Hex of Steel News

Disclaimer : All of the followings are not in any particular order of importance.

- Added : One new official map : Map of the eastern front. This map is 54.000 tiles big, it features 150 cities accurately placed with their names, from Berlin to Moscow, edit it if you're not satisfied, because you can :))
- Added : New NATO counters, forgot some, especially the motorized kind, so rockets, recon etc.
- Added : New tiles : Desert village + desert hills tiles.
- Added Seasons. Basically a winter/summer cycle based on the month of the year the maps is running. Smooth texture transition occurs in November and in April.
- Added : Time. You can choose to set it up, or not in the editor. If you set it up (meaning you set up a number of days going by every turn) the date will appear in the top right corner of the screen.
NOTE : This is NOT for the campaign, campaign won't have any kind of time passing by or season changing, they are fixed in time. This is only for custom maps you can make, or the one I provided/made that you have access to (As of now, these are the map of Europe 1939 and Eastern front 1941).
- Change : Resupplying cost has been changed to something less expensive.
- Change : Steel production from VPs is divided by 2 when the map has more than 10.000 tiles. This is to balance the game and make sure the player don't earn like 1500 steel per turn.
- Change : I optimized the game even more ! Because playing on a map that has a size of 50.400 tiles was tough with the previous version, and also to pursue my quest to enable every single player to play my game, regardless of their computer, I made some more serious optimizations. Everything should be way more lag-free.
- Change : Panzer III J armour has been downgraded from 5 (wtf) to 4.
- Change : the AI will spawn more and more units based on the map size. for every 10.000 tiles, it will spawn 1 more unit per turn. This is added to the base difficulty modifier. Meaning, on the Eastern front map, player in difficulty easy, means the AI should spawn 1 unit per turn, but because it has over 40.000 tiles, you add 4. If you play in hard, this will be 3 *4. Medium will be 2 * 3, easy would be 1 * 1. Ok I got confused, I'm not sure, anyway, it just spawns more units based on the map's size x)
- Change : Infantry got more hard and soft damage. Minimum is now 3 for both kind of damage.
- Fix : When removing units in the editor, it was not actually removing them from the list of units of the player, thus causing problems when clicking 'Next unit' in the game and causing bugs.
- Fix : 'Next unit' not working in some cases, explained above.
- Fix : Bug in the map editor when loading a map with 8 players, could not load the 8th one.
- Fix : French mortar had an extra HP container, forgot to remove it after the first tests I did on them.
- Fix : Paratroopers with 0 MP could not really be dropped, it caused weird stuff to happen.
- Fix : Bug with the Polish Bofors 37 mm that was considered as Infantry and not artillery/gun. Causing it to receive the wrong kind of damage.
- Fix : Train pathfinding was kinda broken, showing only like 2 or 3 potential tiles instead of the usual ALL potential tiles. Also, it took like 10 minutes to calculate all the paths. Now it's instant.
- Fix : the HP rotating with the unit while being attacked.
- Fix : All unit had 1 visibility only, even those with 2.
- Fix : When passed 1st turn, pressing 'spacebar' to toggle the air/ground view was not working.
- Fix : Some of the Soviet units had British NATO counters, sorry, I got mixed up with the colours xd

- Removed : Ability for engineers to build stuff.
I decided this did not really fit into the game's spirit, brought too much micro management, idk.

- Quite significative changes (That actually caused the break of all saves/maps), is that I changed all infantry units of all countries. Just like for engineers, I did not like how it was, and the fact that you had so many different types of infantry. So now it's simple. Light infantry (bolt action rifle/SMG), AT infantry, MG team, Mortar team, engineers and paratroopers. Germans have SS infantry for now, I don't know what I will do with them yet.

I hope you will enjoy this new update ! Sorry for taking so long to release one, but there really was work to do, and this map basically took 48h to make, so ... Happy playing !

Hi everyone

I decided to make some big changes to the infantry, and i am removing units from the game, and replacing some. This means any save containing these units will be broken/corrupted.

For custom maps, if some of you made some, I'd recommend clearing it from all units to avoid any incompatibilities. If there is no units, it map should be fine ;)
UPDATE : I made more changes (to get even more better performances, especially on big maps) and custom maps you made will be broken as well. Sorry.

I decided to change all infantry type to something simpler, I did not like to have infantry represented by their weapon name, so for all country there now will be : Light infantry, MG team, Mortar team, Engineers, AT infantry. And that's it. German have a SS infantry division though.

Next update update will bring some fix, a patch for the resupply cost because it is way too expensive to resupply anything right now.
It will also include a new map, the whole eastern front. Size is 280x180, over 240 VPs and 170 cities with their name.
I also worked on implementing time going forward. As of now, one turn = 7 days, but I'll probably let the player modify this value in the map editor settings of the map.

See you this evening !

- Added : 1 new scenario for the US campaign.
- Added / Change : New first scenario for the German campaign. Will be revamping it all slowly, with accurate city location and accurate city naming.
- Change : After you resupplied, you won't be able to attack anymore.
- Change : Resupplying cost of HP has been multiplied by 10 and capped to the unit's own cost. It basically costs 10 steel to get 1 HP, but if you have a unit that costs 20 steel (low level infantry) and you want to resupply your 10 HP, it will cost you 20 steel.
- Change : Steel income from capturing an enemy VP has been divided by 2. 25 steel for a village/airport/factory. 50 for a harbour/city, and 100 for a capital.
- Change : Modifications to the money you start with has been applied to all US campaign. Trying something out here, probably gonna bring it down to 100 for every single scenario, then with the difficulty settings you would get modifiers (in easy you'd get 100 * something), but in hard you'd have only a hundred to start with.
- Change : Removed the movement cost of each tile, pathfinding made it useless.
- Fix : When staring a new scenario or loading a save, the "two units indicator" was not being displayed.
- Fix : Layer order has been arranged for city names to be under the rest of the unit info.
- Fix : The British Tulip tank was bugged.
- Fix : Resupplying not costing any money.
- Fix : Your potential path still being displayed after you pressed 'Show drop zone' with the paratroopers.
- Fix : For users who are not new to the game and own it already, the update where I added the new option in the menu for AI pathfinding radius was by default set to 0, now it is set to 15 (You probably experienced the AI not moving at all due to not changing the value but I changed its default value for everyone now).

- Added : PaK 44 for Nazi Germany.
- Added : 2 new city names to the map of Europe.
- Added : 1 new scenario for the US campaign. Operation Luttich, german counterattack in Brittany.
- Added : Core units limit in campaign scenarios, limit is set to 15. Non-core are not counted. (Trying to balance the game).
- Added : New animation when dealing damages.
- Added : Damage modifier, enable it or disable it. When a unit attack its damage will see applied a -1, +0, or -1 damage, a bit like rolling dice.
- Added : HP being shown on map. Enable or disable the feature in the main menu.
- Change : I discovered the use and how to use text mesh in Unity, that allowed me to implement the HP on the unit and also any city name to be created (I previously had created the 260 names manually in photoshop).
- Change : I decided to remove all per-turn income in the campaign. Both income from cities/harbours and any other VP you own, but also the fixed income that was laying around since the release of the game. The first one will still be functional when playing non-campaign scenario/maps, such as the map of Europe where you need this per-turn income in order to keep the game running for a longer time. Therefore I multiplied by a lot the steel being earned when capturing an enemy VP to at least a 100 for airports and small towns up to 300 for capitals.
- Change : Panzer III N got his range set to 2, soft damage increase to 6, hard damage reduced to 5.
- Change : All Panzer III's got their armour reduced to 3, except those that have extra armour plates on the side.
- Change : I removed the HP and MP in the top left corner window/panel/whatever you wanna call it. As they are now displayed on the map (HP) and there is now Pathfinding (MP) no need to have their values displayed. You can still press LEFT SHIFT to have the HP being displayed if you wish to play without HP display on the map.
- Change : Size of NATO counters have been reduced a bit to fit better on the tiles.
- Change : Infantry will always deal 1 or 2 damage to tanks when attacking them or being attacked by them, regardless of their hard damage (except those that have a hard damage superior to 3 which would be Panzerfausts, Panzershrecks, PIAT, PTRD etc).
- Fix : Panzer IV F2 was actually a Panzer IV F1, also I changed his range from 1 to 2, and its production year from 1942 to 1940.
- Fix : Unlocking achievements was impossible due to the game not recognizing campaign maps from any other map. Achievements are now unlockable as previously.
- Fix : Desert tiles that did not have the same colour.
- Fix : Clicking 'Next unit' while a unit was already selected and moving. You now can't.
- Fix : The damage are not based on the screenspace anymore but in the worldspace (Unity) and now will stay where they are even when you move the Camera. Will be working on effects at some point.

- Added : 1 new scenario for the US campaign.
- Added : AI can perform landings and will automatically go on an allied harbour tile when there is water between him, and his goal (enemy VP).
- Added : New setting in the main menu, where you can set for yourself the radius the AI will use to perform the pathfinding. It's measure in tiles, and goes in all direction. Minimum is set to 10, maximum set to 100. That means, when you set it to 10, if the enemy VP is more than 10 tiles away, the unit won't move towards it. I decided to change it to a custom value the user can choose for himself, because the time it takes is based on your hardware, and I want everyone to be able to play my game regardless of their hardware. Also, most of the VPs always are within 15 tiles to each other or so, so setting it to 15 even will be fine for any map in the campaign.
- Change : Unit for the AI will randomly spawn, meaning at random VPs and not at the VP that is the closest to an enemy VP. I believe this to be a better solution, instead of giving random goals for the units to go for. They will always go for the closest enemy VP, but at least they all spawn in random locations.
- Change : GREAT optimization for the pathfinding and the AI making it possible to play on the map of Europe again.
- Change : AT rifles hard damage have been reduced from 7 to 5 or 6.
- Fix : Can't resupply while moving anymore.
- Fix : Allied troops could conquer allied VPs, example : Italy conquering a german VP.
- Fix : Turn number not changing as supposed to.
- Fix : Transport ship with NATO representation were not shown in NATO representation.
- Fix : 2 Italian tanks causing Italy to freeze while playing.
- Fix : All transport ships being green (US).
- Fix : Units when controled by the AI going back and forth. They now have a fixed goal, not a new one every turn as I previously set them to (mistake).
- Fix : At least THREE reasons why the AI was freezing during his turn. I believe it should be freeze-free from now on. But in case a freeze happen, I encourage you to press F10, this will take you to the main menu and make a quicksave that will be named crashlog + date + time. Send me this file if you want the bug to be fixed, I can't just go over the thousands lines of code and hope to find an error, unfortunately. The quickest and easiest solution is getting my hand on your save file and opening it in the editor in Unity.

Thanks for your patience, happy playing !