Broken Alliance News

Hi everyone, Oak here.

I come to you with good news and bad news.

Good news first: the Phobos update is ready! We have now released the update for the second faction, Phobos, to join the fray in the fight for Eol. It features Act 1 of their campaign, in their initial steps towards total war, culminating with the siege of Anchorage.

Phobos features an entirely new set of character creation options, a roster of Champions with various Abilities and each of them having an unique backstory that you can discover.



We hope that you will enjoy exploring the lands around Tenebrae, the capital of Phobos! And of course, any and all feedback is more than welcome, we appreciate all of your thoughts about the game, where ever you want to express them ^_^




And now for the bad news. We recently launched our second project, CraftCraft, and unfortunately it failed to meet our sales expectations, also failing to fund the further development of Broken Alliance. This means that we need to put the full-time development of Broken Alliance to a pause. We had to lay off our current crew of 6 people working on Broken Alliance until we find additional funding to continue full-time development of the game. For the time being, all of the sales from Broken Alliance will be distributed amongst the current and former team members to provide at least a little bit of solace in the face of these news. However, we are still going to be working on Broken Alliance. We will still provide updates to it, and we are going to change our direction a bit.

Our new goal is to get in Act 1 for all factions fully into the game and to add a skirmish mode with pre-made and/or randomly generated maps. Hopefully once the release of CraftCraft has stabilized a little bit more (it's not been easy

For now, I want to thank you all for your support, and hope that you will enjoy the Phobos update that everyone on the team has worked so hard on.


Wish us luck, and keep us in your minds. It's rough out there for us indies, but we're all fighting for a better day.


Much love,
-Oak

Hello everyone, Wisak here.

It has been almost 3 months after release and we have been working on the next content update. Due to us being a smaller team and being our first time doing Early Access, we haven’t been as productive as we would have liked, but we have learned a lot and we keep at it.

The Phobos update is almost here. We are nailing some of the final elements for it. Due to our team size and due to the large number of permutations that can happen in our game, testing it becomes a little bit of a problem. For that reason, we wanted to offer the opportunity to work together with us. We have created an internal testing branch and we are looking for a few people to help us with the updates before they come out to the public. These people need to be owners of the game and be part of our discord to help us. They will get access to early builds and they will be able to help us shape the game as we are making it.

Anyone who participates will be credited in the game. At the beginning, we will start with a very small group of 3-5 people to get used to the flow and if it works, we might increase the number.
We are looking for people who like the concept of our game already and are willing to check the builds and provide feedback. Sometimes things make sense on paper for us, or we might have already been biased towards it and some external perspective could help us make the game better.

If you are interested, you can fill this form. We will be contacting people very very very soon.

For everyone else, the Phobos update is not far away. We have already implemented the beginning of a progression system for the champions that we want to expand further in future updates. We have also made a huge overhaul of our AI and it is significantly more challenging than the release version and it will only get better from here. You will also play a whole new faction with its own champions and cards and the build will not finish at the gates of the enemy city. This time you will be able to siege it! At least the first iteration of the siege fight. :D

We will go into specifics very soon. For now, we hope you sign up for the program HERE to help us make the game better!

Have a wonderful week.

The Placeholder team

Good day Commanders, Ramiro here.

After the Early Access release we all took a short vacation since the days before leading up to it were so intense to the point where it affected our holiday break.

We are already full steam ahead working on the Phobos update which will bring a whole new faction to play as. The playable content will be similar to Anchorage currently, focused on the first parts of their Act I. We are also working on the first iteration of the progression system for both Champions and Commanders and significant improvements to the AI, as well as QoL improvements regarding combat, and exploration.

However, we wanted to push this patch with several QoL improvements trying to address problems reported by you, our community! Some of them are a still first step into improvement, which will lead into a bigger fix - but it’s something.

- Fixed Energized card translations for Chinese
- Added a fatal error screen that will pop up whenever the game crashes. It has a log that you can copy and share it with us either via Discord, or on the Steam forums.
- Added a bunch of Artifact effects that were missing. Some are available right now; others are for a future update 😐
- Added complimentary stat modifier colors to the adventure map army screen unit info
- Fixed Jackboot recruitment quest getting stuck if the Lifeseed was paid before advancing the quest. This fix should also make the War Profiteers quest and Sigurdr recruitment quest more stable
- (Combat) Stunned champions can now be selected for a more intuitive experience.
- Cards unusable by a champion are now disabled and lowered in the player hand.
- Combat now acknowledges the player has moves to make when out of stamina but champions can move
- Disable combat retaliations against ally units
- Targeting lines now show when moving player champions in combat to indicate whether they can attack enemies or be attacked by them
- Incurred status effect's icon now shows on top of the damage popup when a champion is attacked with one
- When a champion and an attack card are selected, hovering over enemy units will now show an estimate of the applicable damage. The true value will still depend on any triggered traps and other side effects
- Fixed sprint card can be carried into a new game session
- If the last played unit can still take actions, it'll be automatically selected at the start of the next player action

We hope these fixes bring some more stability and a little bit more clarity to the combat mechanics. We have more things in the works as I mentioned above, but they will take a bit of time due to their more complex nature.

We will have more info coming to all of you soon regarding the next content drop. But here is a sneak peek into some of the beautiful cards coming for Phobos.




This is it for this update. We hope you have a wonderful rest of the week!

Hello everyone!

Oak here. I hope you've all been having a good time with the game so far! We've been going through quite a lot of feedback, and it reinforces a lot of what we already expected, which is an extremely good sign. We know for a fact that we must improve clarity and player feedback, and to make things a little bit more obvious and better explained in the game. Thank you for that!

So, currently, we organized most of the crew to take vacation, because we all put in more hours in the run up to the Early Access release. On the 3rd of February, we will be back in full force again, so this patch is a smaller one, as we prioritize on what we want to bring to you next ^_^

So without further ado, here's the patch notes!

#3054: (Combat) Fixed Regenerate card not healing Champion on end of turn.
#3055: (Combat) Updated retaliation & range icons in Champion detailed tooltip.
#3056: (Cards) Updated card graphics for Feint, Kemdi's Savage, Puppet's Supper, Energize, Regenerate, Spire's Dispel Magic, Siren's Ice Projectile, and Stable's Sprint.
#3057: (Combat) Updated move & trap icons in Champion's quick stats view.
#3057: (Combat) Added heal popup on Champions.
#3058: (Combat) Increased Y-offset when hovering the player cards, to show the entire card graphic.
#3061: (Cards) Fix Energized description.
#3063: (UI) Modify player inventory to equip/unequip using double-click instead drag and drop, refactor, beautify, increase slots, fix bug item gets stuck in slot.
#3064: (UI) Add units stats to army screen.
#3062: (Map) Moved some map labels out of the way for both Prologue and Anchorage maps.
#3066: (Map) Fixed teleporter in the Refugee Habitat in Phobos.
#3067: (UI) Fixed tip screen initialization which caused some interesting problems (on specifically Linux) and possibly caused some of the hangs that people had.
#3069: (Save-Load) Fixed combat reset between scenes which caused combat session to not be cleaned when loading games, causing card selection to become stuck.


There are still some pending issues for us, such as:
Sometimes the Combat may become stuck, but reloading the Pre-Combat Autosave should fix that as a workaround for now.
In some rare cases if you heal your Champions, they may lose Max HP.
There seems to be input lag for the cursor on Apple Silicon based MacOS devices.
Sometimes when moving your Commander, it doesn't find the shortest path there.
...aaaand actually quite many things that I won't list right now because that would not be a good use of anyone's time heh. There will be constant improvements to issues that we both know about, and that pop up as you play further along in the game.


As a final note, I would like to shout out everyone who has taken the time to give us feedback and report bugs, with a special thank you to Tobbzn (they have a Patreon if you want to show your support! and Neffy from our Discord with helping out debugging the issue where card and unit selection becoming stuck sometimes.


I hope you've enjoyed the game thus far, and there will be many more updates to come.

Much love,
-Oak