I hope you're wearing your flame retardant undies, the Butterbomb is here. Massive changes in this patch both from a feature perspective and balance adjustments.

Campfires

First up: campfires have made their way to multiplayer! Campfires are like a mini-mill/farm combo. They cost 60 food, take 30 seconds to build, and they produce 1 food per second for 300 seconds. They do stave off starvation and they do have to be destroyed to win.

Map Customization

Not just campfires though, desert, snow, and other environments are now mixed into multiplayer matches!
On the world selection screen in unranked play, you'll see this list of options for world generation. You can add more gristmills, make larger maps, or play in a variety of environments featured in the Single Player campaign. Now you can make your opponent fear Howling Vell as if it was their first time all over again.

Massive Balance Changes

Our goal with the balance in this patch was both to mix things up and provide more incentive to tech up out of tier 1 play. So many matches were ending in the first 3 minutes that we had to make some major changes to Lizards, Toads, Moles, and Pigeons. Boar - Get ready for the Butterbomb! Slower movement (67%). HP-20 (80) His flamethrower No longer does 4x damage to large structures like warrens and gristmills, instead does 2x damage to ALL structures. Upon death, he explodes in a 9x9 tile massive explosion that does 10 damage to units and 20 damage to structures. We made this change so as to make Uncle Butter’s gameplay have a little more texture and decision making. He’s a lit fuse, kill him before he gets to your base! Barbed Wire - HP+5 (30), any damage it deals out it also takes. Will no longer damage commanders. We made this change because there was no real way to clear Barbed Wire from the field with certain unit compositions. Now you can just tank the damage to make a path. Barbed Wire should see lots more play because of the follow two unit nerfs. Mole - No longer does double damage to structures. Cannot be sold after they have fully spawned. Damage -1 (2) HP +5 (30). This is admittedly underpowered now, but Moles were such a huge problem in high level play last patch that we had to nerf them. Expect them to get a buff next patch. Lizard - Range-1 (1). HP+1 (10) Having a ‘melee’ unit with 2 range never made any sense, and significantly reduced barbed wire usage. Making lizards range 1 makes barbed wire more effective against them and reduces their viability in large numbers. To go along with this nerf, though, we made a fix for targeting and patchfinding that will allow lizards to surround their targets more effectively in large numbers. They can still hit air units. Pigeon - Range -1 (1), HP -1 (4). Reducing pigeon range means that the max number of heal stacks is 9 rather than 25, which should reduce the Tier3+Pigeon Spam strategies we were seeing (while still leaving that somewhat viable). Toad - Apply equal damage to all in AOE (6 to all instead of 18 to single target, 3 to others). HP + 3 (10). Double damage to structures. Explode on own tile rather than target’s. While the previous meta had toad as the third element of a tier 1 rock paper scissors, this change is intended to make toad be viable versus squirrels, and to force your opponent to tech up. Exploding in their own tile means that they are more likely to hit 3 units rather than 6, so they should be marginally weaker versus lizards even though the lizard range was reduced. Snake - Remove ability to poison structures. It was always dumb. It's gone now. They are still good. Chameleon - Will not unstealth to attack the enemy commander. Owl - Removed death-bomb. Mice last 60 seconds rather than 30 (so they can build up to a maximum of 12 mice). HP +10 (50). Mice no longer aggro to enemy commander. Mouse damage -1 (2). Might be a sleeper hit here. Fox - Damage +6 (24). HP -10 (25). Cast time +0.25 secs (0.25), post shot movement freeze +0.25 secs (0.5). Another day another fox change. Hopefully she's easier to catch now that she has to stand still for a full 3/4 second around each shot. Badger - Fixed bug where her weapon spindown was taking as long as the weapon spin up. Minigun now spins down in 1 second, rather than 6. Machine Gun Turret - HP -3 (32) Landmine - Damage +3 (12, 4 to AOE). Warrens - Health per tier: 50, 75, 100 (was 60 for all tiers)

Other Stuff

Version number now visible on main menu

Players no longer spawn quite so close together

Passworded lobbies fixed

Crash in audio code fixed

Fixed issue that would cause the match to end when a spectator leaves a match in progress

Still hard at work on GOG crossplay, no news yet

These changes will all be coming to the next PS4 patch, no schedule on that yet

[ 2017-10-17 00:23:30 CET ] [ Original post ]