Important regarding save games!

We were forced to rewrite parts of the saving and loading system to make certain improvements to the game, and thus old saves will NOT be compatible. You will therefore not see unsupported save files in your list of games to load. We apologise for the inconvenience! In the future, if you want to avoid this problem, you can always turn off automatic updates of the game through Steam, and wait to update the game until you are confident that you won't need to load any old save files anymore. We will do our best to inform you when new updates break old save files.

About this update!

This is the second "general improvements" update since we launched TFC into Early Access. Your feedback has been fantastic! We're very excited about this update. Of course, we can't get through all the feedback at once, but we decided to take some extra time to go through as much as possible, before moving on to new content. We try to respond to most feedback, and if we haven't looked at your suggestion yet in this update, we still take notes. We'll keep making these types of general improvements even as we shift more focus towards new content.

What's the plans for new content?

At the same time as we've worked on this update, we've also been laying out a comprehensive road map for future Major Content Updates, which we'll upload during Early Access as well as past 1.0. You think we've included all our best ideas already into TFC? Think again! It's safe to say that we'e thrilled to start working on it all! Expect a much heavier focus on new features and content moving forward from this update. We're not quite ready to share our plans yet, but stay tuned for more on this!

General improvements

Now, let's get into the nitty gritty of this update!

New high-level pathfinding written from scratch

The high-level pathfinding worked well for the most part. Until it didn't ... the red arrow in the image below shows what could happen in certain cases.
What's more important than decent pathfinding in an RTS game? Therefore, we decided to completely rewrite the high-level pathfinding. The new system is more robust, generally leads to more optimal paths, and it even comes with performance improvements. The green arrow in the image above shows the path a villager will take in this version.

Fixed an ugly performance bottleneck

This problem could make the game constantly hick. The high-level pathfinding system would be told that a battering ram could get through to the watchtower in the walled-in area, and so it would proceed to find a path. This meant that the pathfinding would continously search the entire map for a path that would never be found, using up a lot of uneccessary resources. This would happen with battering rams against partly walled in areas, so it was fairly common for example against the last hordes in Horde Mode, after they successfully sieged down some of your walls.
In this version, the pathfinding will be correctly told a path doesn't exist straight away, and so the game will handle this thereafter; only using minimal resources to take care of these cases!

Units exiting Palace or Watchtower spawn towards the correct direction

Before, garrisoned units always spawned at the bottom of the building, even if the rally point was set eg. to the north. Now, units correctly spawn towards the direction of the rally point.
The red arrow shows what would happen in 06970, whereas the green arrow shows what will happen in 06990.

Smoother resource deliveries

Another side-effect of the new pathfinding is that villagers will walk more optimised paths to delivery points. Villagers had a tendency to deliver resources to the bottom side of buildings, which is no longer the case. This improvement might seem negligible, but we've found the difference makes such an impact on resource gathering speeds that we did some re-assessments of these!

Fixed a problem with ranged units changing attack focus

If an attack animation was interrupted by changing focus to another unit, and the projectile was yet to be launched, this would make the unit idle for the rest of the attack animation, which meant losing almost an entire attack. In this version, the attack animation will reset immediately if the attack trigger (firing the projectile) has not yet happened. This generally makes changing unit to focus much smoother. Overall, this makes ranged units more fun to use!

Animals in Fog of War (community feedback)

This has been a long-awaited community request, as previously you would have to remember the placement of animal flocks after scouting the map. Now the game remembers for you, adding another mechanic to the game that helps you stay on top of things.
Here you can see a mouflon flock in fog of war. When assigned to hunt for the mouflons, the villagers will automatically move to the flock and look for meat to skin or animals to hunt. If there are none left, the villagers will move to the flock position and idle.

Under attack notifications (community feedback)

If you click on it, the camera will move to the battle location. We said we would figure out a hotkey for this, but we haven't found a good solution yet that doesn't break the current hotkey scheme. We'll aim to tackle this as we rework and add customisable hotkeys in a future update.

Cleaned up the resources panel

We've changed the position of all the elements in this panel, such that all the resource stock boxes are next to each other. This should make it somewhat easier to read.

Population and housing numbers have merged into one panel (community feedback)

Meat icon (community feedback)

Since meat can, and fruit cannot, be delivered to a resource camp, we needed to add a distinction between meat and foraged (or farmed) food. The new meat icon indicates if your villagers have been hunting for food and are therefore carrying game.

Zoom in further with the mouse wheel (community feedback)

We've added an additional zoom in level. To achieve this, we've seperated the zoom in and zoom out buttons. And! You can now use the middle mouse scroll wheel to zoom in and out.

Building foundations show which player it belongs to

Villagers drop off resources after constructing and taking over a farm (community feedback)

This change is part of our goal to streamline the game. When looking for a new farmer, you don't have to make sure he or she drops off any resources at a delivery point anymore. Just order him or her to make the farm, and the game will no longer penalise you by removing all the resources the villager was carrying. This will only work for the villager actually constructing the farm. Other villagers helping out but not becoming a farmer will not have their resources automatically delivered.

Attack move is confirmed with Left Mouse Button (community feedback)

It used to be RMB, but we decided to swap this, in order to align the controls more with traditional RTS conventions. RMB is now used to cancel attack move. The same is the case for the 'Repair' command.

Escape cancels actions and closes menu panels (community feedback)

ESC now cancels all command actions like placing a building, and resets selection of tile, building, resource, unit and units. In addition - Can close in-game Settings panel by pressing ESC - Additional hotkey for closing Technology Tree is ESC - ESC is no longer a hotkey for opening in-game menus

Multiplayer and skirmish end screens show total resources gathered

Instead of only food gathered. Also, villagers and warriors count titles have changed to "Villagers trained" and "Warriors trained" to make it more clear what these numbers mean.

Other general improvements

- Showing error message in building view when there is no space around a military training building for a unit to spawn - Skirmish AI is even more aggressive on gathering food during starvation - Skirmish AI will now attempt to protect resource camps outside its immediate base - Skirmish AI will no longer make any buildings that don't contribute to gathering resources while starving - If a Village Center rally point is set to a farm then newly trained villagers will automatically find the closest empty farm to take over - In-game chat box opens on key down instead of key up - Description of Elite Heavy Axeman in tehcnology tree is more precise - Save games are ordered by creation date instead of alphabetically - Enemy buildings show in fog of war in the minimap - Spectators can see all player chats

Balance changes

This is the first update since the EA release with substantial balance changes. We've played lots of games, talked to the community, and followed the last 2on2 tournament closely: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1674820/view/3228530086577059201 Even before the tournament started, we saw clear indications of a meta emerging: all-in on slingers early and never any Palace being constructed! This update attempts to fix the lack of variety caused by this meta.

Main focus areas for balance

- Nerfed all-in Slinger rush as it turned out to be overwhelmingly hard to hold out against - Nerfed Sappers as they could just bulldoze themselves into the enemy base and take out Village Center - Nerfed Watchtowers as they are cheap and were too overpowering as an offensive construction - Adjusted movement speeds so it's harder to kite Heavy Spearman - Reduced Palace costs so it's easier to transition from early game when opponent all-ins pre-Palace units - Fixed "broken" Marketplace

Archer and Javelinman no longer have access to helmet upgrades

In addition, we've made it clear exactly which units benefit from the Copper Helmet and Bronze Helmet furnace upgrades.

Other unit changes

- Slinger base ranged attack damage is 6 (from 7) - Slinger training time is 15s (from 12s) - Slinger has 2 base siege damage (from 3) - Lead bullets no longer provide slingers with extra ranged attack and vision ranges - Lead bullets provides +1 siege damage to Slinger (from +2) - Sapper deals 12 base siege damage (from 15) - Sapper has 6 base movement speed (from 8) - Elite Sapper gains 4 extra damage against defensive structures (from 6) - Javelinman has 6 base movement speed (from 7) - Heavy Spearman has 6 base movement speed (from 5) - Heavy Axeman has 170 hitpoints (from 160) - Battering ram has 3 armour against ranged attacks (from 4)

Technologies

- Improved Woodcutting increases villager wood cutting speed by 30% (from 60%) - Bronze Smelting costs 6 knowledge points to unlock (from 5)

Buildings

- Palace costs 150 food, 150 clay, 150 wood (from 200 food, 200 clay, 100 wood) - Watchtower has 225 hitpoints (from 250) - Watchtower has 0 base siege armor (from 1)

Gathering rates

- Foraging gathering rate is per 2.3s (from 2.4s) - Skinning animal rate is per 2.5s (from 2.3s)

Animals

- Gazelle has 10 hitpoints (from 20) - Mouflon has 20 hitpoints (from 30)

Marketplace

- Trade 10 food for 15 metal (from 15 food for 10 metal) - Trade 10 metal for 20 food (from 10 metal for 25 food)

Bug fixes

We haven't fixed any game-breaking bugs, as we didn't find any, apart from the pathfinding issues described earlier. We have therefore tried to fix as many minor ones as we could. - Description of Resource Camp now mentions bricks as a resource that can be dropped off there - Fixed that "lack of housing" could show even though a unit was successfully in training - Attacking an animal from a garrisoned Watch Tower no longer sets rally point - Logo fades in correctly after leaving multiplayer lobbies in all resolution setups - Toggling idle villager hotkeys no longer work while in attack move, place building or similar states - Unit shadows render on top of farms - Scout deals full damage to animals - Clicking anywhere in multiplayer room will no longer submit chat text - Joining a multiplayer room at the same time as the host starts the game no longer leads the game to crash, and an error message will say "Game has started!" - Fixed graphical glitch that happened when a projectile like an arrow hit Battering Ram - Removed several memory leaks - Ordering villagers to construct village center very soon after placing the building no longer causes issue - Fixed a crash that could happen late game in rare cases in Skirmish Mode - Selecting an empty control groups deselects the bottom HUD correctly - Can no longer select Tribe unit if added to control group with SHIFT+NUM and if tribe is moving towards Village Center - Palace starts with 10 hitpoints upon placement (from 1) - Elite Sapper deals correct damage to walls - Fixed a rare crash that could happen when villagers delivered resources - After hovering building production tooltip and then pressing NUM to select a saved group of units, the tooltip will disappear - Holding SHIFT while placing Palace or Wonder no longer lets you place multiple of these buildings - Fixed issues with "go back to gather resources" command - Units will no longer in some odd cases reach target "one node early" - Fixed that in rare cases the Tribe unit would not disappear but move to the bottom side of Village Center and idle after placement of Village Center instead - Unit selection circle shows when unit is standing on a farm - After saving a game buildings will no longer show as in construction after rediscovering them and then moving away