Thronefall News

Dear Queens and Kings,

This update brings a ton of experimental improvements to Thronefall. We've been very busy and we're excited to share what we've been working on for you. Let's get right to it...



This is our attempt at making defense towers more useful, interesting, and versatile:

• Defense towers have brand new level 2 upgrades (that are more powerful than before).
  
• The level 2 tower upgrades also decide the targeting priority of the tower (highest health, lowest health, closest or random).
  
• Defense tower level 3 upgrades are similar to before but can now synergize with the level 2 upgrades in various ways. You want to build a healing sniper tower? Or an armored tower with hot oil for your front line? You now can.
  

While we won't have recurring "seasons" in the traditional sense, we're adopting the model to allow for big balancing changes like this one. We've heard your feedback loud and clear, so here comes our attempt at addressing it:

• A new empty high score table to allow for a fresh start.
  
• Complete rebalancing of the eternal trials wave generator.
  
• Reduced enemy spawn variety but increased predictability to make runs fairer (one of the main things you asked for).
  
• Increased difficulty and faster difficulty ramp-up (Runs should not take 15 hours+ to complete and the first stages are no free wins anymore. Every victory will be earned.).
  
• New enemy preview before starting a level (allowing you to dodge enemy compositions you don't want to go up against and to better prepare your strategy in advance).
  
• Unwanted perks can now be disabled before starting a level.
  

You've been asking for this for ages and we know we are late to the party. We finally did it and have to agree... This is quite a massive improvement to the game feel:

• New select all army hotkey, select all melee hotkey, select all ranged hotkey, select all heroes hotkey.
  
• New select one unit type hotkey (only ever selects or places one unit type at a time, super useful for sorting clumped-up units).
  
• New toggle command units hotkey (similar to toggle sprint but for commanding units).
  
• The new hotkeys are not just a quality of life change, but also open up a surprising amount of new room for skill expression. We're excited to see how you use these new tools to defeat your foes.
  

Some more things you've kept asking us for that we are excited to finally deliver in this patch:

• Snappier keyboard controls.
  
• Mouse movement added as a control option.
  
• Next day gold preview in the pause menu.
  
• Tower range indicators.
  
• V-Sync should be working correctly now. (You can also use it to limit your frame rate.)
  

We made many balancing changes to the game and more will follow.

Balancing is a two steps forward, one step backward kind of process. Every patch will make some things better and some things worse. The important bit is that on average it keeps getting better over time. This is what we strive for. Thanks for all of your valuable feedback on this matter!


[h3]SELF-HEALING REWORK[/h3]
Before this update, the self-healing of your character scaled linearly with your health pool. This was not very transparent and also led to a lot of balancing problems. To address this:

• Your self-healing no longer scales with the size of your health pool. Self-healing is a separate value now.
  
• Whenever self-healing is affected, it is specifically stated in the tooltips!
  
• You heal at the same rate while you are dead, so intentionally dying is no longer a valid strategy to refill your health (unless you have a ring of resurrection, of course).
  

[h3]PLAYER WEAPONS[/h3]
We're only making some careful adjustments as we'd rather not break anything here:

• The heavy sword makes you start the game with +20% additional health and health-regeneration now.
  
• The self-healing of the spear has been reduced by -10% and scales with your self-healing instead of with your max health pool.
  

[h3]PLAYER UNITS[/h3]
Some adjustments to level the playing field between different unit types and helping each unit to better fulfill its role:

• Berserks have a new jump attack (filling a more unique niche for quick burst damage)
  
• Flails have health steal (giving them more durability when surrounded)
  
• Longbow projectiles are +100% faster
  
• Spearmen have +5% health and +5% attack damage
  
• Hunters deal -10% damage against non-monster units
  
• Fire archers deal -10% damage
  

[h3]ENEMIES[/h3]
Some adjustments to some enemies you found annoying to deal with:

• Quickslings periodically stop firing (giving you a better opening to dive in and attack)
  
• Exploders count as siege weapons now. (They will be targeted by your sniper towers etc.)
  

[h3]CASTLE CENTER UPGRADES[/h3]
These are turning out to be rather difficult to balance. Our main goal here is to make each upgrade more situational, so that which one is best, depends more on the level and enemies you go up against:

• Magic armor deals a fixed amount of damage to enemies when you are attacked (instead of a percentage as before).
  
• Castle-Up now immediately discounts all currently available tower upgrades on the map, making it give a more predictable amount of value depending on how many towers you currrently have.
  
• Commander Mode now gives units that are on hold position a +20% health and attack bonus.
  
• A bit of number tweaking on the other upgrades as well, mostly buffs.
  

[h3]MILL UPGRADES[/h3]
For the mills we recieved some mixed feedback. Some said Improved Plow was not strong enough, but most said it was too much of a must-pick compared to the other options. As the defensive options of the mill are all fairly situational, we think it is okay to buff then up a bit more:

• Scarecrows: Projectile speed increased by +200%
  
• Explosive Mills: Fields explode as well now. The explosion size has been increased to a fixed size accross all mill levels.
  
• Wind Spirits: In addition to the arrow blocking the mill also gains a ranged attack with a slow effect.
  

[h3]PERKS[/h3]
We made tons of little balance adjustments here as well. Almost every perk has been touched in some shape or form. Here are some highlights:

• Warrior Mode is renamed to Warrior Training and no longer negatively impacts the attack damage of your units and buildings. You just become stronger over time (up to +100%).
  
• Castle Blueprints health bonus reduced from +80% to +50%
  
• Gladiator School no longer impact the build or upgrade costs of your training facilities.
  
• War horse damage is increased but you recieve some damage when riding over enemies as well as to somehwat limit how much you can use it.
  
• Glass Canon no longer negatively impacts your self-healing rate (due to the self-healing rework) but it gives -80% health (down from -66%, reverting a change from the last balance patch).
  
• Elite Warriors no longer negatively impacts the training speed of your units but their health bonus has been reduced to +50% (down from +80%)
  
• Archery Skills now additionally gives +60% projectile speed for your archers.
  
• Fortified Houses attack range drastically increased
  
• Treasure Hunter gives +10, +20 and +30 gold in the last 3 nights (previously +60 only before the last night)
  
• Indestructable Mines renamed to Sustainable Mining: Gives +400% health to gold mines and their income never drops below 3.
  
• Health potions heals a fixed amount of health per second for every unit (instead of a percentage of the max health)
  
• Many small number tweaks on other perks as well.
  

We've been putting a lot of work into Thronefall lately. If you enjoy what we do, one of the easiest ways to help us out is to leave a review on Steam (if you have not already). Thanks so much for all of the love and support!

[h3]Join us on Discord![/h3]
If you would like to be more actively involved and help with beta testing for new features before they come out, leave feedback and bugs, the best way to do so is on our Discord server: Join us on Discord!

(We're keeping an eye on other channels such as the Steam Forums as well, of course.)

[h3]What's next?[/h3]
Now that we've taken some time to work on balancing and quality of life features, it is once again time to get back to work on more content for the game! We still have some quests from our previous community event to implement, for example, and we know you likely want to see more levels as well. ;)

Thanks for your continued excitement and support! We would not be able to do this without you.

All the best,
Paul & Jonas

Dear Queens and Kings,
Thank you all a lot for the warm reception of the big update last Friday — and also for your thoughtful feedback! Your suggestions are a vital part of Thronefall’s development. In this update we try to address the most urgent points regarding the balancing and new enemies of Sturmklamm. The molepeople in particular frustrated some of you and understandably so. We agree that they circumvented defences a bit too easily. While this is probably not the last adjustment in this domain, we hope this update makes fighting them off feel more enjoyable and fair for you. We also adjusted the new enemies' occurrence in the Eternal Trials mode. You can find all the balancing changes in detail at the end of this post.


ACHIEVEMENTS:
Whoops, we completely forgot to add Achievements for the new level. Thank you for pointing that out and our apologies! They’re there now and ready to be conquered.


6 MONTH CELEBRATION & PRICE INCREASE:
Later today we will kick off a weeklong 25% off sale for Thronefall, celebrating the first 6 months of Early Access with you. After the sale is over we will, as mentioned in an earlier announcement, increase the price of Thronefall from 6.99$ to 9.99$ (or the equivalent in your currency) to reflect how much the game has grown since its initial release. So if you don’t own Thronefall yet, now is the perfect time to grab a copy at its old price. Don’t forget to tell your family and friends! :)


WHAT'S NEXT?
As you probably noticed by now, we usually alternate between adding new content to the game and improving what’s there already based on your feedback. The next update will implement more of your balancing suggestions as well as some long wished for quality of life improvements like a range indicator for your towers for example. Once that’s done we’ll go back and work on more content.


As always, we’re incredibly grateful to have such a friendly and passionate community. You make every day of developing Thronefall better than the last!

All the best,
Jonas & Paul

[Feb 05, 5:36pm CET: Please note that the MacOSX build will be delayed about 2 hours.]
________________________________

[h3]FULL PATCH NOTES:[/h3]


MOLE PEOPLE:
We heard your feedback that the molepeople are a bit too strong and circumvent your defences too easily at the moment so we are attempting the following changes:

- Molepeople now have a maximum tunneling distance. (They can no longer tunnel across the entire map at once.)

- Tunneling from one place to another will now take a short amount of time (no immediate teleportation anymore).

- The tunnelling ability cooldown from molepeople has been increased by +100% so they will tunnel only half as often.

- Mole people can no longer attack while in their dig or tunnelling animation (but they can still be attacked)

- Their difficulty budget in Eternal Trials has been increased by +15% so when they appear in Eternal Trials, there will be less of them.

- Mole warriors deal -75% damage against the castle center (down from -50%) so they can't "rush" you down as easily.

- Moleman is renamed to Mole Warrior and Moleman Archer is renamed to Mole Archer

- The splash damage dealt by the boss fight statues when tunneling is reduced by -50%.
Bonus Tip: Mole people take increased damage from towers (as stated by their tooltips in the pause screen).


QUICKSLING:
While they seem okay in the Campaign, according to your feedback they can be quite difficult to deal with in the Eternal Trials so let's simply try this:

- Difficulty budget for quickslings increased by +33% so when they appear in Eternal Trials, there will be less of them. (We'll keep an eye on this and increase it even more if necessary.)

Bonus Tip: Quickslings deal reduced damage to buildings. Towers are therefore a good counter. Mills with the wind spirits upgrade are a great counter as well.


STURMKLAMM:
We are happy that all in all you seem to like the new level so besides the mole people nerfs above we only made some small balancing changes to address your feedback:

- The difficulty of some waves has been reduced (a couple less enemies are spawned).

- Some waves towards the end of the level drop a bit more gold.


ACHIEVEMENTS:
- We added the Sturmklamm achievements as they were missing. (Oops.)

Dear Queens and Kings,
We’re excited to finally release a brand new level: Welcome to Sturmklamm. Here is a quick overview over the new stuff that is out now:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
The New Map:
With Sturmklamm we added a completely new map to Thronefall. Its narrow slopes leading through a rugged mountain range offer a well defendable terrain for your new castle. While coming with plenty of building options to inspire a vast range of different strategies we also kept your feedback in mind and designed Sturmklamm to be compact enough for you to always stay on top of the action. Stumklamm features a gloomy color scheme accompanied by a thunderstorm.

A New Weapon:
The Shadow Codex is a powerful new weapon playable on all maps once unlocked. Its unique combination of abilities allows for very powerful plays when mastered: Enemies you attack get cursed, dealing damage to the attacked enemy as well as every other enemy that already has been cursed. Activating the Shadow Codex’ ability lifts the curse from all enemies, dealing a massive amount of damage to them.

New Enemies:
On Sturmklamm you will encounter 3 new enemy types that will require you to adapt your strategies creatively to successfully fight them off.

New Buildings:
There are 2 new structures on Sturmklamm, Shrines and the Royal Forge. Shrines are indestructible ancient structures that can wreak havoc on your enemies, but to activate them a number of foes have to be defeated in their proximity first. The Royal Forge works similarly to the Blacksmith but offers upgrades that apply specifically to your character.

New Perks & Mutators:
The update features 6 new perks and 3 new mutators that can be unlocked and played with on all maps.

Eternal Trials:
All of the new content has of course also been added to the Eternal Trials mode.

We hope you’ll have lots of fun playing through the new level, weapons and perks. In the last couple of weeks we put all our effort into this update and we’re super happy to finally share it with you folks!

As always, we’d like to thank you for all the love, support, feedback and patience! We’re very passionate about making Thronefall the best game it can be, and so are you! We’re incredibly grateful for that. Enjoy!

All the best,
Paul & Jonas

OTHER CHANGES:

- Barricades (building): Only apply a slow effect to fast enemies (bug fix).

- Glass Canon (perk): Your health is only reduced by -66% up from -80%. (This is an experiment to make the perk more useful so we are reserving the right to revert this change if this turns out to be too powerful.)

- We are aware there are more parts of the game that require our attention. We were extremely focused on getting the new map out recently. We'll get around to more balancing changes and some more quality of life stuff shortly! :)

https://steamcommunity.com/games/2239150/announcements/detail/4048241665932476617

Dear Queens and Kings,
We’re hard at work to finish up the next level for Thronefall and are excited to finally share a glimpse of what’s coming:

Explore the remains of an ancient realm while relentless rain is pouring onto the rugged slopes of Sturmklamm. Looking like the perfect site for a mighty stronghold, what could have been the reason for the former rulers to abandon this place?


During the community survey in October you gave us a lot of feedback about what you liked and disliked in the existing Thronefall levels and what kind of content you’d wish for in the future. We listened closely to that and tried to design Sturmklamm accordingly. While we’re busy applying the final touches, here’s a quick summary of what will await you:

• a compact level layout that will allow you to check on most of the action at the same time, resulting in less stressful combat compared to larger maps like Durststein
• a new weapon
• new perks, buildings and enemy types
• an atmospheric thunderstorm

All this gets also added to the Eternal Trials mode of course!

We’re not entirely sure yet about the exact date, but Sturmklamm will be released between January 31st and February 5th 2024.

Heads-up: Price Increase
As stated on the store page, we plan to increase Thronefall’s price in proportion to the new content that we add to the game. Thronefall has grown a lot since its Early Access launch in August 2023 and after releasing the new map we are going to increase the game’s price from 6.99$ to 9.99$ (or the equivalent in your country's currency), presumably mid February 2024. This will of course not affect people who already own Thronefall. To celebrate the first 6 months of Early Access and give everybody the opportunity to pick up the game at its current price we’ll do a special sale *before* the price increases.

As always, thank you all for being such a wonderful community. We’re so happy about all the thoughtful feedback and kind words we receive. You’re the reason that working on Thronefall is so much fun!

All the best,
Jonas and Paul