Songs of Conquest - HOMM2-inspired turn-based strategy adventure game

[cyborgboy95]

Dev-vlog #45 - Sim turns, game balancing and much more!​

 

[cyborgboy95]

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/867210/view/3325360490863262344

Roadmap reveal

Hello friends! We are happy to be back with a huge development update. This time we are doing a traditional written blog post, just to make sure that it can be translated to all the various languages the game is available in.

Team Lavapotion, at our offices (and elsewhere), celebrating the start of the Early Access period!
First and foremost, the whole team wants to send out a big thank you to our players! Your comments, ideas and feedback means the world to us. We have received so many cool suggestions and just general support. Keep in mind, we already spent over five years developing this game and we are planning to spend a few more to get it just right! To finally have a community to share the game with is just an awesome privilege for our small team.

With that said, it’s now finally time to look forward to what the future holds for Songs of Conquest and you players!


Please click the image for a better view of the roadmap. You can also find it on www.songsofconquest.com/roadmap

We have tried to listen to the whole community and strike a balance between features that cater to both multiplayer and singleplayer experiences. Simultaneous turns is a huge addition that is currently released on the Public Test Realm. So you can jump right in and try it out at this moment, but don’t expect it to be perfect, just yet! The same goes for difficulty options in the campaigns, which is something many of you wanted! Normal is a little bit easier than before and Hard is a bit tougher.

The random map generator is something many have asked for, to give the game more longevity, and we have heard you all. That is why we are placing it high on our prioritization list. The same goes for more campaigns, so you’ll get one for each of the four factions!

A lot has happened in the last five years. This is how the adventure map used to look five years ago, and how it looks right now!

There is lots more good stuff to come. First and foremost, the AI will continue to be worked on during the full Early Access period and beyond. It is at the core of the singleplayer experience and it is super important for us to keep improving it. The same of course goes for general quality of life improvements, bug fixing and optimization.

New factions are also highly requested, and something we've always thought about adding more of. But they are very time-consuming to produce. We want to do it, and we will do it, but we don’t know when.

Keep in mind that the roadmap is a living document. We will always need to weigh in new ideas and general improvements to every planned feature, but this is how our plan looks right now. We will always strive to create the best game possible at each given moment.

The combat screen has also undergone a lot of iterations in the last five years. Makes you wonder how it will look after a few more years in development!

Thanks to the success of the Early Access launch we are also expanding and looking for more team members. If you want to work with us as either Community Manager or Lead Artist, check out the job postings on www.lavapotion.com/jobs.

And finally, thank you to everyone who has decided to take this journey together with us. Please know that the whole team is pretty much going on vacation during July (the Swedish summer is short but sweet!) and we won’t be communicating or developing new features. We’ll be back in action early to mid August, so that’s when you should expect to see updates again!

This song is best sung together!

 

[holla_cabezas_de_mierda]

is the game scheduled to be in EA all through 2023 as well?

 

[lukaszek]

is sseth discount good for what it is?

 

[Late Bloomer]

Don't be enticed by this videos trickery. The game is 100% pozzed.

 

[InD_ImaginE]

Don't be enticed by this videos trickery. The game is 100% pozzed.

the video doesnt even talk about narrative content and shit

the main part of the review is just pure on gameplay and autism perspective of abusing game system.. of which the review video is correct. There are lot of exploit in the game and it is somewhat a decent take on HOMM gameplay formula

not everybody subscribe to "muh idpol" school of reviewing shits

 

[Trithne]

The 4 factions are pretty decent as is, and this would let them focus on finalising mechanics and fully rounding off what they have, and then I expect additional factions would be dlc and come with a campaign.

 

[Harthwain]

4 factions is OK, provided there is enough diversity between them to play differently.

 

[lukaszek]

still doing human campaign. Does this game offer unique artifacts? So far everything is boring bland bonus...

Are there map movement penalties?
Any statuses/curses inflicted by enemies?
Any bonuses? Skeletons do not appear to be arrow resistant for example?

 

[luj1]

EA

gg

 

[Dayyālu]

Tried playing 4-player map as the undead vs easy AI without any prior knowledge of the game.

Did pretty much the same, I can echo your opinions. Wasted a nice afternoon testing stuff, and in the end I'm glad that I didn't buy it and instead did an "extended demo" test.

Shit is fast, well done and well presented. The soundtrack does his work fine, the graphics are nice (and I usually dislike a lot fake-retro graphics just because) and everything is easy to understand, particularly if you already played HoMM. The problem is, HoMM exists. For sure the MP will be far more balanced and interesting and the mechanics less obscure and janky, but at the moment.... I'd still prefer to play HoMM3 for my singleplayer needs if I had the time. The game feels almost barebones at times, the factions are interesting and developed but it feels....limited.

Factions are different but they don't feel very different. The Magic sistem is interesting but it's a bit more clunky than the classical HoMM3, but maybe that's me and I can't adapt properly. The AI is a bit schizo and tries desperately to snipe your settlements instead of engaging properly, resulting at times in a whack-a-mole gameplay loop.

I'd wait until I see how much blood and content the Devs put into this before buying. The amount of content they threw out in 5 years isn't a lot, truth be told, if they truly started development of this in 2017.

EDIT: Aww fuck, Swedes. This explains a lot. If this was done by some Eastern Euro sweatshop we'll be at the 26+ faction added.

 

[lukaszek]

skellies are 50% resistant to arrows, iirc

updated versions are, it appears to be more about the shield than being made of bones?

anyway after completing 2 campaigns, I feel like something is missing.
campaigns: when playing on hard it feels like strategy is to try push to some border town with bottleneck and keep fighting enemy heroes with town defenses while slowly building army being able to resist while on the field. As such whole thing became a bit tedious.

I very much like heroes with positioning. It can sometimes screw you if you are unlucky with terrain. Random fights with elevation in the middle are more about bringing higher losses on your end than anything.

What doesnt work for me is magic and army size progression. Both could be fixed with balancing I think.
Magic feels a bit samey across the line mainly due to abundance of dmg spells. It could use more buffs/debuffs instead. Spells that affect positioning or battlefield are cool. Spell improvements from higher specialisation feel uninspired

I like the concept of having max unit stacks. What Id like to see is having various tiers being more comparable. Sort of like 5 dragons having same or worse fire power to 100 troglodytes but having other bonuses like speed/movement while also higher hp pool helping with attrition while traveling map.
As it stands heroes gain too many unit slots. High level hero was already moving scales in his favor due to higher offense/defense/magic/other implemented crap. Now you can get twice the max army size on top of that which creates a snowball effect. Slots progression should be limited drastically, with those rare artifacts offering extra one over max.
This would allow for nice, more even battles, where fighting your opponent would be a bit more about winning economically in the long run - you can move the battlefront when you either exhaust enemy finances or army population. I think it was intended as it would further lead towards more evenly experienced heroes usage.
Possibly some small adjustments would need to be made to acidemias. Thinking about them some bonuses are meh/boring/useless like being able to build 2 buildings at once.

Multiple options to dealing with captured cities are nice and all have their uses. Would be nice if you could replace the hero being stuck inside for few turns with their army.

Im missing cool artifacts with unique enchantments like in homm series. Unless I just didnt experience them in campaigns

 

[Infinitron]

GameBanshee preview: https://www.gamebanshee.com/previews/126682-songs-of-conquest-preview/all-pages.html

Introduction

Developed by Lavapotion, Songs of Conquest is described as a turn-based strategy adventure game that fuses RPG, tactical combat and kingdom management. Which, when you get right down to it, means a game that follows in the footsteps of the likes of Heroes of Might and Magic, Age of Wonders and Disciples.

And seeing how these days we're not getting any new HoMM games, Disciples is taking its cues from King's Bounty, and Age of Wonders is experimenting with various 4X mechanics, a new game of this type is very much welcome.

So, when Songs of Conquest launched into early access, we figured we simply had to check it out.

Wielders of Might and Magic

On the most basic level Songs of Conquest is a turn-based strategy game where you have an overworld map filled with settlements and points of interest. Your goal is to use several "heroes" called Wielders here to explore this map, gather resources, develop your settlements, produce and hire an army, and defeat your enemies.

Seeing how the game wears its inspirations on its sleeve, it's safe to say that if you know Heroes of Might and Magic, and HoMM III in particular, you'll figure out Songs of Conquest pretty much instantly. And if you're new to this particular genre, the early access version already has a series of tutorials that explain how things work.

In fact, a lot of the game's design decisions seem to stem from the developers' desire to fix this or that perceived issue with HoMM III or implement certain features introduced to that game by one of its many mods.

So, assuming you know your way around a HoMM game, let's go over some of the features that set Songs of Conquest apart from its predecessors.

When developing a settlement, you no longer have a town screen with a set selection of buildings, and instead, you have these building plots around your settlement that come in small, medium, and large. It's totally up to you what you build on these plots and in what order. If you fancy a particular unit, nothing is stopping you from just planting ten production buildings for it.

Certain buildings and building upgrades require other buildings to be constructed first, but you can simply build the prerequisite, upgrade your desired building, and then delete the prerequisite and build something else in its spot.

This new system leads to some interesting tactical considerations, especially when you throw the game's approach to resources into the mix.

You see, Songs of Conquest has six resources. Three of them are basic - gold, stone and wood. And three are more precious - glimmerweave, ancient amber and celestial ore. And instead of designing maps in such a way that you usually have easy access to stone and wood, here you can produce these basic resources right in your settlement, allowing the developers to be more creative with resource bottlenecks.

Depending on which resources you can easily access, you'll have to choose between building an army of somewhat weaker but easily amassed units or the rarer more expensive ones.

And this ties into the game's Command system where unit stacks have hard caps (that you can later increase through research) and each of your Wielders starts with only three stack slots (upgrading the Command skill and equipping certain artifacts can eventually unlock up to nine of these slots).

On the one hand, this neuters the cheesy strategy of endlessly splitting your units to bait retaliations. But on the other, this makes the power gap between low-level and high-level Wielders downright unbridgeable.


Moving on to the game's factions, the current early access build has four of them - an alliance between humans and fairies, the undead and the scholars raising them, a renaissance-age faction of merchants and mercenaries, and a faction of swamp-dwelling frog people that can evolve into dragons.

All of these factions are distinct and fun to play, maybe with the exception of the necromancers who the developers seem to hate due to some unresolved HoMM III PTSD. Right now, there are no plans to add any more factions during early access. But after the game gets a full release, we may get some more.

What spoils some of the fun, however, is how you go about conquering your enemies. Whenever you capture a settlement, you can either raze it, convert it, or occupy it. Razing a settlement clears out all of its buildings and lets you rebuild it anew. Occupying it provides you with extra income per turn. And converting turns an enemy settlement into one of your own, swapping unit-producing buildings as necessary.

This leads to two things. First - you can't ever own settlements of different factions or have armies with mixed units. Second - because you can convert settlements, while the units they produce are all unique, all factions have the exact same building progression, and that can be a bit boring. I don't know if there are any plans for this, but it would be cool if the developers added a few unique buildings to every faction with their own requirements and bonuses at some point.

When talking about a HoMM-style game, we should of course mention its heroes. Or Wielders, as they're called here. Songs of Conquest's Wielders have four basic attributes - offense, defense, movement, and view radius. Having movement as a separate attribute means you no longer suffer penalties for hiring a slow army. Beyond that, you also get plenty of artifacts, points of interest, and skills that adjust your movement points, meaning you don't just get Logistics, Boots of Speed, and win.

The game's skill system is fairly robust and more complex than it initially appears. Upon leveling up you can choose between learning or upgrading several skills, with your skill choices apparently influencing the options you will get further down the line. Higher skill tiers also tend to provide additional bonuses, as opposed to just making a skill stronger, and initially, you may not know about those. But to the game's credit, it has a Codex listing all of its skills, artifacts, and whatnot.

Beyond that, every eight levels you get to choose a Power, and those generally offer game-changing bonuses, like a blanket flat damage increase for your army or a global unit production bonus.

Another important thing to mention when talking about Wielders is that they're called Wielders because they wield magic, and that whole system is fairly interesting here.

Instead of a mana pool, your Wielders have access to five basic types of Essence, which translates into five magic schools. You also have a decent number of spells that combine several Essence types. You gain Essence through skills, artifacts, points of interest, and last but not least, your troops. Every time a unit gets a turn, it adds some Essence to your Wielder's pool, which results in some interesting considerations when assembling a magic-focused army, where you want to have a lot of unit stacks in order to maximize your Essence generation.

And while initially, Songs of Conquest's magic may seem weak to the point of uselessness, once you figure out how it works, you realize that it's actually very powerful.


Right off the bat, it's important to mention that there are no global spells in the game. And in combat, the only limitation for how many spells you can cast at any given point is your Essence pool. Seeing how the game has plenty of powerful utility spells, using them creatively can win you many a battle.

And as for the damage-dealing spells, while they start off incredibly weak, a magic-focused Wielder can improve their magic damage in a variety of ways. And here's the part that took me a while to figure out. The game has a number of skills that initially give your Wielder +2 Essence of a certain type per combat turn. Which is really not a lot, to the point that those skills read as borderline useless.

What I didn't realize initially is that once you level those skills up to level 2 and higher, they start unlocking new tiers of spells, making your magic significantly more potent.

When it comes to battles, the general template here is once again taken from HoMM III with its hexagonal battlefields where two armies take turns to pummel one another, but with a good deal of twists.

For example, initiative is now decoupled from speed. You can't order your troops to wait, but instead, a lot of them have activatable skills that do something, like prepare an "overwatch" attack or grant some buff. You can position your troops before a battle, but without anything resembling a Tactics skill, the spots available for unit placement at times feel almost random.

Units in Songs of Conquest also have areas of control that grant them attacks of opportunity against enemies that try to move past them. On the flip side, you don't have anything like morale or luck bonuses here. But instead, you get momentum that makes your units fight better after you wipe out a full stack of enemies.

And seemingly straight from some mods, you get the fairly convenient option to first try a quick battle and then either accept its results or resolve the battle manually. Though usually going for the quick battle option is only advised against much weaker opponents, as the game's AI is currently nowhere near where it should be.

At this point, the game has two difficulty levels - easy and normal, and even on normal, you would need to actively be trying to lose when playing against the AI in a skirmish match.

Still, some of the currently-available skirmish maps do offer some nice challenges when it comes to dealing with the neutral monsters blocking your progress. Unfortunately, there aren't that many maps, and the random map generator is not available just yet.

But at the very least, there's already a heap of community-created maps available for download from within the game. A lot of them offer interesting challenges and showcase just how powerful the game's map editor can be.

When not playing against the AI, you can engage in some multiplayer, either online or using the good old hotseat approach. And on top of that, I should note that Songs of Conquest supports Steam's Remote Play Together feature.

I don't know if I'm late to the party, but this feature was mind-blowing to me. Basically, once you own the game, you can click a button and invite any of your Steam friends to play with you, even if they don't own the game. On their end, they don't need to download anything and just get a window where they can share your inputs and play with you as if you're sitting in the same room. Personally, I find this fascinating.


Beyond just skirmish, you can also engage in some campaign action. Right now, the game has two campaigns representing two of the game's four factions, with the intention to have a campaign for every faction before the game leaves early access.

These campaigns are really well-designed and are significantly more narrative-driven than their HoMM counterparts. The only negative thing there is that each campaign only has four missions, and they tend to end once things get really interesting. On top of just new campaigns, I really would like it if the developers expanded the existing ones with at least a couple of extra missions.

Technical Information

Despite this being an early access release, I haven't encountered any major bugs or issues while playing Songs of Conquest. It being a Unity game, once you reveal a large chunk of the map, you may experience some slowdowns (despite the game not using a lot of resources), but other than that, it runs pretty smooth and takes mere moments to save and load.

Initially, the game's pixelated visuals may seem too busy and even somewhat off-putting, but once you get used to them and learn to recognize what everything is, you start seeing them as charming.

The audio design, on the other hand, is unimpeachable. Both the soundtrack and the miscellaneous effects are great. You even get these quick little musical intermissions between campaign missions.

The game's UI could still use some work. While it's admirable that the game basically has four screens - the overworld, the combat arenas, the character sheet, and the spell book, recruiting and moving your troops around, and splitting and combining stacks, feels way more clunky than it needs to be.

And in general, things seem to be a bit too streamlined. It really saps a lot of flavor out of the whole experience when you claim some structure or pick up an item and only get a quick visual confirmation for that instead of some neat little story about a cranky old witch or an ancient idol. I once again blame the HoMM mods for that.

But on a more mechanical side, this streamlining also results in you frequently missing those quick popups telling you what exactly you just picked up, or what the structure you just claimed does. And with the game having points of interest you can visit at regular intervals, but no proper calendar and a team of astrologers to mark it, it can be really tough to keep track of that stuff.

Another thing that's mildly annoying and should be fixed before the game gets a full release is the fact that you can't load a game from a losing battle, and instead have to quit or lose first, and then reload.

Conclusion

I'm writing this preview after spending roughly 40 hours with Songs of Conquest, which includes beating the currently available campaigns, playing a few skirmish maps, and engaging in some hotseat multiplayer. And if you ask me, that's roughly what you would expect from a full game, not just an early access release.

What's currently in the game is familiar yet fresh, fairly well-polished, and most of all, fun. And in order to become truly great, the game simply needs more stuff - more factions, more neutral monsters, more unique combat scenarios and points of interest, more artifacts, more missions, and maps.

If the developers can deliver that, Songs of Conquest can become one of the finest representatives of its genre. And while it's still early, at this point, there's no reason to doubt the team.

 

[Infinitron]

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/867210/view/3342255406637187238

Upcoming AI Improvements!
Hello everyone!

We've been quiet for a while as the team has enjoyed their Swedish summer vacations. But, since a few weeks back the team is now hard at work again. And we are soon to drop some news and updates for you. Starting right now we would like to introduce you to the upcoming AI improvements. Some of these improvements are already live on our internal development branch, however, AI improvements are an ongoing process, rather than just one update!

Since this is one of the most discussed topics in the community, we want to emphasize that we value your feedback a lot and are aware of many issues related to the AI. It is definitely not finished and we will continuously work on improving it as time goes by - So please, if you have the time, post your feedback regarding the AI in the comments section of this Blog Post. It helps a lot!

We've started to add the concept of wielder roles. So, now the AI will start looking at its wielders in the terms of roles, and from that it can take certain decision. I.e. who should get the strongest troops or what skills to pick when leveling up. This is in an early stage still, but we are quite certain it's going to affect more and more decisions. The inital roles we have created for the first iteration is Warrior and Explorer, more will come after the system has matured a bit.

This a non-exhaustive list of what has been worked on lately:

• The AI upgrading and also switching out (weaker) troops when entering towns/settlements has been made more likely to happen. Previously the AI simply topped off what it had and filled empty slots, often leading to weak and pretty insignificant troops being left in slots.
• Recruitment has gotten an overhaul in general, previously recruitment was only part a long term decision which meant that if it walked by its own town it did not always recruit even if the town was overflowing with units. It's now more likely to recruit if it happens to walk by. Also it should use neutral dwellings much more often than before.
• Skill selection scoring has been changed, in some ways to promote command in situations when it got pushed to the bottom. This was previously a mitigation due to other issues the AI had, having many troop slots just lead to it having empty troop slots. The root cause has been fixed for this so we could remove that mitigation.
• How the AI reasons around buildings has been updated and we've added more decision input for when it decides what to build. For instance, it can check how much resource surplus it has if it would buy all units it produces every round. Or what starting resources are lying around the starting area.
• Deciding what to build has also previously been a bit unbalanced between the factions, which is one of the reasons why the AI has been weaker playing certain factions.
• An improved retreat option is in place to make feeding weak wielders to opponents less likely to happen.
• There has also been several bugs fixed which caused behaviour problems rather than crashing the game. The two major ones being: 1. It inverted treat checks which made Suicide opponents appear as Very Easy, this was particularly nasty. 2. The AI could not "see" some items under hostile zone of control, nor items it was standing next to.

The above points will be iterated upon even more, this is what we have had time to look at after coming back from our vacations. More to come in the future!

We've made a fundamental change to how the AI traces items nearby for pickup/claiming. The previous solution started out well with what we had available at the time (without making the AI even slower, it did not need that ...) but it has scaled poorly and created lots of edge cases.

The AI is now better at determining if something is on the way to where it wants to go and interact with it on the way. This is being verified currently and the initial tests look great, it also has better scaling capabilities when it comes to improvement and performance so we expect this to improve even further.
As always, if you have any questions or comments about this, please put them below.

Until next time!

/Marcus (AI Lead) and Team Lavapotion

 

[cyborgboy95]

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/867210/view/3400803394231664132

Roadmap update!
Hello, Wielders! Since the development team is now back from vacation and hard at work we figured it was time to provide you with a roadmap update. But, before we get into the roadmap we want to send out a huge thanks to all players who have bought or wishlisted the game so far! We had no way to anticipate such a huge interest in the game already in Early Access and we are now in a position where we can support the ongoing development for a long time!

The full crew recently sat down to plan the development up until 1.0. We had a long good look at all the user suggestions over at our Feature Upvote page[songsofconquest.featureupvote.com] and discussed both the top suggestions as well as interesting ideas with fewer votes. The team also reviewed the first version of the roadmap and considered if it still would hold up. After a long and constructive meeting, some follow-up planning, and discussions, we are now happy to release an updated roadmap!

[images.squarespace-cdn.com]
The roadmap is also available in text format on https://www.songsofconquest.com/roadmap. You can also click the image above for a larger version.

Major changes?
The only real major change is that the next campaign has been pushed to early next year. We are still looking for a new Lead Artist and figured it would be hard for us to deliver within our previously estimated timeline. We have set the bar high when it comes to cutscenes and it simply takes a while to produce this level of content to spice up the campaigns!

Other changes
Smaller changes to note are for the scope of the rest of 2022. Spells will be updated, and we are working on more unit traits and abilities. However, a richer siege battle experience has been moved to 2023. Also, what we previously called Lobby facelift and updates have been moved into the UI & UX improvements section. More skirmish maps will come as they are designed, crafted, tested, and refined during 2022 and 2023.

New features!
Oh yes. As you might have noticed, we have listed a whole new game mode in the during 2022 column. Battlegrounds is a game mode where you can test your mettle against the AI, friends, or strangers online. It is a way to jump straight into combat without having to play adventure at all. So you’ll be able to try out late-game strategies, untried army builds, or just have a quick and fun match against a stranger online! We look forward to hearing your feedback on this new game mode, which will be released next week!

We have also bumped up the visibility of the ongoing AI development slightly, to make it clear that this is of the utmost importance to the team. It’s an aspect of the game that is not done in chunks or increments but rather something that is continuously worked on. Our AI lead, Marcus, dropped an AI development Steam post last week, which I suggest you check out if you haven’t already!

Upcoming roadmap changes
Going forward, we will label all the revisions of the Roadmap so you can easily check when it was last updated. As we have stated before, the roadmap can and will change. Sometimes with delays and sometimes with additions of new features or content.

Building this game is a dream come true and the road to 1.0 will be truly exciting! We have lots of cool things to come and we can’t wait to show it all to you! Do you have any feedback, game-related anecdotes, or just something that you want to share about your game experience? Please drop a comment below and stay tuned for next week's update with Battlegrounds, big AI improvements, and more!

/Team Lavapotion

 

[lukaszek]

ahh so missing campaigns are way of

 

[Tavar]

Man, this is taking forever. What is the currently planned end date for early access?

 

[ArchAngel]

Man, this is taking forever. What is currently planned end date for early access?

Between now and forever.

 

[lukaszek]

its quite surprising considering how it plays as complete game

 

[ArchAngel]

its quite surprising considering how it plays as complete game

It was not even close to complete but pretty fun Early Access title.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

They're waiting for fanstratics release so it won't tank their sales.

 

[cyborgboy95]

Development update

See the video for a quick summary of the most important new features. But you can also read the full pacth notes below! Overall the sprint has been good and we are happy to give you three brand new official maps to play. There have also been a lot of quality of life improvements for the Battlegrounds mode (turn timer, I'm looking at you!) as well as AI-improvements.

Overall, good stuff, and much more to come. Please leave a comment and say hi to the team, ask a question or just leave praise, if that is your thing!

Take care and see you in about a month!

/Lord Querkius and Team Lavapotion

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CHANGELOG V0.78.4 – OCTOBER 17, 2022

Additions

• Added deployment to Battlegrounds
  
  
• Added turn timer to Battlegrounds
• Time allowed per turn is normally 2 minutes. If you time out, you will only have 10 seconds to perform your next turn. Any time you end a turn yourself, you are back to having 2 minutes per turn
  
  
• Added option to scale up HUD (“Large HUD” in Video options)
  
  
• Added additional tooltips to show currently equipped artifact next to inspected artifact
  
  
• Added three skirmish maps
• Small map, 2 players “Calm Before the Storm”
• Small map, 2 players “Small Beginnings”
• XL map, 8 player “Hate for Eight”

Gameplay changes

• Improved death animation curve for Spectres and Seneschals
  
  
• Lower intensity of Entangle effect light
  
  
• Remove notifications older than 5 rounds

Bug fixes

• Restores HUD when closing inventory using UI button
  
  
• Closes purchasing menus when attacked during a simultaneous turns online game
  
  
• Fixed bug where game could end up soft-locked in battle when the last troops on one side where killed by Chain Lightning
  
  
• Fixed bug where ability sounds were not played for opponents in multiplayer battle
  
  
• Fixed bug where two players could init battle at the same time in a simultaneous turns online game
  
  
• Trigger main menu music if returning to battlegrounds army select after battle
  
  
• Hide pause menu, codex and kingdom menus if attacked in multiplayer
  
  
• Fixed songs “Fear No Foe”, “Stoutheart Shall Stand” and “The Coin In My Hand” not applying all of their buffs to friendly troops

Battlegrounds

• Fixed bug in Army Creator when dropping a troop on an already occupied troop slot the previous troop value is refunded correctly
  
  
• Fixed bug in Army Creator when setting troop size to 0 did not delete the troop on cancel

UI

• Added clearer selected state to Kingdom Overview menus (Building overview, Troop overview, Research and Marketplace)
  
  
• Hid locked troop slots in Trading menu
  
  
• Increased font size for the smallest text areas
  
  
• Reworked town list tooltips and construction UX. Construction animation is now shown when the town is working at max capacity instead of when one building is being constructed in case the player has researched the option to build multiple buildings at the same time.

AI

• Changed explore/map entity scoring to increase chance of claiming resource generators
  
  
• Added dynamic data caches to most adventure related calculations the AI makes per think loop
  
  
• Tweaked the Battle AI Target selection to be less predictable and more balanced

Optimizations

• Major improvements to performance when wielders move around

Known Issues

• Sim-turns is at version 0.1
  
  
• Co-Op (Teams) is at version 0.1
  
  
• Balance changes are upcoming
  
  
• All traits and abilities for troops are not yet implemented
  
  
• Camera in adventure is not working as intended
  
  
• Battle AI Ranged troop movement is suboptimal

 

[ArchAngel]

Nothing of import. This Battlegrounds is shit and waste of development. Do they want to turn this game into some turn based competitive battler lol

 

[Feyd Rautha]

Elevation. If a unit stands on elevated ground and is targeted by a ranged attack, wouldn't he be considered as more exposed and thus be more easily targeted? Anyone knows?

 

[ArchAngel]

Elevation. If a unit stands on elevated ground and is targeted by a ranged attack, wouldn't he be considered as more exposed and thus be more easily targeted? Anyone knows?

Where did you get this logic from?! Elevated ground in RL gives both offense and defense bonuses as enemies have a smaller angle to shoot at you because they need to shoot from below.