Hex of Steel News

[h3]ADDED[/h3]

• Better visualization on the board of core units (golden outline on the counter).
  
• Possibility to remove an active policy by simply clicking on it and confirming your choice.
  
• Short and subtle animation to selecting/unselecting a unit.
  
• Missing coastline tiles in the tiles editor (From 54 to 63).
  
• 'Truce' mechanics for Diplomacy. When two countries make peace, they automatically make a truce. The truce lasts for 6 in game months, based on days per turn value. So, if the scenario you are playing has a 7 days per turn value, this will be 182 (6 months) / 7 = 26 turns. Truces can be broken, but you will have to pay an entire turn of your income to your enemy as a penalty for breaking the truce.
  

[h3]CHANGED[/h3]

• Further improved balanced between sub damage and destroyers.
  
• Winter damage now is based on the MP (Movement Point) cost of the tile. So, road will deal -1 HP of attrition, while thick forest will deal -3 HP. The slider in the settings now acts as a modifier. Meaning 0 is x0, 1 is x1, 2 is x2 etc.
  
• Operation Market Garden further balance changes.
  
• AI will no longer buy units from allies having another ideology than theirs if historical focus is ON (Axis excluded since Germany was a major supplier).
  
• Upgrading or downgrading a unit will now apply an experience loss of - 10 XP.
  
• Ships now also get a 15% armour penalty when attacking armoured LAND units.
  
• Ships have seen their damage dealt to LAND units reduced by an extra 5%.
  
• New numbers on counters style. More flat, less 'amateur'.
  
• Selected unit icon is now a little bit more 3D instead of full flat 2D without any light effect.
  
• Mechanized units now have a repair cost that is x2 superior (instead of x1).
  
• Motorized units now have a repair cost that is x1.5 times superior (instead of x1).
  
• Motorized and mechanized units now will pay twice as much for fuel as regular foot units.
  
• Mechanized units now have an extra 5 armour points to counterbalance the new more expensive repair cost (so they are still worth buying).
  
• Tanks, planes and ships now pay 1:1 for fuel. Infantry has a 1:2 ratio.
  
• Updated the 'two units on a tile' icon.
  Reverted back to the old steamworks library. Should fix the issues of not being able to play without steam and other steam related issues. RIP. Even after reverting to the old version, it still doesn't work... Seems like this is it for running the game without steam. UPDATED: So, I made a version of the game that is stripped from the Steam Library altogether. You can find it on itch.io (not on steam for obvious reasons). Should work just fine now...
  

[h3]FIXED[/h3]

• Engineers didn't have any bonuses for harbours as they did for any other urban areas.
  
• Vienna was not connected to a railroad tile in Europe scenarios.
  
• Showing negative XP on units made it double '--'.
  
• You could not upgrade a core unit if you reached your max core unit limit.
  
• Price was not updated in upgrade mode in the store for toggling core unit ON or OFF.
  
• 20ms CPU spike on mouseExit hover unit.
  
• Partisans no longer really spawning.
  

[h3]REMOVED[/h3]

• 'Civil economy' policy. You can now simply cancel policies.
  

One more patch :)

Our closed beta for our new game is still running, and if there are still some of you interested in giving it a try / playing with us, feel free to join our discord server and ask for a key, I will be happy to show you what we've been working on these past 2 years!

[h3]ADDED[/h3]

• Convoys spawn events on Europe 39 and Europe 41. Canada and the USA will be spawning convoys regularly in the Atlantic to help out the UK. This makes for some realistic war help and starts the atlantic war...
  
• Possibility to press 'escape' when starting/loading a scenario to pass the start screen.
  
• BMW R12 recon unit for Germany.
  
• Willys MB Jeep recon unit for the USA and GB (Desert variant).
  
• GAZ-67 jeep recon unit for the USSR.
  
• Small icon on unit counter to show wether or not a unit has a hero.
  
• Possibility for ships to surrender for scenarios where the year is < 1900.
  
• Humans only toggle for the events in the map editor.
  
• Opacity for the overlay is now saved.
  

[h3]CHANGED[/h3]

• Any ground unit can now attack an enemy unit that is in a landing craft IF the enemy is on a harbour tile.
  
• Embarking/disembarking from a transport plane, a ship, or a train will reset the unit's entrenchment level to 0.
  
• Error text shown when trying to join a faction that already exists but you are not Neutral.
  
• If two units damaging each other are on the same tile (typically, plane + ground unit) the damage visuals will be split evenly on the sides instead of both in the middle resulting in some glitchy text.
  
• Stronger penalty for units proceeding to land to make a more significant different with marines which have no penalty at all.
  
• Pressing 'escape' when chat is open will no longer close all of the UI but simply close the chat panel.
  
• Text when a player sends you funds.
  
• Added a delay to retaliation fire sound effect (0.5s).
  
• Removed some Allied ships from the Sicily scenario as they didn't have that many historically.
  
• Made custom manpower cost inputfield in unit editor bigger (could only fit 3 numbers before...).
  
• Added an extra Istanbul city tile on the other side of the coast on Europe scenarios.
  
• Added Mount Olympus mountain in Greece that was missing on Europe scenarios.
  
• Stalingrad factory positioning on Europe scenarios.
  
• Artillery will now take armour into account, 15%. Artillery was pretty OP and needed some nerfing.
  
• Bombers take into account 15% of it.
  
• Infantry now also takes into account 5% of the enemy's armour value as a penalty when attacking armoured targets.
  
• When paratroopers will be dropped, if there is any enemy AA in the area the enemy AA will fire at them.
  
• Reduced factories and refineries prices to 1000 and 2500 to have profit start after 30 turns vs 40+ turns previously.
  
• Operation Market Garden upgrade.
  

[h3]FIXED[/h3]

• Faction change event could lead to one unwanted behaviour where the country from the alliance being joined would stay at war with the country joining (Example: Romania switching sides in 1944, before the fix, USSR would be both allied with Romania and at war with Romania).
  
• When duplicating an event, the MaxExecution property would reset itself to 1.
  
• 'Disarmed' text was shown behind the unit counter instead of in front of it.
  
• Op. Husky Canadian starting position + changes to order of battle.
  
• Event actions would repeat themselves more than once if one of them could not be completed during the process of an event.
  
• Redeploying units that were in trains or landing crafts would be redeployed in the same state.
  
• All campaign scenarios went missing in multiplayer (no longer available).
  
• Typo in armour production bonus for policies.
  
• Custom cost in unit editor could only display 3 digits at a time.
  
• Unit upgrade text in unit history was wrong.
  

Hello hello

Now that most bugs have been fixed in the new game, I can come back to HoS and change a few things around

[h3]ADDED[/h3]

• Possibility to upgrade ships. Ships need to be next to a friendly harbour tile to be upgraded. The upgrade is possible only between ships of a same class (Submarine -> Submarine). When upgrading a ship, it will be sent to the reserve for a certain amount of turns. You will be able to deploy upgraded ships once they are finished upgrading.
  
• Possibility to change the camera's background's color. The option can be found in the settings in the main menu, it is the very last entry. It is an inputfield where you can write the color of your choice in hexadecimal (https://www.color-hex.com).
  
• Small widget about our new game in the main menu.
  
• Black faded bar to the left to have more visible buttons in the main menu.
  

[h3]CHANGED[/h3]

• Changed wallpaper to summer one.
  
• Updated Steamworks API.
  

[h3]FIXED[/h3]

• Iraq had an ideology of 'Null'.
  

Hello everyone!

That's it, we've done it, we're finally there, the steam page for our new game is out!

Direct link to the steam page

After 2 years of hard work, we finally have enough ready to show the game

I have been ON and OFF working on HoS due to the ongoing/active development of this new game, so I hope you forgive me.

I am still not done with HoS, I have a pretty long list of things to add/change, and I will go through it, slowly, but surely

We currently are running a private beta test for this new game, if you are interested, join our discord server and request a key to get access to the beta (on steam)

The game is a mix of strategy with a hex map like HoS, but also a first person shooter side.

If you want to learn more, I invite you to use the link I shared in the beginning of this post and read the description of this new game directly on its page :)

Have a good day everyone!

Hello everyone!

I hope you all are happy with the recent events overhaul ! :)
It really opens up a new world of possibilities...

Anyway, since I recently finally found a way to open modding to iOS, people on all platforms can now enjoy modded games!

One thing that got back to me a lot (and that I was aware of for a long time) was that mods crashed the game on phones/tablets. I really didn't understand what was going on and decided to... ignore this issue... Until recently, when iOS users got back to me with the same 'mods crashing the game' issue.
This was the drop in the bucket and I decided to do some serious research.
(All this time I was sorta helpless because I am in an Apple environment and the game being only available on Android, I was not able to perform any debugging).

Turns out... This whole time, it was a memory issue. Loading mods taking several GBs of memory.
Now that's good, because I learned what was causing the crash. Only thing that was left was to solve this excessive memory use. TURNS OUT, when loading images into the game, those images remain uncompressed, so they take a LOT of space.

All I had to do all this time was add an extra line of code saying 'downloadedTexture.Compress()' . And voila! By doing this, I cut the RAM usage by 50%.... Now, this is not ideal, but it's a good step in the right direction! And many mods now work on phones/tablets.

For this compression fix to work though, images need to have a specific resolution. Only multiples of 4 can be compressed. Currently, in the game, almost all textures are multiples of 4, at the exception of all round ones (Round counters, all ships, and heroes images).

So, I have resized all textures from the base game to be properly sized (So that the remainder of the resolution divided by 4 never is a decimal: 1024 / 4 = 256) but mods remain largely unchanged.
I am calling all modders to update their mod and make sure the images they are using are all multiple of 4. Without that, there will be no formatting, and excessive memory usage when loading them.

I have updated the modding doc, and the base files that you can use for making mods.

For modders, flags must be 200x100. Tiles must be 2000x2000. Units must be 1024x1024. All counters must also be 1024x1024 EXCEPT for ships or planes (or any round counter), they must be 1260x1260. Heroes must be 212 x 308.
Please, double check your files and update your mods :)

[h3]ADDED:[/h3]

• Engineers for Denmark.
  
• Brand new policies category: Economy! Coming with 5 brand new policies to pick from (Manpower and/or Tech Tree options must be ON).
  
• Save file locking when starting a new scenario. This will prevent anybody to ever open the save in the map editor and edit it. Convenient when you want to play with someone online but don't trust him. Or just to be sure.
  
• Light infantry to Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia.
  
• Parachute logo in the store panel to better show ground units that can go airborne.
  
• Turn production stat in the store.
  
• Friedrich Paulus as a german commander.
  
• Showing the true production value of a tile when destroyed, with normal values in '( )'
  

[h3]CHANGED:[/h3]

• RAM usage when loading mods. Has been reduced by 50%.
  
• AI carriers will now play before AI planes, so that the planes better follow and cover allied carriers, and provide better resupply possibilities.
  
• Mouse cursor from the old ugly one to something more in line with the game's UI.
  
• Unit's name (real one) is now shown in its history panel.
  
• Next human player panel when doing local multiplayer.
  

[h3]FIXED:[/h3]

• Some campaign scenarios' balance.
  
• Shanghai spelling error in Pacific 41 and 42.
  
• Event action 'Spawn unit' could in some cases not execute properly.
  
• Not possible to upgrade units that had a max purchase limit.
  
• Fixed AI freeze instance due to policies changes.
  
• AI never moving its ground units in some instances.