Grab a snack Savages, this is a big one.
AI Commanders v0.1
- Casual games now have AI commanders that will begin the match if at least 2 human players are on the server and warmup has ended.
- Humans can take command if elected to the position by their team
- AI Commanders will take over if the human commander leaves their seat
- We expect to be continually improving the AIs intelligence, but we felt it important to get this feature out and start getting feedback now
- Our final goal with casual AI matches is to allow any and all skill level players to quickly find a suitable, fun match at any time of the day. We think adding AI Commanders and Bots is a huge part of priming the pump that is Savage, and increasing our concurrent players.
AI Player Bots v0.1
- Any missing slots in official casual games will be filled with player bots, these will leave as real players join and take the spot
- These bots are tuned to be quite easy, we have much more difficult bots available to release fairly soon
- We expect to be continually improving the AIs intelligence, but we felt it important to get this feature out and start getting feedback now
Netcode
Melee lag compensation has been tightened from 250ms to 150ms (less getting melee’d by someone who looks like they can’t reach you)
We're now shifting some more of our focus to improve this part of the game and plan to have some tweaks over the next weeks.
Bandwidth
Doubled max usage from 20kB/s -> 40kB/s to reduce dropped voice data and dropped feedback events
Healers Rework
We really want to make significant improvements to the impact and fun factor of the Chaplain / Shaman. Our intention was to really push them and while this may seem like too much, we would rather make them extremely impactful and have to tweak back than to take too small of a step forward. Play them, enjoy them, and give us all the feedback to help perfect them.
- Now cost 500g (down from 2500g) for the player
- Available with a single building, require no additional research
Chaplain:
- Heal is always available and about twice as powerful
- Now has a channeled ability to set up a mobile defensive forcefield, requires only Stronghold level 2
- Resurrect ability has slightly longer range, requires only Stronghold level 2
Shaman
- Now has a 2 part melee combo
- Heal is always available and about twice as powerful
- Shield ability requires only Lair level 2
- Revive ability has slightly longer range, requires only Lair level 2
- Shaman heal and revive now use classic snap casting as their default aiming mode, you can change this in the controls settings (Aiming Mode: Prefer Quick Cast)
General Improvements
- New dealing damage / taking damage feedback (your target’s model will glow red briefly)
- Added subtle refire / cooldown feedback to the crosshair
- Greatly improved tooltips for unit classes and ranged weapons
- Added more loading tips
- Updated Shaman jump and sprint animations
- Added effect to make landmines more visible
- Made sensors less visible
- Reverse input field / send button on in-game chat
- You can now double click workers to select all nearby workers
- You can now double tap the idle worker button or hotkey to select all idle workers
- Added announcements for enemy main base taking damage
- Improved timing of ranged dealt damage sound for several weapons
- Update normals on many buildings, improving their look
- Updated Chaplain animations
- Play kill taunt and killstreak lines in the world, so nearby players can hear them
- Spawn sound radius increased
- Spatialized voice lines from nearby units
- Zooming while in third person will temporarily swap you to first person
- Preventing damage with a shield will award score
- Improved levelup descriptions to be more specific and accurate
- Added sound quality levels and options to change them
- Added more server messages: ‘game was forfeit’ and ‘base was destroyed’
- Updated localization for French and Russian
Balance
- Fireball: damage 230 -> 260
- Chaos Bolt: range and speed 3750 -> 6260, damage 100 -> 90
- Incinerator: damage 5 -> 5.5
- Tempest: cooldown 1.4s -> 1.15s, damage 125 -> 120 (15% dps increase but requires 3 hits to kill a level 1 Nomad instead of 2)
- Rupture: damage 80 -> 100
Bug Fixes
- Improved player bot pathing (practice with bots)
- Fixed a player bot crash (practice with bots)
- Fix order ant trails when selecting groups of units with different orders as commander
- Fixed announcements for your main base taking damage
- Fixed building on fire sounds not clearing when building was repaired
- Fix an end game crash
- Fix loadout tech highlights appearing when there’s no items available
- Fix voiceover and music at endgame playing the wrong line sometimes
- Fix some map ambient sounds not respecting their volume slider
- Fix VOIP not respecting its volume slider
- Fixed several sound positioning bugs
What Are We Doing?
- Improving our new AIs
- Finishing up a new map
- Fixing those bugs
- Monitoring the effect of the latest balance changes, preparing new ones
- Working on netcode (to improve melee feel) and performance (to continue improving framerate)
This patch changes a lot of things, so please expect a few bugs and derpy bots. We'll be patching fixes for any major issues found tomorrow or asap.