Hello everyone, we are so excited to announce that Athena Crisis shipped as 1.0 release on Steam yesterday. It's awesome to finally ship a version of Athena Crisis that we feel like is complete. However, we didn't want to just build a video game, we wanted to build a community! It's also why we wanted to build Invasions from the beginning. Very few people noticed if you look at the keyart you'll spot the crystals and portals off on the side. They've always been part of the plan. That's why there are crystals in the main story, and we are excited that after our characters just talked about them, we can actually interact with them as real items! The entire Athena Crisis multiverse is now finally fully connected, what you do in the game has an impact on others, and it enables emergent gameplay. It's a truly unique feature in this genre. Everything needed to fall into place to ship the feature on release day. Most systems were prepared to support invasions for the past 18 months. We intentionally didn't immediately announce it besides the teasers so that the community could discover the feature together. Thankfully, despite the massive changes, there are only a few minor bugs that will be fixed quickly.

Here is what's new from the past several days

• New: 6 Secret Maps & Secret Ending: The Athena Crisis campaign now features 6 secret maps that explore the factions in our main story further, bringing the total map count of both official campaigns to 50! All campaign maps now have star challenges assigned to them.
• New: Invasions: You can activate the new Power Crystals to enable co-op with friends, but they also open your world to other invaders who may want to battle you. If you win in an invasion you'll receive Chaos Stars, a new type of in-game currency.
• If you invade a player, you can always abandon (give up) the game. If you abandon a game after taking command of the AI, the AI will jump back into the game. As a reward for playing Early Access, each player received a number of crystals so they can try out the feature.
• New: In-Game Shop: You can use stars that you obtain by playing the campaign or through invasions to buy in-game items like crystals, portraits, and skills. Watch out and check back regularly because we'll be adding more exciting items (and skills!) soon.
• New: Feed: Games which can be invaded are posted in -invasions, but you can also view all ongoing games from the past day in a new news feed that's directly in the game. Active Invadable (is that a word?) games will always be on top of the list.
• New: Translations: The game is fully translated into 10 languages and we just shipped the most recent translation changes.
• New: Chaos Star Rankings: You can sort the leaderboard by chaos stars. Who is the most prolific Athena Crisis invader?

• There have been major rewrites and fixes to underlying systems around game actions, giving up, what happens when you miss a turn etc.
• Fixed some issues around game timers and the timer bar not showing up.
• Improved and fixed various design and styling related issues, polished up user profiles a bit.
• Made it so clicking a portrait in the player card and then pressing ESC will take you back to the game you were playing.
• Reduced volume of the fireworks sound.
• Broke and then fixed a bug where skills that the user already unlocked were "temporarily" unlocked again at game end.
• Fixed a bug where the game showed the wrong player turn banners in games with fog.

Improvements Shipped to Invasions Recently

• Every player invading with a Phantom Crystal now receives chaos stars as long as they are not defeated and the main campaign player gets beaten.
• There is now a small chance that something slightly more chaotic happens when using a Phantom Crystal.
• Adjusted the amount of funds a player receives when invading.
• Fixed a bug where the "Command" crystal was disabled when it shouldn't have been.
• Slightly improved player spawn points in some cases.
• Improved invasion Discord messages.
• Fixed an issue with multiple invasions at once.
• Fixed an issue where two crystals might get subtracted when invading (may need more testing).

And last but not least, some balancing changes

• Sneaky Sabotage: Saboteurs now receive 50% more attack and 300% more defense when using this skill.
• Some AI and draft skills were removed from the skill count in your profile, which should allow you to obtain 100% of skills.
• Some portraits for yet to be seen units were removed from the counter in your profile too, allowing you to obtain all current portraits.