Update 1.3: Gaia

Today we are releasing the second major update to Gods Against Machines nicknamed "Gaia".

In this update, you can look forward to a new Gaia power, optional mission objectives and new rewards for completing them - Gaia's Gifts and Wonders! There are also several smaller changes, such as more control over game scaling in EASY difficulty, as well as tons of fixes and small improvements, and of course balance changes.





We have added a new baseline (always active) Gaia power - Wonders Of Nature!

By upgrading this power, you will be able to encounter optional objectives (more on this below) in missions more often and receive better rewards for completing them. It will also allow you to use wonders more often and gain access to more powerful wonders. But what are these wonders and what are the optional objectives? Read on to learn more!





In some regions, you will have the opportunity to complete an optional objective. These make it more difficult to defeat the enemy by requiring you to play a certain way - remove a certain amount of corruption, use only certain types of spells, not use miracles, etc. Some objectives even have a time limit - for example, you have to kill bosses fast enough to complete them. If you can't, don't worry - nothing bad will happen, but you will miss out on powerful rewards that you can't get any other way! Fortunatelly you can see what kind of objectives (if any) will be active in the available regions:



Some optional objectives may be very easy because your build is very good at solving that particular challenge, while others may be nearly impossible. The choice of which goals to attempt is entirely up to you!

But what about the rewards? Let's take a look at what Gaia's gifts and wonders are:





Gift's are rewards that are used immediatelly when you pick them up. When you complete an optional objective, there will always be at least one gift to select among the options. There are eight different gifts in the game - here is an example of three of them:

• Gift of power - Earn maximum number of rewards for winning this region regardless of corruption.
  
• Gift of clarity- Corruption in this region won't be added to world corruption.
  
• Gift of fate - Earn 3 fate charms.
  

Wonders are a completely new mechanic which we are introducing in this patch. They are tokens that you can use to request help from Gaia at any time during a region battle. This should allow you to have more control over the battle and tackle extremely hard challenges more easily. You can gather wonders in advance and then use them at the right time to overcome even the strongest of foes.



The Wonders Of Nature Gaia power is relatively weak at first, but once you spend a good amount of essences to upgrade it you will be able to get many wonders and use them as often as you like!



There are six different wonders in the game and each of them comes in two flavors: normal and greater. The greater wonder has a much stronger effect than the normal one. For example:

• Wonder of fire - Destroy all small enemy military units.
  
• Great wonder of fire - Destroy all small enemy military units as well as military producing buildings.
  

We have also added a small feature that has been requested on our forums - the ability to change how enemy power scales in EASY difficulty. You can now reduce or increase their damage and hitpoints as well as the amount of resources they have so that you can test your powers or experiment with crazy builds!





With new features come new achievements! We did not want to make them too grindy, so you can get all on NORMAL difficulty, but it will still require you to challenge yourself. Can you earn all three?





As always, there is a lot of small fixes and improvements in this patch. Here is a list of some of them:

• Promised power blessing now gives twice as many shards than before (shards for bargaining with powerful spirits)
  
• Fixed a bug that caused the loot chance to be displayed incorrectly in the stats window
  
• Increased the amount of shards that can be obtained in a single region (from drones) to 6 (was 4) before diminishing returns kick in
  
• Fixed a bug that caused only 1 mark of fate to be rewarded for completing a region even though 2 (or more) should have been awarded
  
• Fixed a few bugs in descriptions of spells
  

Hopefully you will enjoy this update! We have more things in store for future. Please keep the feedback coming, we read our forums regularly and take everything you say seriously!

Peter