Greetings, Brave Ones!

As promised earlier this month, its time for a major update with a bunch of highly requested features including the first localized versions, male heroes and a bunch of AI upgrades! This is a big one for us, and wed love for you to hop into the new build, share thoughts and provide feedback for the new features in our community or in Discord.

Localization Begins (DE, RU, PO)

As those of you following our progress know, it has always been our priority to open the gates ever wider for new adventurers. It started on day 1 when we chose to always release builds for Mac and Linux along with the PC ones, it will continue in the future with the planned console versions, but today, were celebrating our first three localized versions - for German, Polish and Russian. We hope to keep this up and release in as many languages as we can down the road, so stay tuned for more!

Major Changes

• Male Hero Models have been added to the game. This is something weve continuously left for later as gameplay was our primary focus, but it is time.
• Existing save files are not affected by this addition.
• Caverns procedural strategic maps have been added to the game.
• In Skirmish mode you can now configure the map between caverns and grassland environments.
• Continued our tutorial rework, improving the overall flow and adding new tips as well as a new scenario for Overwatch and Brace mechanics. You can now retry or skip scenarios more easily. Some scenarios have controller issues but were working on that and it should still be playable.
• New mission added in the beginning of Act I, this will not break existing save files but will not appear for them when playing either.
• Party movement speed and vision range reduced during worldmap travel.
• Heroes in towns changed so they will never be all of the same class.

Balance

• Improved game balance across all difficulty levels.
• Objects and Guards spawn in the world-map in more balanced patterns to increase replayability.
• Heroes will be limited to level 5 during Act I and will not gain experience after reaching level 5. Future acts will increase this limitation. Existing save files will not have this limitation.
• The Powerful Encouragement upgrade will no longer increase the AP cost of the Encourage ability.

Visual & UI

• Changed the font of the game to improve clarity and readability, let us know how you feel about it!
• New and better indication for currently selected units.
• Ability tooltips are overhauled and will now show more information in a clearer way.
• New Ability visual effects - Chain Lightning, Holy Shackles, Bolster.

Technical & AI

• Performance for the Windows version has been improved, Linux and Mac will get the same treatment soon.
• Strategic AI in Legendary difficulty will now better handle neutral forces and monsters, both in terms of aggression and choosing targets and in combat it will lose less units facing them. This change was started by great feedback from veteran players who noticed Legendary AI is too aggressive towards neutral to a point it harms itself
• Reckless enemy units will no longer move if they are already near an enemy.
• Enemy units will no longer attempt to move to new cover causing them to trigger Overwatch or Attack of Opportunity unless their current cover is compromised.
• Gharzan and Gharbarak will now have Goblin hero classes.

Bug Squashing

Stacking potions will no longer sometimes disappear, including when returning to the world map.

Fixed several bugs causing faulty scaling of UI elements (for example, sometimes enemy unit cards became visually broken).

Cinematic Camera will now work properly on the first attack in a mission. It is no longer possible to move on the spot and waste movement points this way.

Several bugs in the party merging screen have been fixed to prevent unit loss / duplication as well as empty party scenarios.

Fixed Ballista to have 3AP like other units, and changed the cost of its an attack to be 3AP.

Game will no longer get stuck when using hotkeys to open the skill tree or party screen while there is no party selected. Thank you for keeping up the good fight, for supporting us, and for sharing your thoughts to help us make the game better. Onwards!

[ 2019-06-18 20:54:47 CET ] [ Original post ]