Hopefully this results in a less overwhelming ramp-up for newer players and more time to coordinate commanding larger groups of units. Build times are not changed much in order to avoid making the early game too slow.
- Replaced the starting barracks with a peasant.
- Starting resources increased from 50gold/25amber to 100gold/25amber.
These couple changes should allow for a wider range of openers without slowing the early game down too much. It should particularly make an early stables more viable since the player is not locked into having a barracks at the start of the match.
- Peasant build cost decreased from 50gold/0amber to 25gold/0amber.
The early game was feeling a bit too slow, and a big reason for that was the big up-front cost of building a peasant before it could start building a structure.
- Income from resource structures is now earned in increments of 5 instead of 10, but with double the frequency.
- Doubled the HP, attack damage, and healing amounts for all units and structures.
These changes are mostly nonfunctional - they will make earning and spending resources more smooth and allow for more fine-tuning of low-integer stats.
- Village site gold amount reduced from 800 to 700.
- Defense modifiers have been changed from percentage adjustments to integer adjustments (AKA armor bonuses) for simplicity. Forests and villages provide +2 armor to friendly units, and the keep provides a +3 armor bonus.
Balance changes
- "Charge" upgrade has been replaced with "High-protein Horse Feed" which adds +1 range and +4 damage to the charge ability. This new upgrade is researchable at the keep, but requires a stable.
- Horseman damage increased from 8 (+0 vs resource-collection structures) to 8 (+6 vs resource-collection structures).
- Pikeman damage decreased from 4 (+12 vs cavalry units) to 4 (+9 vs cavalry units).
- Pikeman build time increased from 30s to 32s.
These adjustments, along with some of the economy adjustments, should hopefully make early horseman builds a strong option and establish cavalry units as a competent answer to archers.
- Archer damage decreased from 8 to 6.
- Archer move speed cooldown increased from 3.33s (+2s in forests) to 4s (+2.67s in forests), bringing archer movement to a point where it matches the other infantry units.
They had it coming.
Smaller changes
Menu content
- Added a settings menu with volume sliders, a display dropdown menu, and a toggle-able edge scroll option.
We do not yet have any audio in the game, so the volume sliders are non-functional.
- Added a tips page to the main menu.
UI/UX
- Tiles are now selectable -- selecting them displays information about the terrain.
- The unit selection interface now displays a range stat, a kill counter, the remaining resource count (for resource collection structures), and hoverable attack, defense, and movement modifier tooltips.
- The buildable unit tooltip now displays build time.
- Currency icons are in place to represent gold/amber.
- Added a red flash effect when a unit gets damaged.
- Added a particle effect on unit death.
- The path visual now changes color and target icon to communicate whether the path is for a move command or an attack-move command.
- A red reticle is displayed over the selected unit's target unit (if it has a targeted unit).
- Added a hold-position ability which stops units from moving in reaction to being attacked.
- Right-clicking or issuing a move or attack command to a unit's own tile now cancels the unit's queued command.
- Various improvements to attack-move and pathfinding logic and path visualization.
- Produced units now spawn in at the first point along the producing structure's rally path if the structure is occupied. Units produced in this way start with their move ability on cooldown.
- Zoomed in the camera a bit.
- Various adjustments to the darkening of move-inhibiting tiles when selecting a unit, and to the darkening of out-of-bounds tiles.
- Adjustments to the income UI at the bottom left.
- Added an animated "Defend this" UI element over the player's keep at the beginning of a match.
Hopefully this should make it more clear which side you control :)
Bug fixes
- Players who do not control a production structure (i.e. spectators and opponents) can now see what units that structure is able to produce. All players can now view the build menu of workers as well.
- Fixed an issue where village sites provided a defensive bonus. You now need a completed village to provide that bonus, as intended.
- Added proper wide-screen support, fixing the camera and adding letterboxing.
- Fixed an issue with middle-mouse camera panning when hovering over UI elements.
- Fixed an issue with reacted attack moves not properly resetting the unit's target location.