Content update #11 is out now!
Hello everyone, it has been some time since the last update but we’ve got a pretty big one today!
We saw a lot of players enjoy the invasion maps, so we’ve added quite a large new one called Invasion of Memel, a map you can play with 1-3 players. Some players might recognize it as the old German name of Klaipėda.
Invade a heavily fortified spit of land and destroy all 3 Order shrines. 2 convoys are inbound, stop them or the enemy will be alerted to your presence early.
Next to that we have a whole lot of quality-of-life improvements, including allied AI commands! It has been one of the biggest complaints in the campaign, that the AI player doesn’t always do what you’d want it to do. So now you can boss it around all you want, unless it’s in a particularly non compliant mood. ;) Do please let us know if you encounter anything unusual with this new system, as this is a big change.
Allied AI commands:
You can issue commands to allied AI players in both campaign and custom games. You issue a command by holding down the Alt key and holding right click, entering a wheel of commands. This wheel was already in the game as pings for other players, but now it has a lot more purpose and polish. In the wheel, you can also toggle which AIs should react to the command. It might refuse the request if it’s not possible or if it’s defending its base.
Attack here command - Allied AI will overwrite its commanders to assign its units to attack move to an area until enemies in a small radius are defeated and a small timer has passed.
Defend here command - Allied AI will overwrite its commanders to assign its units to attack move to an area until enemies in a large radius are defeated and a long timer has passed.
Go here command - All combat units of allied AI will force move to a location but keep assigned to their previous commanders.
I claim this command - Allied AIs will not build resource buildings in the area or gift you an existing resource building.
Take this command - Allied AI will attempt to build a resource structure in the area. Additionally, if the area is next to your base and usually blocked for the AI by the game, it will be unblocked. If cast next to a pickup, the AI hero will force move there, if somewhat nearby.
Request resources commands - Allied AI will give you the specified resource if it has enough, otherwise it will tell you no.
Allied AI will sometimes request help when under attack.
Allied AI will sometimes make a ping and notify you when it's attacking a target.
Features:
New challenge map: Invasion of Memel. Invade a heavily fortified spit of land and destroy all 3 Order shrines. 2 convoys are inbound, stop them or the enemy will be alerted to your presence early.
New glyph: Peasant Army - When a Hovel is made or destroyed, it spawns an armed peasant for free.
New glyph: Preparations. Allows for the construction of Silos which increase the maximum amount of resources you can have by 1000 each. In addition, you receive 300 of each resource.
New glyph: Divine Denial. Denies enemy global spells from being cast in the area around the shrine.
New glyph: Spirit of Usinsh. Grants all cavalry units +2 speed.
New achievement: Invader of Memel, complete Invasion of Memel on Insane difficulty.
Saule can now buy Usinsh mount as an upgrade in the Celestial Hold in custom games.
New cheatcode: cc_lust (all new cooldowns get set to 1 second).
The edge screen panning speed is now separate from the normal pan speed in options.
Added a warning for resetting settings.
Worker behavior:
Last update added some additional behavior for better repairing logic, but it seems the workers became a little too eager to fix things all the time. We've done a whole bunch of tweaks to their logic.
When workers finish a gathering building, they assign to it rather than look for things to fix.
Manually walking workers somewhere will no longer have them look for things to fix while they are selected.
Reduced the repair search radius to a more intuitive one.
When manually assigning workers to garrison (or similar actions), they will now all enter, rather than only one.
Fixed the workers sometimes acting weird when the entrance to a building was blocked.
Units are deselected upon entering a tower. This fixes them sometimes popping up in a new location when ejected, because they “walked” somewhere while being selected.
Fixed workers sometimes bouncing between two locations when trying to build a wall.
Improvements:
Skills will now have the caster walk into range to be able to cast it, instead of walk into range and not cast at all. This should make the targeting of skills much more intuitive.
Beginning of UI improvements. Overhauled how damage and defense types are displayed.
Better highlighting of resources when trying to place buildings.
Start of text fixes/rewrite: most of Michael and Bishop abilities and units have been updated.
AI players will now defend more reliably by sending more troops.
Middle click camera movement now works even when the game is paused.
The skill panel can now be closed with the Esc key.
Trebuchet can now shoot into the fog of war and can now be retargeted while it is in cooldown.
Units will find open spots to stand quicker after moving, which should lead to less “dancing”.
Notifications like level up do not overlap on top of the skill panel anymore.
Worker spawn noise disabled when it’s of another player and during dialogue.
Allied rally points are now the color of the ally instead of yours.
George AI now understands how to use the Ascalon and Rally abilities.
Level up button clarity, hopefully it looks more like a button now.
When selecting a unit or building, non-owned abilities no longer show as interactable.
Increased the amount of space around the map where the camera is allowed to navigate. This should make moving the camera near map edges much smoother.
When Steam timeouts user connection, the timer has been increased from 10 to 60 seconds, to make disconnections less likely.
Added sound effects for when you receive resources from allies.
Separated the update rates for the fog of war of units and buildings. This means that enemy units should appear a lot faster.
Distance of abilities for the Nurse have been unified, to make her casting more reliable.
Improved the Tracker unit’s Pounce ability to be displayed as 1 instead of 2 abilities, and removed the delay for the actual attack part of the charge.
Bishop’s Conversion skill cancel range is now slightly bigger than the cast range to avoid instant skill cancellation.
Recommended hotkeys will no longer have the G of unit skill overlapped with the build menu. This only applies to new players; if this hotkey is overlapping, you can reset hotkeys to fix it.
Slight edit on the housing icon to make it easier to distinguish.
Optimization:
Various performance optimizations on units and buildings.
Optimized the AoE casting of AI players. This also makes the casting look more human.
Fixed one of the performance leaks. Other performance leaks have their days numbered. Hopefully.
Fixes:
Fixed healers sometimes just not healing targets.
Fixed an issue where manually targeting several healers had only one of the healers walk in range to heal.
Healers should now chase manual targets more reliably.
Made the range of Nurse’s Shield of Faith the same range as her heal to prevent her sometimes not getting close enough to heal.
Fixed Starfall making pathfinding holes in the map or walls.
Invasion of Skalvia will no longer be lost when one of the players dies.
Unbuilt/unfinished buildings no longer drop destruction rewards.
Fixed an issue where Indraja picking the shadow wolf glyph would cause issues because she already had all unit skill slots full. Her shadow wolves will now be a global skill.
Fixed ranged units sometimes running up to melee range to attack a building.
Fixed that you could queue spam trebuchet attacks to attack faster than the cooldown.
Fixed buildings sometimes leaving ground blockers when destroyed.
Fixed destroyed buildings sometimes blocking wall placement.
Fixed units being able to be pushed off walls by abilities, which caused a bunch of issues.
Fixed golden apple glyph text which wrongly said it could be applied multiple times.
Fixed Giltine’s Kiss upgrade for towers not matching the range of the normal shoot range.
Removed the Hammer of Justice upgrade from the Training Camp, as the unit for the upgrade was no longer made from this building.
Fixed missing text when selecting a random hero for the match.
Indraja’s Lightning Arrow no longer has distance decay for the damage, it was never intended to have it.
The Witch’s Plague Bolt spreads properly again.
Longbowman foul arrows should now hit more reliably, as they were missing the small AoE the other arrows have.
Fixed Mark of the Beast particle effects sometimes clipping with the ground.
Fixed selection circle color sometimes starting too bright and going darker when hovered over.
Pressing Restart on a mission should now unpause the game if it was paused.
Fixed the loot modifiers of Pukis not syncing correctly across the network, causing the client player to see a 0 health Pukis who refused to die. If you see more modifiers not syncing for the client, please let us know.
Activating chat or skill panel will now disable the current active targeting of skills and buildings, preventing strange looking targeting issues.
Alert range of units now matches the chase radius, to prevent units bouncing back and forth when on the edge of alert range.
Fixed the targeting of abilities sometimes being able to cast in the fog of war when they are not supposed to.
Doubled the search range of the Wonderbird to have it come closer to units to actually heal them in the AoE.
Fixed destroyed buildings sometimes leaving a gap or blocker in the pathfinding grid.
Fixed AI opponents in campaign and challenge maps sometimes not being able to spawn units, because their cap was unlimited but the chalice upgrade set their cap to 20.
The sound effects of the throwing nets will now follow the sound effect volume percentage, preventing it from being super loud.
Fixed Trebuchet unit sometimes not repeating its shots, only shooting once.
Fixed units sometimes not being able to attack a gate because they were trying to go through it to attack it from the other side.
Fixed certain skills sometimes shooting several times when casting manually. This was most noticeable with Ausrine’s Stunning Lights ability.
Fixed the wrong voiceline playing for the max wealth warning.
Fixed some networking desync issues that were due to a small float precision mistake, I don’t know what this really means to you as a player because the coder cannot explain it to me in a way I understand, but I guess it’s important so it needs to be in the patch notes.
Fixed an issue where it seemed that units on walls were refusing to stand on certain spots, but it was actually the client seeing the units on the wrong spots on the wall.
Fixed a weird display and sound issue when clicking a building with a healer while pressing the Alt key.
Fixed being able to spawn several Cockatrices from the Castle when you should only ever have one.
The Skybull unit will now get in closer range to better hit units with its AoE attack.
Fixed Zealot’s Mark of the Beast ability being able to be toggled off invisibly, it can no longer be toggled off.
Fixed Saule's hair clipping through her arm in the lobby.
Campaign:
(beware of minor spoilers)
Disabled repathing logic during cutscenes, to prevent characters from having cutscene zoomies.
More tutorial popups.
Fixed certain triggers not firing when a cutscene was skipped. This should fix the bishop hiding on the wall to avoid his fate.
The game now correctly disables all dialogue at the end of the mission to prevent interfering with the triggers of the next mission.
Fixed camera movement tutorial breaking when the player unassigned WASD.
Fixed tutorial tooltips blocking input, especially causing an issue in Bishop’s Bane.
Fixed a bunch of cases of dialogue and voiceline not matching in several missions.
Fixed a missing trigger for the river baptism in Moonlight.
Fixed in Bishop’s Bane that killing Meinhard early would still have his dialogue trigger, causing overlap with the victory dialogue.
Attempt at fixing the Herder of Clouds skycalf achievement in Bishop’s Bane. It seems to work in our tests, but if there’s any more issues with it, please let us know.
The AI player in Union Divided has been given some starting boosts to make them more useful.
Improved voice line volume of Berthold in Siege of Lennewarden.
In Eclipse, doing the alternate mission completion by destroying Ausrine’s and Meness’ shrines should now actually trigger a victory.
In Eclipse, Saule should now defend the fort much better. She was previously only defending her own base.
In Eclipse, Saule AI will now more reliably start casting Solar Fury. If the player is Saule, you will get 1000 faith so you too can go nuts on the enemies. :)
In Eclipse, Saule will now get 7 additional workers at the start of the defense part of the mission.
Fixed missing text in Sword Brothers when destroying the Latgalian tribe’s shrine.
Slightly tweaked some cutscenes in Lone Star.
In Lone Star, Meness now has Blade Dash so he’s not so sad with only one ability.
Balance:
Vakarine’s Trance damage increased by 15.
Dream Refuge skill no longer applies to buildings because buildings can’t dream.
Fire Laume’s basic attack cooldown lowered from 5 to 3 seconds.
Frost Laume’s Glacier ability’s cooldown increased from 30 to 60 seconds.
Catapult attacks no longer have the projectile damage type. Turns out a shield is not going to do much when a giant boulder crushes you.
Rogue's base damage increased by 3.
Avenging Angel’s Sacred Barrier damage increased by 10.
Michael’s base health decreased by 50.
The cost of Manna Grain increased from 100 to 250 wealth.
The faith yield of Manna Grain increased from 1 to 2.
Falling Stars cooldown increased from 50 to 100 seconds.
In the meantime, we have been working hard on the rest of the content behind the scenes. Act 3 and other 1.0 update features are coming along steadily as well.
The recent months have been a little rough for us personally (for non-game reasons) but we continue to head towards the finish line. To help us out with speed, we’ve just gotten another freelancer on board, this time for gameplay writing and QA. In this patch you can already see some of the improved text, mostly for Michael and the Bishop.
Our current planning projection puts us in the first half of 2027. Some very exciting stuff is coming for full release and we hope to see you there.
As usual, let us know what you think! And if you'd like to find some people to play the new map with, or see if you can get some sneak peeks out of us, join the Godsworn Discord: https://discord.gg/r2qBuBXfVc
