Hex of Steel News

ADDED

• Warning popup window for chinese players trying to play realtime multiplayer, the game does not have any servers in China, which as a result can lead to poor performances during online games (realtime only).
  

CHANGED

• Multiplayer version compatibility.
  
• AI better picks its target when several are at its disposition.
  
• AI now takes into account units cost when planning for an attack.
  
• AI's aggressiveness is now properly influenced by the actual economical situation (allies vs enemies total income).
  
• Vehicles armour have less impact vs infantry damage when engaged in unfavourable terrain (cities, forests...).
  

FIXED

• AI was wrongly calculating supportive fire when making attack decisions, which could lead to some 'kamikaze' attacks.
  
• Choices UI elements for next scenario(s) in campaigns were not translated when completing a campaign scenario.
  
• When the AI was playing very fast and deploying new units, some of them would remain visible through the FOW.
  
• Bug during human/AI control swapping mid-game through the Diplomacy menu.
  
• AI paratroopers would often place themselves over rivers or mountains in their transport mode trying to paradrop but they could not due to the tile not being walkable.
  
• Changing a unit's starting level and reverting back in the map editor would not revert the unit's HP.
  
• Little bug with ZoC behaviour in some specific cases.
  
• Infinite money glitch when selling units with a progressive cost set (factories, refineries, etc).
  
• AI had some wrong stats applied when purchasing some movement options (motorization/mechanization).
  
• Typo in french localization.
  

[h3]ADDED[/h3]

• New file inside mod folders: Manifest.json. With the rework of the mod manager UI, some information relative to the mod can now be seen (author, mod version, description of the mod, dependencies, etc). I would like to invite all modders to update their mod with the new file (new file is automatically added to any mod whenever you open the Mods Manager UI menu).
  
• New unit property for the Units editor: Exclude unit. This is a BOOL (true/false) which basically excludes any unit tagged with the flag from the game, you can use this to 'remove' base game units (and the reason why it was added).
  
• New unit property for the Units editor: Move or Attack. This is a BOOL (true/false) which when applied will prevent the unit to both move AND attack during its turn.
  

[h3]CHANGED[/h3]

• Modding menu UI. Clearer and simpler to use.
  
• Mods loading order are now exactly as shown on the new modding UI menu, mods will be loaded from top to bottom.
  
• AI units marked as scenario victory condition (must be killed in order to win the scenario) now are going to flee away from enemy units. As an example, the battle of Midway or the Coral sea had such victory conditions, the carriers will no longer rush into the enemy fleet, but flee instead.
  
• Store menu no longer resets after closing it and reopening it (your basket will be kept intact).
  
• Mods thumbnail template has been updated.
  
• Quicksaves naming convention, clearer and more informative now.
  
• Reworked the stats of all artillery (towed) with 15 and less damage.
  
• Artillery with 15 damage and above or 3 range and above are now considered as heavy and have the 'move or attack' mechanic.
  
• Heavy artillery (20+ damage) will now remove 2 entrenchment level when attacking.
  
• VERY heavy artillery (30+ damage) will now remove 3 entrenchment level when attacking.
  
• Reworked codebase to allow for future in-depth modding support.
  

[h3]FIXED[/h3]

• Cavalry had wrong localized name for Napoleonic Wars mod.
  
• Operation Uranus (Allied campaign scenario) had no victory conditions.
  
• UI scaling issue with the end of turn summary.
  
• UI scaling issue with save/load menus.
  
• Removed annoying Aleutian islands major victory points on Pacific 1941. As a result, I will have to reset the Steam leaderboard for that specific scenario as this will change the victory quite a lot.
  
• In very specific situations, the AI would skip some of its units (if a unit died during its own turn and another one was playing before, that next unit would be skipped).
  
• Strategic bombers with the recon property would be shown as possible to bomb a tile even though they are not capable of such an action.
  
• Patrol boats would be shown possible to move through some enemy-controlled VP even though when clicking it would result in the unit not moving and wasting its movement action.
  
• AI would have issues with its vision through FOW around its VPs when playing with 'stricter FOW' setting ON.
  
• Bombing a tile with a strategic bomber did not disable the 'undo' feature.
  

Many of you have several times reported back to me with issues regarding accessing the multiplayer server.
I have always received this feedback, but every time I checked the server, all indicators were showing 'green'.
No RAM issue, no CPU issue, no storage issue, no issue at all shown on the analytics.
I decided to put the blame on the provider, since I could not figure out what was wrong.
Then I decided to take a look at the logs, and oh boy, that was interesting.
Turns out, the multiplayer server basically was getting 'attacked'. HoS was DDoSed.
Some player was trying to create an account hundreds of times per second. Obviously, this should not have been possible natively, since in order to create an account you have to manually press buttons with your mouse, and have go through UI elements, etc. You cannot physically possibly send hundreds of requests for an account creation per second, and freeze the whole server for everyone by clicking buttons. So, this person definitely 'hacked' its way into the code and just decided to ruin the game for everyone.

After this was discovered, I then had to start taking measures against this sort of 'attacks', this is currently being tested, but so far the server is running, so you can sign in and resume your games.

Hopefully, this issue is resolved for good now.

People behaving like this don't deserve access to videogames at all.
They deserve to play with rocks and sticks.

[h3]CHANGED[/h3]

• Multiplayer compatibility version.
  
• Horse-towed units now get 2 movement points as a bonus, not 3 anymore. This brings horse-towed artillery up to 3 MPs max instead of 4.
  

[h3]FIXED[/h3]

• Multiplayer being inaccessible.
  

[h3]ADDED[/h3]

• Shuffle musics option.
  
• Keybind to open/close the objectives window.
  
• Dynamic filtering for the Units Editor search bar, you can now type in your own filters. You can use operators and units properties directly to filter at will. For example, typing in: 'name contains light infantry and productionyear >= 1943' would return all units where their name contains the 'light infantry' words and where the production year is superior or equal to 1943. I will be releasing the list of properties available on the Forums for you to dig. Spaces don't matter, caps don't matter, so doing LIGHT INFANTRY will work just like light infantry, and doing productionyear>1943 will work fine just as PRODUCTIONyear > 1943.
  Official 'how to' can be found here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/1240630/discussions/0/603033738055534866
  

[h3]CHANGED[/h3]

• Changed multiplayer compatibility version to 7.7.35.
  
• Updated the Manual.
  
• Light artillery guns can now move/attack during their turn.
  
• Heavy artillery guns can now only move OR attack during their turn.
  
• AT and AA guns can now move and attack during their turn.
  
• Rebalanced Sea Lion campaign scenarios.
  
• Rebalanced Low Countries campaign scenario.
  
• Reworked in game soundtracks UI menu.
  
• When editing an official campaign scenario through the editor, the game will no longer create a copy of the original file, you will be directly editing the scenario itself (allowing you more freedom with the scenarios the game has to offer).
  

[h3]FIXED[/h3]

• Potentially fixed game not launching on intel Macs.
  
• Overlapping UI elements (objectives menu / draw menu).
  

[h3]ADDED[/h3]

• Game will now look in an additional (optional) 'Shared' folder in the Units/Graphics path of your mod when it cannot find certain graphics. Useful when you have the same graphics shared across several countries, this way you don't have to duplicate the same image for all, but you keep only one in that Shared folder.
  

[h3]CHANGED[/h3]

• Operation Weserubung balance changes.
  
• Paratroopers now have 10 ammunitions versus 5 prior, making them more resilient when dropped behind enemy lines.
  

[h3]FIXED[/h3]

• Vichy not properly transferred to Germany upon its capitulation following Op. Torch on the Europe scenarios.
  
• Production time was not reset when moving from one campaign scenario to the next.
  
• Lessons of War policy was not applied to artillery/ships (+1 bonus XP).
  
• Supplies bug when no available tiles were found around a unit.