Hex of Steel News

[h3]Changes[/h3]

• Updated Unity version to 2021.1.28f1 and Steamworks version to 1.52. Sorry I had to remove this some time ago because Steamworks wouldn’t work but now it’s fine, so the Mac version now has native support for M1 ! :D
  
• Removed morale indicator for all units that had 0 movement points (Bunkers, radars, mines and others).
  
• When you send a message, the inputfield will now stay selected so you can send several messages quicker and you don’t need to re select the input field every single time by clicking on it.
  

[h3]Fix[/h3]

• One instance of AI freeze when trying to spawn partisans, rarely happened but still.
  
• El Alamein 2 instant loss after 1 turn.
  
• Random damage modifier (-5/+5) not fully working.
  
• Engineers in landing crafts could disable naval mines.
  
• When a country turned neutral, if another country that wasn’t neutral had units there they would be stuck. Any unit being in a neutral country will now be sent back to the reserve. And same for neutral units in someone else’s country. In order to prevent cheating, you cannot change your faction to neutral more than once in 10 turns. You can join other faction if you wish, but neutral is once max in every 15 turns. This is to prevent cheating and sending your enemies troops back to its territory any time you get attacked :)
  

[h3]Added[/h3]

• Engineers and Light infantry 43 for Turkey.
  
• Light infantry and heavy infantry for Luxembourg. I didn’t touch any of the maps though, but now they have the possibility to make those 2 units.
  
• New setting, OFF by default, plane can move one tile after they attacked. This will allow for more than 1 attack per plane per tile.
  
• New setting, units that can still move will now blink when the camera is far enough from the map.
  
• You can now order units by their health status in the OOB. Units with the lowest health will be on top.
  
• Tile’s production value is now shown in the tile’s info panel in the top left.
  
• Mountaineer option damage is now shown in the damage breakdown.
  

[h3]Changes[/h3]

• All campaigns scenarios now are available to play in quick games.
  
• You can now deploy planes all around carriers, not just the tile above it.
  
• Sending money directly to a player using the diplomacy panel will now see a penalty of 15%. Meaning : Sending 1000 to a player, this player will receive only 850. Why ? To make it more interesting to use convoys :)
  
• Infantry and other non ranged units cannot attack landing crafts anymore. Only artillery, ships or planes can damage troops in landing crafts.
  
• When setting up a quick game you will now see a flag instead of the country’s text, more user friendly.
  
• Gunboats now get double damage from sub (just like landing crafts).
  
• Removed camera max height limit in the map editor for mobile.
  
• During winter, if you have some winter damage ON in the settings and > 0, they will now be multiplied by 2 when there is bad weather.
  
• Removed some placeholders units for Turkey.
  
• Units in trenches now start asleep.
  
• Optimized the camera script.
  

[h3]Fixes[/h3]

• Qattara depression was shown as “mountain”.
  
• Some campaigns scenarios in the Pacific were missing naval reinforcement tiles for the Japs.
  
• Autosaves were made too early (before the income was added), so if you loaded your autosave you would not get the income for your turn.
  
• Droppable tanks (paratroopers, such as the Locust) didn’t have the right amount of fuel when in a plane.
  

Some screenshots from my new game, I already am preparing the Steam page! Release of the open beta is gonna be soon!

[h3]Added[/h3]

• New desert tile : Qattara depression. Impassable desert tile.
  

[h3]Changes[/h3]

• Operation Commpass changes to the map.
  
• Modified all desert maps to make sure they had the proper terrain features.
  

[h3]Fixes[/h3]

• Morale for spawning units event
  
• Many ships/subs stats were a bit off.
  
• Some ground units stats were off.
  
• Capitulation vps for Greece and Romania on europe 39 were not assigned the right tile (coordinates were a bit off).
  
• Luxembourg was missing its name in europe 39.
  

[h3]Added[/h3]

• New event ! Spawning unit when losing a VP.
  
• More events (mostly capitulation) in quick games. I tagged the event as Historical focus only, so if you want to have those events fired in your game, you need to turn ON the option « Historical focus » in the settings :)
  
• Karel Doorman as a dutch naval hero.
  
• Conrad Helfrich as a dutch naval hero.
  
• Amet-khan Sultan as a soviet air hero.
  
• Lev Shestakov as a soviet air hero.
  
• Alexander Pokryshkin as a soviet air hero.
  
• Kirill Yevstigneyev as a soviet air hero.
  
• Izidor Kovárik as a Slovak air hero.
  
• Franco Bordoni as an Italian air hero.
  
• Mario Visintini as an Italian air hero.
  
• Lauri Pekuri as a Finnish air hero.
  
• Pierre Le Gloan as a French air hero.
  
• Edmond Marin la Meslée as a French air hero.
  

[h3]Changes[/h3]

• Mobelwagen had an armour of 65 which was too high.
  
• Increased the quality of naval counters on mobile.
  
• Gave a bit more sense to the stats of new heroes (Fighters having more chance to get air damage and MP bonus than bombers for example, more chance for visibility bonus for AT units etc. Just so that the stats of the heroes are more appropriate to the unit’s type and not entirely random and end up useless).
  

[h3]Fixes[/h3]

• Using events, spawning a unit later than turn 1 would give the spawned unit 0 HP.
  
• You could deploy any unit right after the country you won the war against capitulated. Like all the infrastructure were instant ready.
  
• On mobile, highlight ring would not show up on the map when you clicked on an important notification.
  
• 2 broken air heroes for the soviets.
  
• Seems you couldn’t buy any more units in the store in the map editor.
  

And a happy new year to everyone ! See you in 2022 for more stuff :D

WARNING : This update is NOT compatible with earlier versions for real time multiplayer.

[h3]Added[/h3]

• Events !! Yoohoo ! Finally xD
  You know how it is with me now, I work on stuff when I want to, and recently I had ideas about events and how to create them etc, so I just sat behind my computer and coded. I have made a few different events (categories let’s say). Receiving money, spawning a unit on a given tile, changing a country’s relationship (faction), and losing all your VPs (capitulation) when losing control of a certain VP. I hope those events will be enough for now, I couldn’t think of anything else while making it. You can add as many event as you’d like, it is very easy to use, events can be added / removed directly from the map editor and added to current scenarios. I also added another setting that I thought could be useful : Historical focus events only. When this is ON, the event will take place ONLY if the option “Historical focus” is turned ON in the settings (game settings). So, yeah, I hope you’ll like it ! I already implemented one event in one of the campaigns, the German one, first scenario in the eastern front. The USSR joined the war only on the 18th, so I created an event for the USSR to join the war on the 18th of September. That’s it ! Ah, I also added notifications to let you know when an event happens (like if the enemy got reinforcements, or if you got reinforcement, those will show up as a notification :)). Ah, actually I also edited Europe 1939 and added events there too, but they are all for Historical Focus = ON. Have a look at the events I added if you want :)
  
• When selecting a tile in the map editor, it will now display its coordinates (that will help when creating events for spawning units since this event requires you to enter the tile’s coordinates !).
  
• Pressing escape in the map editor will bring the scenario settings panel.
  
• Oh, did you think that was it ? Well, I have not one, but TWO gifts for you this year because you have been so kind :p I made a whole new map of the Afrika Corps, it doesn’t cover the entirety of it, feel free to edit it and add bits to the right and left if you really want to, it’s just the map I based it on didn’t include more than that. It is still at a scale of roughly 10km/hex, and is 166 x 65, it includes Germany, Italy, Great Britain, Australia and New Zealand ! I hope you will have fun with it ! And merry Christmas ! ( Map is named North Africa 1942 and happens right after El Alamein, november 1st)
  

[h3]Changes [/h3]

• Bombs and rockets were too powerful, nerfed those a bit (-5 hard for rockets and -5 hard for bombs).
  

[h3]Fixes[/h3]

• You could place units even if “hide units” mode was ON and this lead to some unwanted results (inactive units etc).
  
• Operation Crusader fixes, Qattara Depression was mostly missing, and Tobruk was not British held which was .. shamingly for me the purpose of this scenario !
  
• Moving more than one tile with a gun and undoing the move would not give back the ability to attack to the gun.
  
• Soviet Union had major victory points on its side in the polish campaign that were needed in order to achieve victory. One issue though, since I changed the USSR from axis to neutral, they couldnt be called to the war because diplomacy isnt available in campaigns. This has been fixed by the new event feature I added as part of this update. USSR will now join the Axis mid game
  

I also looked into 2 other issues, AI stacking units issue around airfields and AI stacking issue with railway gun, couldn’t reproduce any of those. If you see this happening again, please do share a screenshot of the exact situation so I can reproduce it and hopefully fix the problem.
It’s not a super important bug since when this happen a reload will fix it, and the stacked unit is sent back to the unit pool for the AI, so nothing game breaking, just visually disturbing I agree :)

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Okay, now that we talked about Hex of Steel, I thought I’d give you guys some news about my other game.
I did a lot of work on the AI for planes, you can see it at work here :
https://youtu.be/_ccJzd2nRhU
Let me tell you that if you have a plane that is less maneuverable than the AI, you are a dead man. I added auto MG defensive fire though, so if you are lucky enough to have a rear MG, it will automatically fire upon your enemies that are trying to shoot you down :)

I also did some work on the armour of vehicles and their slopes, you can see it here :
https://youtu.be/mQUBYdaHGk4
Basically it takes the mesh of the vehicle and calculates the normal vector when the projectile hits the mesh and then calculates the angle between the normal and the forward vector of the projectile which results in … the armour angle of the vehicle ! Awesome ! So, slope armour is working GREAT :D

I also added different ammo types, that you can see here :
https://youtu.be/n_b8YjCRJdw
It’s an old one, but I think I didn’t talk about it yet. So basically, there are a few ammo types so far:
AP, APCR, HE, HEAT, SMOKE. AP is simple armor piercing, APCR is armor piercing on steroids, but to use for special purposes since slope armour will make it bounce immediately, and its velocity though higher than AP drops VERY fast over distance. HE and HEAT are similar, High explosives shells, and smoke well smoke hehe

What else … Oh, maybe I could show you the vehicle collection that I have so far ? :)
One pic per country ! Let’s do that :D
Here are some planes that I currently rigged and that you can fly :


Some German tanks, from the very small Pz I B to the Sturmtiger (Not showing all tanks here I really don't have the room, there are way more):



Some Soviet ones :



American ones :



And British ones !



I will most likely add Japan as well, but I haven't started working on that yet.

The game is currently playable, there aren't any goals but all the basics are there. I tested it with 3 people, I'll try to test it with more people at the same time see how it behaves. So far, so good !

I will try to launch an open alpha soon, early 2022, probably before March, so if you guys are interested, you will be able to play test soon-ish ;)

I would like to wish you a MERRY CHRISTMAS and a happy new year in advance since this is likely to be my last post of the year,

Thank you to all the new players that got the game during the sales, you have no idea what it means to me (the world, it means the world to me)

Hope you’re all gonna have fun and … see you on the battlefield !