Thronefall News

Dear Queens, Dear Kings,
as it often happens we introduced a couple of small new bugs with the big endless mode update on Wednesday. Sorry for the inconvenience and thank you all so much for finding and reporting those. We hopefully tracked them all down in this hot fix. It also contains a couple of balancing tweaks that should improve the overall experience you have with Eternal Trials. You'll find the details about the changes below. :)

All the best,

Jonas and Paul


Eternal Trials Balancing Tweaks:

- Mono-battle stages (where you encounter the same one enemy type in every single wave) happen only half as often (about 1 out of 60).

- Mono-spawn stages (an entire stage where enemies only spawn from one spawn point) happen only half as often (about 1 out of 10).

- Starting from stage 5, the stage randomizer will always give you **at least** 11 gold to start with (note, that the difficulty scales with the amount of gold you start with, so this change is just to give you more options and does not directly impact the difficulty)

Bug fixes:

- Fixed a bug that caused the spear to have infinite attack speed

- Fixed a bug where you could gain infinitely more gold by saving and loading Eternal Trials Runs

- Fixed a bug where pressing escape during loading an Eternal Trials run broke the save file

Dear Queens and Kings,
It has long been asked for and is finally here! We just extended Thronefall with a brand new endless game mode: The Eternal Trials.

In Eternal Trials you play your way through an endless succession of stages in a rogue-like manner. In each stage you face a level that is based on one of the existing campaign levels but features a random set of enemy waves.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

At the beginning of a stage you pick between three options, unique combinations of a level, a weapon and two perks. While the weapon and level only matter for the current stage, the perks will be added permanently to your loadout for this run. This means after every stage you will gain two more perks. This ever growing power is met by enemies who get more challenging each stage.

Be careful! Defeats are permanent in Eternal Trials and one of them will mark the end of your runl! How far will you be able to venture?


With the Eternal Trials game mode we also added a new elite variant for each enemy type. Elites are much stronger versions of their base unit, meaning an elite swordsman is very powerful compared to a regular one. You will usually encounter them later in your runs and they’re distinguishable by their special unit icons and yellow outline.


To start an Eternal Trials run simply ride up to the new level marker on the map. It’s important to note that leaving a run during the night will result in an instant defeat (no worries, there’s an in-game warning for this, it shouldn’t happen by accident). During the day and between stages you can safely quit and resume at a later point, as you’re used to.

As a little extra the Eternal Trials levels also come with randomized colorsets. So in case you always longed to explore the snowed-in mountains of Nordfels or indulge in the lush spring meadows of Frostsee — now is the time. :)

This update also brings a couple of bug fixes and tweaks, listed in detail at the end of this post. We hope you enjoy the Eternal Trials as much as we do. We’re excited to hear about your adventures! Thank you for being such a passionate community.

All the best,
Jonas & Paul


[23/12/01 EDIT:]
We just rolled out a hotfix with some balancing tweaks and bug fixes for Eternal Trials. More info over here: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2239150/view/3871469509819519631?l=english



======================================================================
PATCH NOTES 1.3
======================================================================

General:

- New endless game mode "Eternal Trials"

Enemies:

- Exploder health reduced from 70 to 60 hp

Color Schemes:

- Tweaked the color schemes for Neuland, Nordfels and Uferwind, making them more easy on the eyes.

Bug Fixes:

- Leftover projectiles no longer damage you, your units or your buildings
after the end of the night

- Bow and dagger are finally correctly affected by Assasin's Training

- The "Stronger Heroes" perk is only applied when the perk is equipped (the effect was always applied before *whoops*)

- Barricades and hot oil tower are now correctly affected by the “Commander” perk.

- Fixed a couple of spelling errors (thanks for pointing those out!)

- “Warrior Mode” and “Commander Mode” affected the damage output of hero units twice. This should now be resolved.

- Ranged resistance from blacksmith upgrades and perks should now protect from flying wizard damage.

- Hot oil tower's splash attack is now affected by melee attack upgrades (or perks).

- Barricades are now affected by melee attack upgrades (or perks).

- Blacksmith can no longer be upgraded before the end of sunrise preventing a bug that swallowed all of your gold.

- Blacksmith no longer makes progress when it is respawned with the god of destruction perk active.

- “War Horse” perk does no longer work while you are dead.

- You can no longer make the unit command circle appear while you are dead.

- Slow effects on the player are properly reset when you respawn.

- You can no longer see any targeting attack markers while you are dead.

- Your ability cooldown is instantly recharged after you die

- Fixed a bug that made the main menu appear as an overlay while playing when pressing play too early.

Dear Queens and Kings,
We’ve been busy and would like to give you a small glimpse into what awaits you in the next update.

One of the most requested features by far has been some kind of “endless mode”. While we don’t think endlessly building out the same castle would work well with our current systems, we believe we found something that will scratch that itch!

We’re excited to announce a new game mode coming to Thronefall soon: The Eternal Trials!


Eternal Trials will be our brand new rogue-like game mode for Thronefall. It is played out on existing maps, but with randomized enemies, challenging you to adjust your strategy on the fly!

After each stage (each stage consisting of one “level”) you will choose between three options, deciding on two perks you’d like to permanently add to your loadout for this run, as well as which map and which weapon you would like to play with next. Stages get progressively more and more difficult, so be careful! One small misstep and your run is over! So how far will you be able to go?


We hope that this game mode will greatly add to Thronefall’s replayability, giving you something to explore while we continue to work on new levels and new content. The game mode is currently in the final stages of development. We’re excited to share it with you as soon as we’ve finished tying up the last remaining loose ends.

As always thank you all so much for the continued loyalty and support. Developing this game together with you continues to be an absolute blast.

Cheers,
Paul & Jonas

Dear Queens and Kings,
This week we implemented some long-wished-for quality of life features. They are meant to speed up things a little bit when growing your realm and deploying troops during daytime. Along with that we also did some small balancing tweaks and minor bug fixes. Here are the details:

Quality of Life:

• The player character’s horse (it’s named Hasty by the way) is 30% faster during the day

• You can now move while you are dead to influence your respawn position

• Your units now immediately teleport to their target location when you place them during the day

• The required button hold time of the unit command button when putting your units in “hold position” mode got reduced from 1 sec to 0.5 sec.

• When purchasing buildings, the coin bar now fills up ~20% faster



Enemies:


• Barrel Knights no longer have the "Armored Against Ranged" tag, they take significantly more damage from ranged attacks now.

Player Units:
• Fire archers splash damage dealt reduced by -10%

• Fire archers "only" deal +200% damage against siege units (down from +300%)

Fixes:

• fixed some rare save/load bugs on Neuland

• it’s possible again to resign/retry during the first day

• when getting defeated in the first night, the “retry day” feature now works as expected

• leaderboard and in-game perk selection screens now display the correct level name


We hope those changes make expanding your realm even more joyful. As always, thank you so much for being such a fantastic community!

All the best,
Jonas & Paul

Dear Queens and Kings,
After extensive testing on the beta branch we now finally feel ready to roll out the save game feature we announced a couple of weeks ago. Due to its technical nature we expected this one to be quite error prone in its first iterations – and it was. It was amazing how thoroughly you tested this update and there is no way we could’ve found all those little issues without your help. So a *massive* Thank you to everyone who helped to polish this update with us.


Here is what changed:
• Your games get now *saved* after sunrise every morning. That means you can leave your sessions anytime and just continue them at a later point. When selecting a level there is now a “Continue” button if you left a running match.

• If you got defeated you can now choose to retry from the last morning too. No need to grind through the whole level all over again if you wish to explore the same strategy anyway.

• This option is also available in the pause menu, allowing you to instantly restart from the last morning.

• We added a score bonus of 10% for finishing a level *without* retries

• When deciding to restart the level from the beginning you can now immediately re-pick your perks and weapon without returning to the main menu. This works from the pause menu as well as from the victory/defeat screen.



That’s it for this update. As always, thank you for being such a fantastic community. Right now we’re working on an exciting new feature we can’t wait to share with you!

All the best,
Jonas & Paul