Thronefall News

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.]
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[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

[hr][/hr]
[h3]Dear Queens and Kings,

We asked you for quest suggestions and you delivered!
As promised we will pick some of the most popular ideas and bring them into the game.[/h3]

Things went a bit differently than expected. We mostly expected combinations of weapons, perks and mutators with perhaps a few new mutators mixed in here and there. What we got from you instead was an absolute onslaught of fantastic ideas for new ways to play, that a couple of simple quests would almost not do justice. We’re currently exploring ways how we could introduce those as kind of “special” game modes or challenges. Since we’re also all hands on the new map which as promised has our priority at the moment we hope you forgive us if the implementation of those will take a little while.

We read through all of your suggestions and collected a lot more inspiration than just the presented “winners” here, but for some ideas we still need some time to check how feasible they are from a technical and gameplay perspective.

For the following “winners” however, we can already say with high confidence, these will make it into the game in one way or another.

[h2]Congrats and thanks for the fantastic suggestions:[/h2]

No Preparation, go go go!
By matan

“Complete [Map Level Name] with less than 15 secs of preparations timer between waves"

This post received the most community upvotes by a long margin so how could we say no. The idea didn’t cross our mind before and it sure does sound like a fun new way to play Thronefall. We’ll think about where to best implement that into the game and give it a go go go!


I like it just the way they are
By Gertimoshka

“Never move any of your own units from their starting positions.”

Both we as well as the community liked the idea. We’ll find a way to put it into the game, probably as a mutator so you can’t accidentally move your units and mess up the quest.


The great Wall
By CaporalNico

“Before Night 3 build a wall or two. They can protect your castle. Then don't let a single part of your wall get destroyed”

The idea of having to protect something specific came up a few times but protecting your walls seems like the most fun and intuitive twist on the idea. We’re not sure how well it would work as a quest (the rules don’t quite fit into the quests section), but we have some ideas and will find a way to make it work. Nice one.


One Man Army
By Hjorse Rider

“Thematically, you're a one man army who wins whichever battle you participate in.”

This concept or idea came up multiple times in different variations. In Hjorse Rider’s version building towers would still be allowed but building units would not be. In other variants e.g. by FlediX2 you may only build and upgrade your castle center and nothing else. Hjorse Rider gets the win in this category for choosing the best name “One Man Army '' and for receiving the most community upvotes. That being said, we find all of these options interesting and will likely explore different variations of this idea in the game.


When are these “quests” coming?
We are currently hard at work on a new map, so we’ll look into this right AFTER the new map is out.

[h3]Thanks a lot for your understanding and patience and thanks again for your fantastic ideas and suggestions.[/h3]