Athena Crisis News

You can always win a map by capturing the HQ, but what if there *is* no HQ? In the latest Community Map of the Week, Explosive Supply Race by Flak, we’re left with another tantalizing option: blow up your opponent’s entire base with a bomb. Big bada boom!

The players here start in an X pattern, with each player controlling two corners of the map. The goal: take a supply train laden with explosives and drive it straight to the enemy HQ, where it will wipe all of their buildings off the map, instantly winning you the match. There’s a system of rails that lead from base to base, but which will also slow down your early wave of pioneers. The supply trains you need to move are also out of fuel, meaning you’ll need to capture a factory before you can build a Jeep or another Supply Train to refuel it and send it on its way. Don’t forget to build more rail units to escort it, though: if the bomb Supply Train is destroyed on the way to its destination, you’ll have to revert to a war of attrition and defeat all enemy units to win.

(Fun fact: train units are twice as fun to use if you yell “choo choo” every time you move them. Try it out! Another fun fact: this map is inspired by the Payload races in Team Fortress 2!

It's been a busy week in Athena Crisis improvements and fixes! Check out all the latest changes below:
[h3]New Art:[/h3]

• New Decorations: Over 30 new decorations depicting destroyed units or objects common to the autumn season. Perfect to depict devastation on the battlefield. (Check closely for a variety of very spooky Halloween-themed items!)
  
• New Structure: Destroyed Super Tank: Similar to the Crashed Airplane, you can now place a Destroyed Super Tank structure. You need to clear it to make way for units.
  
• New Airfield design: The design of the Airfield was adjusted to stick out more. The look was aligned closer to that of construction sites, cc @TheSneakyDragon.
  
• Changed the color of the "Destroyed House" to look less like a neutral house.

[h3]Curated Campaigns:[/h3]

• There is now a new "Curated Campaigns" list that you can find from the campaigns screen. Curated Campaigns are high-quality, community-created campaigns that are well-tested and maintained. By playing them you can receive more stars and you might even unlock rewards. Don't spend all your new stars at once – more items will be added to the shop later this week!

[h3]New Skills in the Shop:[/h3]

• Dragon Fire: Unlocks Dragons. The Dragon Fire power deals massive damage to units adjacent to Dragons.
  
• Large Footprint: Allows recruiting Ogre's, with a power that benefits all soldiers.
  
• Wild Companion: Unlocks Bears, increases Soldier attack in forests and mountains, and its power spawns Bears at Shelters.
  
• Last Resort: This skill unlocks Zombies in the editor, and prominently features the "convert" ability – but only for units with less than 10hp!
  
• More Power: Unlocks the Power Station in the editor, increases the funds multiplier of Power Stations and allows constructing Power Stations while the power is active.

[h3]New:[/h3]

• Added gamepad/keyboard support for map filters in the new game list.
  
• Added the ability to define initial charges in the map editor. This should make it much easier to test powers, and might make for some interesting setups when you start a map with a charge. Thanks to @CoconutTank for the code contribution!
  
• Player skills in pending games are now hidden for other players until the game starts, cc @Legend.
  
• The game now distinguishes between Xbox, PlayStation and Switch controllers and displays the different button layouts in the settings menu and the tutorial.
  
• A "Ranked" tab was added to the "New Game" screen showing maps with the "ranked" tag. We'll try to keep a pool of PvP approved maps in there. Maps without the "ranked" tag can no longer be played as ranked games. cc @Legend, @Mαstrο.
  
• As a result of this change, we changed all ongoing ranked games into casual games and did a one-time reset of player ratings. Who will become the best Athena Crisis player?
  
• Activating a Power Crystal now immediately turns a game into a realtime game, cc @CoconutTank, @Mαstrο.
  
• Added a 1 week turn timer. Removed the 10 minutes turn timer.
  
• "click+shift" was added to creating and unloading units.

[h3]Fixed:[/h3]

• Buttons to delete a campaign or update the play style are no longer shown when spectating somebody else's campaign. Other campaigns now show "Xyz's campaign" to be less confusing about where you are, cc @TheSneakyDragon.
  
• When there are multiple optional escort objectives and the player achieved one, it no longer changes the marked colors of the escort area.
  
• Fixed the actions diagram on the open source website, cc @CosmicCarpenter
  
• Fixed an issue where the map editor settings panel didn't reset the map size when inputing a large number.
  
• Labels on buildings associated with hidden optional objectives are now immediately revealed upon completing the objective, cc @Lukas.
  
• A small note was added to the create game and pending game screens when the first player who is starting a game is not the default first player.
  
• Fixed an issue that displayed unpublished campaigns in some situations.
  
• Fixed an issue in which captures were counted twice on the client, cc @SparkyDL2.
  
• Note: There will only be critical updates and bugfixes from now until October 22nd. Expect many improvements to invasions in the latter half of October!
  

It’s another devious puzzle map from Dxdydzd. We already have to mentally fortify ourselves when we see the “win in one turn” notification on these maps, but seeing “win in six turns” might be even MORE scary. There’s only so many things you can do wrong in one turn to fail a scenario map, but when you have six turns, any step in any one of those turns might be the wrong one.

Here, you have nothing but a lowly Pioneer and a Small Tank, and are asked to defeat two snipers and an APU in six turns. The Pioneer can’t attack, and the Small Tank is not well-suited for attacking the enemy units, so how do you win? Perhaps the Radar Station has something to do with it…or it might be a red herring, as we know dxdydzd is fond of those. Also keep in mind that ammo is limited: your tank isn't quite full, and the northern sniper is out of ammo, but the mountainous defense will make it more difficult for the tank to attack it.

You can give Demolition a try right now! If you’re playing on Steam, simply go to New Game and search for “Demolition.” Let us know if you beat it on the Discord or in the comments below!

The full experience of Athena Crisis has been out for a few weeks now, and we’ve got the reviews to prove it. Sitting with an excellent score of 83 on Metacritic and with a Recent Review mark of “Very Positive” on Steam, it’s been gratifying to see reviewers and players enjoy the 1.0 release, which includes the full campaign experience and the new Invasions feature.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]But don’t take our word for it! Here’s what reviewers are saying:

Athena Crisis is…
“crafted with love and shows in every corner.” - Steam Deck HQ
“bursting at the seams with new gameplay mechanics - The Nerd Stash
“an incredibly competent tactical adventure inspired by Advance Wars - Hey Poor Player

If you’ve taken the time to play and enjoy Athena Crisis, please consider leaving us a review!

Hello all,

If you haven't been following the Discord news channel, here are (many) of the changes and improvements we've made to Athena Crisis since it hit 1.0 on September 23rd. There are plenty more fixes that have been implemented in addition to this list, so please check the Discord if you'd like more rapid updates.

[h2]NEW AND IMPROVED[/h2]

• Any type of casual PvP game can now be abandoned by a player, allowing you to clean up that list of games that has been sticking around. Thanks @Rishi is Here and @Jinjo for playing 3 games super quickly to make me realize I should enable this.
  
• Invasion messages on Discord now have better phrasing for games that have ended, and an "open in app" button was added.
  
• When there is no cancelable action in a game, pressing Escape now opens the overlay menu. This is a pretty big change to the cancel behavior, so please report any issues you might find and/or whether you think it would be better to add an option to disable this behavior.
  
• You can now horizontally navigate in landscape mode in the main menu/overlay menu. It was silly that this didn't work before, but I only changed the layout of the menu (adaptively!) about two weeks ago and honestly didn't even think about it.
  
• The damage chart is now public and no longer requires logging in.
  
• Secret maps in the main campaign are now highlighted as "Secret" in the level selection screen, cc @Kylestien.
  
• Brutes are now always listed in the damage chart since they come up early in the campaign + added a note that units have to be unlocked to be shown in the unit chart.
  
• click+shift: When moving a unit, you can press "shift" instead of clicking/enter to move the unit and then complete it and put it into waiting mode. This means you no longer need to press "Wait" or "shift" manually after a move, cc @TheSneakyDragon
  
• You can now pick the primary faction on a map. This allows you to create campaigns where the player controls any of the 7 factions, while also using the remaining factions as bots in the story, cc @Oinks, @Mr Bun, @Legend.
  
• Unit health is now shown in the map info panels on the bottom, cc @Risky (Glyph).
  
• The name of the player now cycles through rainbow colors when you can activate a power, cc @mrorie.
  
• Keyboard shortcuts are now shown in the settings. It's not super pretty, though.
  
• Unit Cards now show which unit the currently selected one is vulnerable against. The Unit Card was updated to also include all the units that are present on the map.
  
• Hovering completed units shows their attack radius.
  
• Achieved stars are now shown next to the map name in the campaign selection screen.
  
• The previous best is now shown in the game dialog while playing a game.
  
• You can adjust the difficulty of a campaign between games in the campaign dialog. You can find the dialog either by long pressing the campaign name in the campaign list, pressing the button on the right with the completion status, or the top left card with the campaign name in the level select screen.
  
• In the campaign, bot names are now just using faction names. Instead of "Purple Bird", they'll be "Purple Horizon" until somebody invades. Regular PvP games are unaffected.
  
• Tutorial maps are now persisted locally on your device so you don't lose your state when you navigate away. Unhappy to report that it is less code than it was before 🫠, just didn't have time to piece it together properly before 1.0.
  
• Barracks received a small style update to make them more distinctive from houses. Thanks @FaeWilds for the feedback.
  
• You can now give up a game by navigating to the right from the game info tabs with a gamepad/keyboard which should reduce confusion about which button to press quite a bit.
  
• Morale Boost is now explained in unit cards, cc @Pistolaceo, @chair summoner, @Oinks.
  
• Added gamepad/keyboard support for map filters in the new game list.
  
• Added the ability to define initial charges in the map editor. This should make it much easier to test powers, and might make for some interesting setups when you start a map with a charge. Thanks to @CoconutTank for the code contribution!
  
• Player skills in pending games are now hidden for other players until the game starts, cc @Legend.
  
• The game now distinguishes between Xbox, PlayStation and Switch controllers and displays the different button layouts in the settings menu and the tutorial.
  

[h2]BALANCING[/h2]

• Medics can now rescue.
  
• Sneaky Sabotage: Saboteurs now receive 50% more attack and 300% more defense when using this skill.
  
• Some AI and draft skills were removed from the skill count in your profile, which should allow you to obtain 100% of skills.
  
• Some portraits for yet to be seen units were removed from the counter in your profile too, allowing you to obtain all current portraits.
  
• When using a Command Crystal, the Easy and Hard Mode skills are removed from the AI when they convert to the player.
  
• Minor changes of damage to structures by all units. The changes should not be more than +-5.
  
• New Heavy Equipment Ability: Rocket Launchers are no longer able to act after being dropped from transporters to counter the new Rocket Jeep meta that has developed in the past 24 hours, cc @Mr Bun, @Mαstrο.
  
• Unit Costs: Unit costs affected by skills are now rounded up instead of rounded down. When using Aggressive stance, some units might cost +1 now.
  

[h2]INVASIONS[/h2]

• The maximum chaos stars a player can receive was bumped from 15 to 25 for Phantom Crystals, and 10 to 20 for all others.
  
• Winning an invasion now returns the cost of the crystal at all times. This also reduces the "risk" of using the power crystal.
  
• Fixed some issue related to who is "winning" an invasion. If the campaign player loses, active Phantom and Command invaders all win. The correct list of winners should now be shown as well.
  
• There is less leakage now when rounding down chaos stars that are being handed out. Players of the actually winning team (the ones who deal the final blow) may receive an additional star.
  
• Fixed a bug where multiple pending invasions would abort a command invasion.
  

Thanks! We'll see you in an Invasion soon....