Holdfast: Nations At War has been updated. Things have been extremely busy here during the past few months setting up a new office space. With everything now back on track, we’re releasing one of the largest updates that Holdfast: NaW has ever seen!
We’re bringing forth kilted men into the field of battle with the most recent addition of the Bagpiper Class, more line infantry units for both the British and French factions - The 92nd Gordon Highlanders and the Polish Legion, an entirely new class - The Grenadiers, four new maps - two of which are specifically designed to cater for organised gameplay, the start of our improvements on melee combat, five new tunes for the drummers and fifers, quality of life additions and more.
Loud & Glorious. Bagpipers!
Role: Support
Against all odds, these kilted Scotsman marched gloriously into battle with their Pipes. Equipped with a sabre and a pistol, they can also be effective on the charge. You’ll most certainly be seeing a frequent occurrence of this class during matches - They’ll become the next big thing!
What’s more impressive however is the selection of tunes available! A total of 22 bagpipe tunes were recorded in a studio, and have been introduced into the game in this update. Here’s the list of tunes.
Bagpipe Tunes (British Empire)
- With a Hundred Pipers
- War or Peace
- The Standard on the Braes O’ Mar
- The Point of War
- The Garb of old Gaul
- The Black Bear
- Scotland The Brave
- Muckin’ O’ Geordie’s Byre
- March of the Cameron Men
- Lochaber No More
- Lads With the Kilt
- Highland Laddie
- Hey Johnnie Cope
- Flower of Scotland
- Cock O’ the North
- Campbells are Coming
- Cabar Feidh
- Brose and Butter
- Bonnie Dundee
- Blue Bonnet
- Battle of Waterloo
- A Man's a Man
A big thanks goes to everyone who brought this class to fruition. Calumn played the pipes, Joseph managed the recording session, Rejenorst edited the audio, Jackson took care of the art and Monroy which programmed the whole thing.
That is not all we have today for the musician classes. Fifers and Drummers certainly shouldn’t go amiss! 5 new fife and drum tunes are present in this update.
Fife & Drum (British Empire)
- The Girl I Left Behind Me
- The Campbells Are Coming
Fife & Drum (French Empire)
- Fanchon
- Le 31 Du Mois D'Août
- On Vas Leur Percer Le Flanc
New Class. Grenadiers!
Role: Offense
Chosen from the strongest and largest of soldiers, Grenadiers excel at killing other infantry units. With this we’ve continued adding to an already vast selection of classes but we won’t be stopping right here. Do look forward to future additions to both this class as well as others.
French Grenadiers
British Grenadiers
Traits
Bayonet Specialisation - Excels with using bayonets. Your melee damage when wielding a bayoneted musket is slightly increased.
Weaponry
Musket - Muzzle loaded firearms equipped with a pointy end. They’re your best bet at making quick work of your enemy if things get up close and personal.
Historically grenadiers weren’t equipped with grenades, however these throwables were already present during the Napoleonic Era. As a future addition to this class, it would certainly be possible to consider including them in the game but the head’s up will need to be given by the community on this matter first. They will not have a large area of effect so their effectiveness against line formations will not be great, they’ll be operated through a fuse, available in limited numbers and server administrators can disable them directly through the config file.
This question will be put forward to the community in a future poll. You will be the ones to decide.
New Units. The 92nd Highlanders & Polish Legion!
This will come as quite the surprise to some since we’ve never mentioned this particular addition to the game within our development roadmap. However, we’ve heard time and time again requests to introduce more units to the existing classes so we’ll be doing just that!
Scotsmen! Play as the 92nd Gordon Highlanders in the British Army or fight for your emperor with the Polish Vistula Legion. Both of these new units are an additional variation to the existing Line Infantrymen class.
Polish Vistula Legion (French Empire)
92nd Gordon Highlanders (British Empire)
Melee Combat Improvements!
Now that most of the backend work is done we can start pushing improvements towards melee combat! In this update you will be able to go into melee combat whilst crouching. It’s an especially useful quality of life addition when you’re engaged in the heat of battle.
Blocking will also be seeing a drastic improvement when it comes to responsiveness! It has since undergone a substantial rework towards this effort. From our preliminary testing, our testers have experienced little to no delay. Before the rework, blocking was highly dependent on latency so now players can expect a much more responsive defensive mechanic.
There has also been a variety of other additions that both directly and indirectly contribute to melee combat from optimisations, fluidity between transitions and general responsiveness.
These improvements have yet to be tested on high player count servers as we don’t have the in-house resources to do that. In the future, we may require some more volunteers for testing. We will be monitoring this throughout the coming weeks on our official servers and changes will commence accordingly. Joining a low latency server that correctly reflects your region is still highly recommended of course.
We do understand that melee is a core mechanic of the game, and is at the heart of what the community wants! You’ll most certainly be seeing more improvements and new additions in future updates. This is only the beginning of our work on improving the melee.
Be sure to forward us your suggestions and feedback so we can continue improving upon the system. Thank you for everything thus far!
Go here to provide us with feedback.
4 New Maps! Sharpton, Dutch Canals & Plains Maps
With this update, we’ll be introducing yet even more maps in Holdfast: Nations At War all featuring different scenarios and environments. They will also be plenty in number! A total of four new maps playable on a variety of different game modes are now being rotated on the official servers.
Inspired by one of the most famous battles during the Napoleonic Wars, Sharpton features two farm houses that where pivotal towards turning the tide of the battle. In this map, both of these conflict points will see plenty of engagements. This map is playable on the Army Battlefield, Assault, Deathmatch and Siege game modes.
Sharpton
Dutch Canals is another map featuring plenty of space for open field engagements, farms surrounded by fences, windmills and a whole lot of flat terrain. This map is playable on the Army Battlefield, Assault and Deathmatch game modes.
Dutch Canals
We have been gathering feedback from various regiments (clans) and event hosts to improve on our current designs for line battle maps. Desert Plains and Grassy Plains II are specifically designed to cater for organised play. You’ll definitely be seeing more of these maps crop up as we progress through the development of the game.
Desert Plains
Grassy Plains II
You’re welcome to hop in and check them out yourself! If you’d like to host these maps on your Community server, further details are provided in the full changelog below.
New Office Space. We’ve Grown The Team!
Besides a few remaining aesthetics, the new office space is pretty much complete. It has been quite the endeavour to set everything up but we’re now in a position to continue growing the team. This is of the utmost necessity for the well-being of the game!
We have been listening very closely as to what the community wants. Improvements upon melee combat, the introduction of cavalry, more naval mechanics or even a map editor all require a programmer’s skill set to be developed.
We’re very pleased to announce our latest addition to the team, Dylan ‘Monroy’ Vassallo. Monroy is working closely with our lead programmer Andreas ‘Dreas’ Grech on a full time basis to bring new and improved gameplay oriented features to the game. He has only been with us for a couple of weeks but thanks to his skill and dedication he already started effectively contributing towards the project! He’s been taking care of integrating game levels, quality of life additions as well as the bagpiper class.
Please join us in welcoming this good chap! We look forward to showing you more of his content.
This is not all there is to this update! You can continue reading the full changelog below.
Changelog 10 - Game Version 0.10.6593.29863
- Bagpipers! A grand total of 22 tunes are available for this class. You can check them out by joining the British faction.
- 5 new tunes for the fifer and drummer musician classes have been added into the game. 2 of those tunes are British and the remaining are French.
- A new map! Sharpton is now playable in game. » Use the following parameter to host the map on your community server: map_name sharpton
- A new map! Dutch Canals is now playable in game. » Use the following parameter to host the map on your community server: map_name dutchcanals
- 2 new line battle maps! Grassy Plains II and Desert Plains are now playable in game. » Use the following parameters to host these maps on your community server: map_name GrassyPlainsII or map_name DesertPlains
- Grenadiers! Chosen from the strongest and largest of soldiers. They’re available to be played in both the British and French factions.
- 2 new line infantry units! The 92nd Gordon Highlanders and Polish Vistula Legion.
- Melee combat improvements! You’ll be seeing more updates on this from us in future patches. This is only the beginning of our work on improving the melee. Here are more specifics. These changes have yet to be tested on high player count servers. » Blocking will be seeing a drastic improvement when it comes to responsiveness, and is no longer highly dependent on latency. » You are now able to go into melee combat whilst crouching. Your character will stand up so you can commence with melee combat. You can do so by pressing the ‘X’ key or striking or blocking with your melee weapon from a crouching position. » A variety of other additions that both directly and indirectly contribute to melee combat from optimisations, fluidity between transitions and general responsiveness.
- Transitions when going from running to aiming and vice versa are now more fluid.
- You can now reload your firearm directly from melee mode. Once again this should add to the overall fluidity of combat!
- You can now cease reloading your firearm by jumping.
- You will now stop crouching if you jump.
- Reworked Arendan River’s Siege mode! This map has been re-designed with the intention to prevent players from losing to much reinforcement’s needlessly by attempting to defend an optional capture point.
- The scoreboard has been re-designed. The player IDs have been removed and are now visible in the Round Players panel instead. We’ve also changed the font to a more readable text.
- Free roam camera improvements! You can now see the names of other players irrespective of the faction you have joined. It’ll certainly come in handy for all those generous fellows who take up their precious time to host events.
- Fixed an issue which caused the free roam camera to collide with invisible walls.
- Spectator camera improvements! You can now view nameplates of other players by rotating your camera when spectating another player. This is yet another addition to aid with the administration of events.
- Server side optimisations. More to come in future updates.
- Additional work to improve game stability.
- You now have the option to listen to your microphone input when speaking through VoIP by enabling ‘Listen Locally’ from the ‘Audio’ settings.
- There’s now a very slight delay when you stop pressing the push to talk key for 3D VoIP.
- The list of official game servers displayed in the ‘Join Other Server’ panel that is accessed through a button on the server browser has been update. You can make use of this if you ever face issues with not being able to see servers in the lobby.
- Multiple language support! The game now supports Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian and Arabic languages. You can now make use of or see these characters being displayed for all the above mentioned languages in the game chat, player names, scoreboard, admin broadcast message as well as the round players panel. We’re now also supporting extra special characters that are especially useful for regimental tags.
- There has also been a variety of changes to fonts in a variety of other places including the main menu and settings options. Everything here was done in preparations for localisation. It’s going to be our next step after multiple language support to ensure that the game is widely available to everyone. More on this in future updates!
- Game tips and map information. We’re now displaying the map’s name, game mode and a variety of tips specific to the game mode being played on the map loading screen. We’ll be including more information in here as the game progresses.
- More line battle maps have been included in the official server map rotation. This was voted on by the community. You can see the results of the poll yourself here on our forums. » Poll - Official server linebattle map rotation. Cast your vote!
- Player joined notifications are no longer displayed when you hide the UI using the ‘Scroll Lock’ key.
- Canyon has been optimised even further.
- Improved the looks of the flora on Grassy Plains.
- We’ve also added more spawn locations on all maps to reduce the chance of players spawning on top of each other.
- Improved the looks of the snow particle effect.
- Improved and changed ambient sounds on a variety of maps.
- Organised the order of classes on the Palisade Arena map.
- Removed HTML tags from the game chat and administrator broadcast messages.
- Fixed a spelling mistake in one of the messages that get displayed when reinforcements are depleted.
- Fixed an issue on Spanish Farm which caused players to fling into the air and access the attic inside the two story house.
- Fixed several spots on the Desert Ruins map which were never intended to be accessible.
- Fixed issues with rain and snow accumulation on various maps.
- Fixed issues with collisions that made some stairs inaccessible on Arendan River.
- Fixed several issues with objects culling (disappearing at long distances) before they should on Arendan River.
- Fixed several errors that occurred whilst playing on the Grassy Plains map.
- Fixed an issue with grass being limited to a certain distance on Fort Christina.
- The official server map rotation has been changed to reduce the chance of night scenes and weather.
- The Join Game button in the main menu has been renamed to Play.
Known Issues
- Sometimes, the leg movement of other players whilst holding a bagpipe doesn't look as intended. We'll be investigating the root cause.
- If you experience a graphical bug on Sharpton, kindly restart your game to solve the issue until we push forward a fix.
- If your 3D VoIP is not working, kindly take a look at the below. We'll be pushing a permanent fix to solve this issue in the upcoming update. » Enable "Stereo Mix" (It's in the recording tab) from your PC's "Sound" settings.
Whilst you’re all enjoying the latest update, we’ve already started our work on the next one. This time around we will be featuring new modes, maps and other additions focused on organised play. We want to give back to the regimental community which has been instrumental towards the success of the game!
You'll also be pleased to hear that there has been plenty of progress on the Prussian faction. Keep a look out on our Facebook and Twitter.
Thank you very much for your support and as always, may good health be yours.
- Anvil Game Studios