The Conquest of Go News

Update 0.4.0 isn't focused on a particular area of the game, but instead contains various improvements which are outlined below.

• Campaign difficulty presets have been added which can be used when creating a new campaign. The difficulty levels are Beginner, Novice, Intermediate, Expert, Master, and Professional, each with their own settings for selected AI, AI level, handicap, and more. The lower levels will start with handicap stones, which was not very intuitive in the previous menu. Players can still manually set each of the campaign options to their specific preferences if desired.
  
• After creating a new campaign, your selected preferences will be saved and will automatically load as the default when creating a new campaign.
  
• The main menu has been reorganized so that tutorials have their own dedicated button, making them much easier to find.
  
• When returning to the main menu, the game will now reload the menu that was last used while leaving the main menu. This means that if the player starts a quick match and then returns to the main menu, it will automatically display the quick play menu. The same goes for the tutorials, online, and campaign menus.
  
• A progress bar will now display while on the campaign map screen if there is an automated review in progress for a previous match.
  
• Tooltip icons have been added to all menus which have labels containing additional information (board settings, playback settings, AI settings, general settings, quick match, online challenge match, online find match).
  
• Updated the formatting of opponent rank restriction in the online play Find Match menu.
  
• Fixed a typo in both the Nets and Capturable Shapes tutorials.
  
• Fixed a display issue for the next AI recommendation button which was being hidden under some circumstances when traversing the move tree too far in a separate move branch.
  

Several improvements to the ease of use and flow between screens for the campaign mode were implemented this week and included in this version 0.3.0 update.

• When viewing the move recommendations from the automated review of campaign matches, there are two new buttons which will allow you to navigate to the previous or next move recommendation, making the process much easier to review each recommendation.
  
• Clicking on a region of land on the campaign map will now automatically transition to display the result of the most recent battle from the battle history, if there is one.
  
• When returning to the campaign map from a match or review, the campaign map will automatically select and zoom in on the region that was previously selected. For example, if you just finished a match at Streles and returned to the campaign map, it will automatically zoom in on Streles, showing you the resulting city and allowing you to collect any resources that can be gathered.
  
• While viewing the resulting city from a completed campaign match and an automated review is completed with move recommendations for that specific match, the move recommendations will now automatically load on the screen without having to reload the battle history record.
  
• A new button has been added to the battle history panel to allow the player to return to the campaign map after a match record has been selected, making it more intuitive than closing the battle history panel.
  
• The board settings menu now includes an additional setting to let the preferred theme override the environment theme for campaign matches. With this setting enabled, any match played within the game will use the preferred theme, including campaign matches.
  
• Bug fix patches released after the previous 0.2.0 update can be found here.
  

The past week has been mainly focused on bug fixes, which you can find a log of here, but this update primarily focuses on improving the campaign difficulty system to make it more fair for both new and experienced players. With the new difficulty system, the handicap and AI level is managed separately for each board size (9x9, 13x13, and 19x19) of the battles that occur on the campaign map. What this means is, as battles are won, or as battles are reviewed for move improvements, when the difficulty changes automatically, the change will occur for the difficulty settings of that particular board size. When creating a new campaign, the player can set the starting difficulty values independently for each board size, or optionally have the AI level copy over to the larger board sizes, and have the handicap scale up for the larger board sizes (13x13 receives twice the handicap, and 19x19 receives thrice the handicap up to a maximum of 25). To maintain compatibility with existing campaigns, the starting values for the larger board sizes will follow the scaling method based on the current difficulty, but all automatic updates to difficulty throughout the campaign will only affect the corresponding board size.

There's been a lot of good feedback over the past week with regard to quality of life features and improvements to the campaign that will begin to be incorporated into the game with future updates.

Other changes included in this update:

• A handicap value of 1 is now supported within the campaign. Bear in mind, this represents a komi value of 0.5, and no additional black stones will be placed on the board as placing a single stone would be equivalent to the system playing the first move for you.
  
• All handicap games in the campaign will now use a komi value of 0.5.
  
• A details button was added to the campaign stats summary on the campaign map screen to make it more obvious how to display the detailed campaign stats.
  
• Stat summary values will display a scaled average value based on active boards sizes to represent the difficulty level for the campaign as a whole. The detailed stats show the individual difficulty level for each board size.
  
• Added a number to each automated review move recommendation to show the order in which the moves occurred during the game.
  
• Made it more clear that you can earn resources by finding the AI move recommendation yourself instead of clicking the Show Best Move button.
  
• Added new tooltip indicators to the New Campaign menu. These indicators will be incorporated into the other menus in future updates to make it more apparent that there are tooltips.
  
• Fixed a bug causing the Campaign Home button to not be displayed in the match results panel after the match completed under some circumstances.
  

The Early Access release of The Conquest of Go is now live and available for purchase! Thank you all for patiently waiting as this project has been developed. I look forward to your feedback as the game continues to be polished during the Early Access period.

If you run into any issues, please visit the Bug Reports & Support Steam discussion board, and if you have any suggestions after playing, you can visit the Feedback & Suggestions Steam discussion board.

I'm happy to announce that The Conquest of Go will be released for Steam Early Access on December 7, 2020! The Steam trailer has been updated with gameplay from the current state of the game. With this game, my hope is to get new players into the world of Go and provide a unique experience that can be enjoyed by both new and experienced players. See you all in December!