Request to our players: If you had not previously given Empire of Ember a thumbs-up on Steam, and feel it now deserves one, please help out by leaving a review, or updating your old review. A lot of prior thumbs-down were for launch issues that no longer exist. Once we are mostly positive again I can launch a new marketing push, and the new players will help with continued development.

Major changes since the last content patch two weeks ago

Save files should be compatible, however I strongly recommend starting a new game to take advantage of the economy fixes and to get the new entropy spell for free. You get a certain amount of resources for free by skipping the tutorial so feel free to do so.

1. Most major bugs fixed
2. You no longer get significant amounts of money from breaking things, the amount of objects in dungeons was massively unbalancing the economy and making it not necessary to trade with villages or train units.
3. All player attributes reworked so all attributes are now useful. In particular you can't just kite or dodge endlessly, so ranged weapons are actually ranged now.
4. You can now buy higher level equipment from the market with random probabilities, rather than having to buy all equipment from lowest to highest tier
5. The bow does much more base damage so missing at long range is no longer punishing. However, headshot damage without abilities is reduced. Combined with not being able to dodge endlessly is now truly a long range weapon as intended.
6. Player melee attacks now always hit all enemies in range, rather than the first enemy, making it much more powerful
7. Staffs / Wands heavily rebalanced. They no longer slow down the player when 'reloading' but cannot be 'reloaded' while running or dodging.
8. Added entropy spell to quickly break items in dungeons

Minor changes since the last patch on the 28th

1. Reduce number of enemies in dungeons
2. Markets should not sell equipment the player already has
3. Fixed highlighting a destroyed village just showing a white square
4. Player can play through additional storyline missions that are fairly difficult
5. Fix benefice sword
6. Fix werewolf unit
7. Updated Post Processing profiles to share consistent effects across all profiles
8. Fix roaming horde units overspawning
9. Fix stairs in dungeon requiring player to jump
10. Fix unit being stuck in getting up state forever when trapped
11. Reenable tree removal code for AI so they don't spawn on top of trees
12. Unlocking discovered units now costs spellbooks instead of gold
13. PotatoTheScourge: Fix crash caused by going to build mode, then options screen
14. Orgasinator: Entropy hits units, and kills villagers you are supposed to rescue
15. Orgasinator: Greatly increase cooldown, increase mana cost, decrease non-upgraded range of blink so it can't be used to kite enemies so easily or without risk
16. Orgasinator: From always dropping 3 gold, environmental props have 1/4 chance to drop 1 gold. The reason was that the player could earn over 1000 gold from breaking everything in a dungeon, where the intent was breaking props was a small bonus that would not significantly impact the economy.
17. Orgasinator: From always dropping 1 stone/wood/steel have a 1/10th chance to drop 1 from random props. But you always get rewarded from breaking enemy weapons and shields
18. Orgasinator: Increase pickup radius of gold by 1.95 and pickup radius of other objects by 1.5. This is to make it so you don't have to wait for broken object fragments to disappear before pickup.

Major changes planned within the next month

1. Rework melee combat with better animations and enemy feedback. Currently there is not a good interactive feedback cycle between attacks and blocks, and the animations feel disconnected.
2. Add custom animations for most spells
3. Add enemy cities. Some players have complained there isn't enough content. This is because the focus of the game was always meant to be downloading enemy cities. While it is currently in the game it's not in the forefront and easy to find. Most likely enemy cities will send units to attack the player and the player's city, either through diplomacy or simply being always hostile.
4. More unit sounds. While most unit sounds are currently fine as they come from Ember, they are missing fear sounds or sounds for certain actions.
5. Localize to Chinese. I hired a professional company to help with this so expect the quality to be fairly good.
6. Continue to balance gameplay generally. My main concern at this point is the game is too difficult.
7. Restart marketing effort. I had stopped trying to market the game over the last month while I fixed the bugs and balance issues reported. I'll gauge user feedback but it seems like the recent reviews have all been positive. If this trend continues I'll dig deep and find a marketing company to help us with that.