Commanders,
Patch 1.2 is now live. Prepare for smarter enemies, tougher decisions, and an even more brutal battlefield.
Brutal Difficulty UpdateWe've rebalanced existing campaign maps to make Brutal difficulty a true challenge worthy of its title:
- Enemies now start with more units (mission and difficulty dependent) and deploy them more aggressively.
- Maps support having extra properties based on the difficulty setting, giving the enemy increased income, and forcing you to fight harder.
- Our new AI system makes fewer mistakes and will punish yours.
The ability to configure extra units and properties for your own maps will be coming as part of 1.3, enabling you to make Brutal Skirmish maps for others to play too.
Using gameplay data from across the community, we’ve analyzed player performance and grouped difficulty levels into target skill cohorts. The campaign has been rebalanced with these benchmarks in mind:
- Standard – Designed to be completed by our average player with moderate challenge.
- Hard – Tuned for the top 25% of players, likely requiring strategic restarts and tight decision-making.
- Brutal – Aimed at the top 10% of players, offering a serious test of skill, planning, and perseverance.
We’ll be actively monitoring player feedback and performance metrics over the next week to fine-tune these difficulty targets if needed. Your input will help us shape an experience that’s both fair and fiercely competitive.
AI UpdateOur AI has been completely reworked from the ground up. Here’s what to expect:
- Smarter Enemy Behavior: The AI now adapts to your tactics, coordinates flanking maneuvers, prioritizes key threats, and makes better use of terrain and timing.
- Improved Decision-Making: Expect enemies that think more like players—and punish mistakes accordingly.
- More Reliable Allies: Friendly AI now acts more intelligently in support roles, improving the feel of team-based operations in our 2v2 skirmish missions.
Our AI now better understands the battlefield. It looks further ahead at what the player might do, and plans its own moves accordingly. No more running a Bomber into SAM range to immediately die.
Notice the Helicopter now actively avoiding the SAM's attack range. It's also not diving in due to the Flak-Cannon protecting the SAM.
The build table has been tweaked, and the priorities have changed. The AI no longer saves up for the expensive units, but better evaluates based on need and builds those instead.
Battle Powers are better evaluated, not just for their value change, but how they will impact the AI's contested frontlines. Sorry to those players hiding a Destroyer in the corner of the map to attract Mordred's power - that will no longer work.
Our new AI now understands the faction unique units and units with special actions. This means the AI can now build and use Medics. It also fully understands the Rhino's push mechanic. If you leave a vehicle in front of a river, expect to get shoved into it!
We've also made the AI deliberately make some bad moves to "progress the game". We've counterbalanced this by giving them more units on higher difficulties. This stops the game stalling, but keeps the net difficulty the same.
The intelligence of the AI is still dependent on the difficulty setting. Higher settings look further ahead, whilst lower settings are still open to making more bad moves. Standard difficulty will accept a worse value trade than Brutal would.
Skirmish missions should also play better with this update (or any mission where you start with no units). The updated AI is better able to read the early game. It will know it needs to build units to capture properties initially. It will decide where it wants to send those units and do a better job of spreading them out as it does. This is much more like how a human player would start a Skirmish or PvP game.
Multiplayer Turn Timers
Warside's multiplayer was always meant to be fast-paced, with moves being made under pressure. To improve this, we've added turn-timers to multiplayer games, with the following modes:
- Standard - 3 minutes per turn.
- Blitz - 90 seconds per turn.
Matchmaking games always use Standard timers. For your own lobbies, you can choose your timer setting or disable it entirely.
The timers are based on our existing multiplayer data, but we're open to adjusting them and welcome your feedback
on our forums.
Additional ChangesAs part of this update, we have also included the following smaller changes and fixes:
- Added some additional Skirmish missions for some mission concepts we wanted to try.
- Changed "Fog Of War" mission to end the mission if the outpost is captured, rather than being optional (and then a standard "eliminate all units" mission after). The mission can still be won by eliminating all units instead of capturing the outpost directly.
- Fixed trigger on "Krakens Wake" mission, where a player could win early by destroying all units without moving the Cargo Truck. This meant a story event didn't trigger, and left some players without enough context to explain how that mission ends. This mission no longer ends by eliminating all units - you can only win by moving the Cargo Truck to the flare location, even if the enemy has no units left.
- Fixed Decker using Medusa's theme music instead of his own.
- Fixed animations not being shown for ground-to-air attacks in the ice environment.
- Fixed vehicles not leaving craters when they explode during combat cutscenes in the ice environment.
- Swapped Demetria for Boreas on "Endgame" mission. Demetria's power can hurt allies, and although she only used it for a positive net trade (for the whole team), it wasn't fun if the player was on the receiving end of the friendly fire.
- Root and Disarm no longer apply to buildings (no game impact, since buildings can't move or shoot, but less flashing icons).
- Various font fixes for players using Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages.
- AI will move units in clusters (if unaffected by enemy positioning). This prevents the camera jumping around as much during the AI turn, especially on larger maps.
