Lots of new systems to play with this update! Introducing the King unit, the Amber Forge structure, proper UI + sound effects, and more!
The King
The Keep has been replaced with the King, a new unit with a variety of functions:
A player wins the game by slaying their opponent's King.
The King can move around and fight.
Kings can use their Parade ability to permanently increase the collection rate of a friendly resource structure.
The King can visit the Amber Forge in order to research powerful upgrades.
Resource Pickups
Several resource pickups spawn throughout the map at the beginning of a match. Move a unit to a resource pickup in order to get a nice early-game resource boost.
There are 6 resource pickups (2 gold and 4 amber) which each give 50 of their respective resource.
The Amber Forge
That's right, AmberForge now has... an Amber Forge!
This is a neutral structure in the middle of the map which both players can use to research powerful upgrades. Bring your King to an adjacent tile in order to research. Upgrades research instantly, but each player has a global cooldown timer of 60s that must elapse before researching another upgrade.
Upgrades include:
Amber Aura: Speeds up all friendly timers by 25% for 30 seconds. Repeatable. Costs 100 amber.
Inspiring Presence: Adds +3 attack damage to friendly units when they are adjacent to your King. Costs 100 amber.
Mystical Soil Enrichment: Adds 200 collectible gold to each friendly Village. Costs 150 amber.
Swift Step: Archers are no longer slowed by Forests. Archer move speed penalty after attacking reduced by 0.4s. Costs 100 amber.
High-Protein Horse Feed: Adds +1 range and +4 attack damage to the cavalry charge ability. Unlocks Knights. Costs 50 amber. (Moved here from the Keep)
Art and Audio
Proper in-game and main menu UI is now present.
Health bar visual improvements.
Unit selection outlines.
All structures now have new art assets -- no more placeholders!
First batch of in-game sound effects, including some unit voice lines.
Pathfinding and Attack Improvements
Instead of always trying to find a path around all units, shorter paths are now preferred even when they go through other units. Put another way: pathing units will wait for other units to get out of the way instead of pathing the long way (if the long way would be too long).
Before/after for pathfinding
Attacks are now split up into distinct attack-move and target-attack abilities with their own visuals.
Other miscellaneous visual and logic improvements for pathfinding, attacking/moving, targeting units, and selecting units.
Misc Stuff
Holding down a command hotkey rapidly attempts to perform that command.
Production structures now attempt to spawn a unit at any adjacent unoccupied tiles, prioritizing those closest to the rally path.
Settings for edge scroll speed and edge scroll area size.
Various fixes and improvements for tooltip messages and text alerts.
Bug fix: Disconnection issues in the lobby.
Bug fix: The damage from archer arrows would occasionally be delayed.
Economy/Balance
Reduced starting resource count from 200gold/25amber to 100gold/0amber.
The resource pickups and the King's Parade ability provide early-game economic boosts, so the extra starting gold and awkward amount of starting amber are no longer needed.
Moved Peasant production from the Keep to the Village.
Peasant move timer cooldown increased from 4s (+2.67s in forests) to 5s (+2s in forests).
I do want to make Peasants a viable supplement in a fight, but I don't want it to be trivial to use a peasant to scoop up all of the resource pickups on your side of the map. Consider this nerf temporary!
Knight damage decreased from 16 to 14.
Knight HP decreased from 70 to 65.
Knights can no longer be built until researching High-Quality Horse Feed.
Archer move speed penalty after attacking increased from 1s to 1.2s.
Misc map changes, mostly to make room for the Amber Forge and to move the third Wheat Field (village site) farther from the start location.