Hex of Steel News

Discord link to see the work on the world map: https://discord.gg/Tn63mrwJyH

[h3]ADDITIONS[/h3]

• New edge-to-edge movement mechanic. This opens up the possibility for a ... WORLD MAP!!!! Which I started making already, the amount of tiles is a staggering 160.600 for a size of 550x292. This mechanic can be toggled ON or OFF based on the map directly from inside the map editor. OFF by default because there is no world map in the game YET.
  
• Possibility to edit the HQ points directly from the map editor, so if you want to give some HQ points to a certain country when starting a scenario, this is now possible.
  
• Input field to search for a particular unit in the OOB.
  

[h3]CHANGES[/h3]

• Added a little color to the switch air/ground view button.
  
• Added an extra second at the end of an AI turn per unit when slow AI option is active. Player feedback was that slow AI was still too fast.
  
• Mods in the list of mods will now be refreshed live if you delete / add a new mod from your mods folder. No need to go back and in again to have it refreshed.
  
• Any AI can't deploy ground troops at naval reinforcement tiles except US and Japan anymore.
  
• Units that are marked as SKIPPED or ASLEEP will now be greyed out. Easier to identify the ones you really want to play.
  
• High command points now are earned on a turn basis, not depends on capitals anymore. This is so that they work on all maps equally.
  

[h3]REMOVED[/h3]

• Amount of players dropdown in the map editor. Was useless and created issues when adding more players than the dropdown had possibilities. Was rendered useless a while ago since I added a "Add player" button.
  

[h3]FIXES[/h3]

• Clicks going through UI.
  
• Camera moving when typing a message.
  
• AI could deploy missiles (V1s and V2s) at airfields.
  
• OOB would close itself (Core unit issue).
  
• Several minor fixes that I actually attributed to the 6.3.0 changelog.
  
• Modded background for counters would not show up in the store when buying from other countries.
  
• If you had modded units loaded, when a ship was moving left or right it would mirror and so would the text.
  

Cheers!

[h3]ADDITIONS[/h3]

• Brand new (updated) UI! I added a blur/transparency effect and it looks more modern/slick now, I think it looks better like that, it's refreshing!
  
• New policy mechanics! Totally optional, can be turned ON or OFF in the settings, multiplayer and campaign compatible (carried over from one scenario to the next). 43 policies split in 3 categories. I will add more, I just need ideas, so take a look at what’s already there and suggest me some others! :D
  Same for categories, I’m sure we can come up with more than 3 to make it more interesting or balanced.
  Now, with the introduction of policies I am also introducing High command points, using those high command points you will be able to choose policies. You can have one active policy per category MAXIMUM. You can change as many times as you wish as long as you have the high command points necessary. High command points are earned every turn based on how many city tiles you own (biggest city tiles = capitals basically). The maximum amount of high command points you can store is 100. Each city tile will produce 5 a turn. All policies have a different cost based on what they do. AI will also pick policies.
  Unfortunately, none of this is moddable. I am sorry! (It requires deep changes in several places in the code, and you do not have access to the sourcecode so that's why I can't be edited from the outside). But I am really open to ideas so go crazy!
  

[h3]CHANGES[/h3]

• AI now plays ... faster. Just WAY faster. On the map Battle of France AI only it took the AI 20 minutes and 72 turns to finish the scenario, and with the old one it took it 47 minutes and 74 turns. It plays twice as fast at least :)
  
• AI amphibious attacks should be more interesting now it will not send all its troops to a single point but instead spread out and land from different directions.
  
• Updated Europe 1941 and Europe 1939.
  
• Updated Sevastopol campaign scenario and Campaign of Poland campaign scenario.
  
• SPGs took a single turn to produce, I believe it should be 2, so now they take 2 turns, they're tanks right so they should take the same amount of time.
  
• FOW is now shown when playing AI vs AI games.
  
• Showing the amount of money the AI player has when in the same team / AI vs AI game.
  
• Added a 1 turn delay for deploying captured equipment.
  
• Optimized the shit out of the store menu. No more lags.
  
• Submarines are forced to surface every 3 turns now (to recharge their batteries). They will not be allowed to dive in the third turn they have been submerged and will surface automatically.
  
• Optimized the supply line generation. Should lag way less and be more responsive.
  
• Updated Campaign of France quick game scenario.
  

[h3]FIXES[/h3]

• Sometimes the core unit amount would not be properly reset when starting a new campaign.
  
• Retreating units with option quick movement ON were playing the movement animation.
  
• Sonars would show naval mines.
  
• Following achievements were broken (couldn't be unlocked): Creator, Cheater, Loser, Winner, Retreat, Shore bombardment, Follower, Host.
  
• Submarines could attack from underwater (being submerged).
  
• On the Europe maps, the railways would not reach the followings cities: Lulea, Pecs, Hammerfest, Bergen, Oslo.
  
• Time played on a scenario wasn't saved in the autosaves.
  
• OOB sorted by health was not working entirely, now the lowest health is properly at the top.
  
• AI playing by itself without hitting start in some rare cases.
  
• You could get money by upgrading a unit more than once.
  
• All units price and stats on all maps.
  
• Attacking a neutral unit would always make the country turn Allies and never Axis even if you were the Allies yourself.
  

[h3]Added[/h3]

• Redeploy button in the OOB. When pressing this button, the unit will be sent back to the reserve. This operation will cost 50. You cannot use this button in real time multiplayer.
  
• Text message event. Just shows text.
  

[h3]Changes[/h3]

• Made Thailand start Axis in Pacific 1941.
  
• Changed starting income in the battle of Khalkin Gol.
  
• Submarines can attack each other when they both are surfaced OR under water after 1950.
  
• Broken scenarios on Android (Korsun Pocket, Courland Pocket).
  
• More changes to Europe 1939 historical version to make sure it is as close to history as possible (I'm talking about the way stuff unwraps not like forces etc, so just the way country handle diplomacy).
  
• Neutral countries will now get one fifth of their income per turn instead of one tenth. Basically they now get double the amount. So if a neutral country has a production value of 1000, then it will get 200 instead of the 100 previously. This will make them more reactive upon war declaration.
  
• I made encirclement remove more supplies as it was quite weak before, so instead of being 10% less supplies per unit encircling it now is 15%, which is 50% more supplies taken compared to before. So a complete encirclement will bring the supplies down to -90% for the unit being encircled.
  
• The Soviet Union now has a 50% production penalty until June 1941 in quick games to reflect their disorganisation and general bad political + economical situation but also to prevent a Soviet domination by 1940 which was not possible at the time. I basically weakened them until real war broke out between them and Germany.
  
• Added a +5 damage modifier to Finnish ground units when fighting in / from winter tiles. This is also to make it tougher to go against Finland in winter and make sure the Soviet Union stalls and not steamroll them.
  
• Compressed a lot of textures and reduced the game’s weight by about 600 MB, I personally can’t tell the difference between that and before in a 4K retina screen. So no quality loss but you just got yourself 600 MB of free space :)
  
• Updated unity version from 2021.1.19f1 to Unity 2021.3.0f1.
  

[h3]Fixes[/h3]

• Performance issue when playing for a long time on a map and having a lot of units. Buying new units would make the game freeze for a long time before becoming playable again.
  
• Optimization when spawning new units, it will not re generate the entire pool anymore simply delete the unit you just spawned from it.
  
• After unfielding a unit, if on the tile the unit was there were 2 units the two unit indicator would not go away.
  
• France 1940 was not properly part of the new leaderboard.
  
• If not created properly, ships in the unit editor could be assigned the motorize or mechanized option. Now it doesn't matter how you create them.
  

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And as usual some screenshots from my next game :

[h3]ADDITIONS[/h3]

• Auto chat reconnection when losing connection.
  

[h3]CHANGES[/h3]

• Entrenchment is not taken into account anymore when the unit attacked is retaliating. So only the defenders entrenchment level is taken into account.
  
• Same for the terrain penalty, only the one of the defender's will be taken into account now since the fight takes place in the defender's tile.
  
• Made terrain effect on supply route have twice the impact in cost.
  
• Increased torpedo damage by 5.
  
• How you can resupply ammo and fuel : Only when you have 2 APs. Meaning when you start your turn. If you move or attack you can't anymore. This is to counter the fact that many times units would be simply full of supplies and rarely out of supplies since you could resupply at any given moment (unless you were out of AP).
  
• Moved the workshop panel in the MODS menu.
  
• File browser standalone plugin for the map overlay in the map editor.
  
• You can now enable / disable mods directly from the mod menu, including workshop mods. I will most likely add a workshop browser where you can subscribe and unsubscribe from mods there too at a later time, I finally found how to do it. They will not be loaded automatically anymore, you need to go at least once in the mod menu and activate them there now. Otherwise they won’t be loaded.
  
• Reorganised my canvases in Unity for better performances. The way canvases in Unity work is that whenever an element is changed Unity will redraw the entire canvas, and since I didn't know that and I placed my entire UI inside a single canvas, the game had to re draw the entire UI every time a single UI element was changed. So to improve this I have placed all elements of the UI that are frequently changed in their own canvases, I am not sure how much of a different this is gonna make since its not expensive to re draw everything but it's still some performance gain :)
  
• Unity update. 2021.1.28 -> 2021.2.17
  

[h3]FIXES[/h3]

• Overlay in map editor not working on MacOS.
  
• Units blinking in real time multiplayer for other human players.
  
• Fixes with the overrun mechanics (You could perform more than one overrun in a turn and move endlessly).
  
• You could resupply ammo and fuel more than once because I wasn't checking how many times the player pressed the button. Now it's once per turn :)
  
• Leaderboard and way to win. Winning by diplomacy is not an option anymore since that would defeat the purpose of a leaderboard. Finishing Europe in 30 turns simply by buying everyone to your side as the USSR just to be #1 is not something I want to see, sorry!
  
• The way supplies were calculated. I am so sorry about this, it has been around for years now I think, I mean at least one for sure. Basically the amount of supplies the unit would get when resupplying (HP or fuel or ammo) was based on the total the unit could have. So if a unit has 100 max HP, currently is at 25 HP, has a 75% supply rate well the unit would get 75% of 100 HP back capped at 50%, but I never intended it to work that way. I always meant it to be 75% of the MISSING HP. So the unit would get 75% of the 75 HP missing to reach its initial 100. Anyway, this has seriously been here FOREVER, most likely shortly I implemented supplies rules, and I could never pinpoint the error while playing but now I did and it's fixed! No more units healing from nothing to almost full health in between turns :)
  

Hello there fellow wargamers!

Who here likes to compare with its peers who's got the biggest or ... who can finish first!?

Today I would like to celebrate the implementation of a new feature into the game : Official support and implementation of the Steam leaderboard for Hex of Steel!

What does this mean? Well, imagine you finish the scenario Europe 1939 in about 350 turns, the results for the scenario get uploaded directly to Steam and everyone will be able to see how you did. All players will be ranked from the lowest to the highest turn count.

Here is the list of everything that is being shared :
- Most units killed
- Most units lost
- Most units captured
- Most units killed per type (Tank, infantry, artillery, ships, planes...)
- Lowest turn count for almost all of the quick games AND per team (Axis/Allies)

And one new achievement for being the top 1 of any of the leaderboard!

Also, this is totally save compatible, so if you are in the middle of a game, feel free to continue it!

If you ever play the same scenario twice, only the best score is kept, so don't worry about doing worse than the first time !

May the competition begin, and let's see what numbers we can see on there :D

NOTE : Since the leaderboard uses Steam's API and Steam's servers, you will understand that this is a Steam version only feature, this won't come to the mobile version of the game or anywhere else out of Steam.

As part of this update I also did the following fixes:

• When being neutral you could get supplies from any neutral country not just your own.
  
• When being neutral you could see where other neutral country's submerged subs were.
  
• When deleting a player from the list in the map editor the borders would not get re drawn.
  
• The AI would not declare war on anyone anymore.
  
• Fixes for Europe 39.
  
• Neutral units in sight would wake up units that were put to sleep.
  
• The range of artillery would be shown when in landing crafts.
  

One more screenshot from the new game, an Avro Lancaster Mk. I having 2 engines destroyed during a night bombing :)