Hello again!
We are back with the next major content expansion - the Setting the Sails Update. It's our biggest update to date, featuring many new units, technologies and even custom events!
Big thanks to anyone that participated both in internal and public playtest, we really appreciate the help and feedback given!
Here's the full changelog of what we're bringing to life this time.
Full Naval Rework
So far the naval combat has been rather simplistic, with only 2 naval units, being available. This update aims to address it. As such a bunch of new naval units have been introduced, each with different strenghts and weaknesses! Here's the rundown:
Transport Ships
Transport Cog - A primitive transport ship used to transport units. It's relatively slow and unable to enter deep water, while also being relative vulnerable.
Transport Ship - A direct improvement of the transport cog. This ship is much faster, more resilient and may enter deep water.
Light Ships
Scout Ship - Cheap light vessel good for early exploration, or preying on defenseless transport, but poor war vessel overall.
Corsair - A very quick vessel, good for both exploration and harassment, while being more resilient than the scout ship.
Heavy Ships
Galley - A larger galley equipped with a primitive balistae for effective ship to ship combat, good for fighting lighter vessels.
Galleon - A mighty galleon, equipped with top of the line armaments for naval domination, expensive but domineering on the sea against all but few ships.
Anti-heavy Ships
Fire Galley - A galley equipped with a greek fire launcher, very effective against heavier vessels, but has a very small attack range.
Siege Ships
Siege Galleon - These fearsome ships are equipped with long range mortar, to devastate the enemy buildings from long distances. If you control the seas, you may use these to reduce the enemy economy to rubble.
Various ships are worth using when dealing with other ship types and for different purposes. For example heavy ships deal best with lighter vessels, fire ships deal best with heavy ships while siege galleon excels at devastating the enemy coastline.
Varied Naval Fleet
Now more than ever, it is important to possess various vessels to balance their strengths and weaknesses. In addition to ranged attack that most ships possess, a ship may ram their enemy, if it's outside of firing range. This combat option applies additional bonus damages. No ship is ever the perfect solution, and it makes up for satisfying variety filled battles. Here is the quick rundown of the new bonuses:
Transport Ships : Receives more damage from both light and heavy ships.
Light Ships : Bonus damage versus transport ships, and anti-heavy ships. Receives more damage from heavy ships.
Heavy Ships : Bonus damage versus most ships, especially the lighter one.
Anti-Heavy Ships : Significant bonus damage versus heavy ships. Low damage versus light ships.
Siege Ships : Receives more damage from all ship types except its own.
Brand New Naval Research Tree Branch
In addition to all that new content, naval research has been appropriately changed, including some helpful upgrades, that will aid you in later battles!
The Trigger System
Scriptable maps is something that we've been planning for a long while now, and it's finally here! Using this functionality you can within the editor set up maps with custom events in them!
This is achieved using our trigger system. Each trigger may have any amount of customizable conditions to activate and effects that will take place once it is activated!
Using this tools you can make your maps really come to life, with events, missions or dialogues now being achievable!
And the best thing is, you can do that all without touching a line of code, by simply using the in game editor!
The in game editor also contains a simple tutorial, which briefly explains how the trigger system works in practice with practical examples. We hope this will provide you with an opportunity to create really fun experiences! steamhappy
New Land Units
Pikeman - While spearmen are arguably pretty good at their job, this unit takes it into the next level. It's a more resilient version of a spearman, able to sustain significant amount of damage from more expensive enemy cavalry, and decimate its ranks.
Warrior - There has always been a gap between rather weak militia, and a powerful swordsman. The warrior aims to fill that gap. Warriors now replace militia as the weakest barracks unit, being recruited for almost the same price (with a slight cost in gold added in), while offering substantially better results. This results in barracks being a much more viable choice in the early game.
New Technology Tree
Aside from the new reworked naval technology branch, a few non-naval technologies are sneaked in! We also visually revamped the whole technology panel, to give it a bit of a fresher look, and reworked the user interface in it.
See if you can spot what's new!
New Generation
Another significant change is the new and improved oceanic map mode! It has been completely reworked from the scratch to offer guaranteed balanced islands.
Each players island offers the same amount of forests, berries, deep forests and mines, while maintaining similar distances from other islands, if possible, guaranteeing a fair combat scenario.
New Terrain Type
New shallows terrain was also added, with the unique property of being traversable both by land and seafaring units!
UI Overhaul
User interface has saw very significant changes in the update.
Technology Panel is no longer scrollable, now instead relying on drag action to manuever in it. This allows a more horizontal and readable distribution of the technology tree.
Aside from new panels, and interface generally being more informative, many new graphics and stylistic changes were undertaken. We hope that this will positively impact your experience.
Here are few example of the changes made:
General Changes
Change the player 2 (red) material to have more contrast.
Decreased the trade amount 100 -> 50
Increased the range of the catapult 2->3
Reduced movement cost of sand tile 2 -> 1.5
Some unit textures were updated.
Some unit/building sprites were remade.
Added a water movement sound.
Introduced some optimization changes.
Quality of Life
Technology button now reflects the technology research state. (Green when completed, shining when in progress)
Information panel now says whether a unit is transporting another unit.
Information panel now includes additional information about unit class, moves left and range.
Interaction panel now shows all your building options outside of your turn on multiplayer.
Added F1 as a hotkey for disabling user interface (for the purpose of screenshots)
Resource costs are now ordered consistently with the way they are presented on the resource panel.
Bugfixes
Fixed an issue where a building preview incorrectly shows that a building can be placed on another buildings.
Fixed an issue where a stable building could also be unlocked by researching the first archery technology.
Fixed a movement issue, where if a unit had exactly 2 movement points left it could not enter a cost 2 tile.
Fixed an issue with market displays, showing incorrect conversion of luxury goods to gold.
Fixed a multiplayer specific issue with saving/loading where a transport ship would not properly load its contents.