Athena Crisis News

Null Games and Nakazawa Tech are happy to announce that Athena Crisis will see its full PC release hitting Steam on September 23! That’s right, our journey through Early Access is coming to an end and in September you’ll be able to play the full Athena Crisis campaign for the first time.

Here are some of the new features you can expect to see come September:

• The full single-player story campaign, featuring over 30 maps and missions.
  
• Brand-new units, enemies, and skills.
  
• Even more options for user-generated puzzle maps, PVP challenges, and full campaigns.
  

We’d like to thank everyone in the Steam community and the Athena Crisis Discord for their feedback during development, and we hope to play some of you in PVP on launch day. If you haven’t wishlisted Athena Crisis yet, you can do so on its Steam page right now!

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Here are some of the most recent updates to Athena Crisis!

Attention Multiverse Travelers: There are reports that Act 3 has just caused a rift in the multiverse. We suggest checking if somebody arrived early at one of the Research Lab buildings in the Prequel Campaign! Start a new online Prequel Campaign to discover 10 new maps and unlock 3 portraits, 4 skills and two biomes – one which you have never seen before! This brings us to 30 released primary campaign maps between Act 1 and 3, and we are getting closer to uncovering the secrets behind the Athena Crisis.

New: Meet Ada, operating the Acid Bomber: Ada operates the Acid Bomber special unit, equipped with Corrosive Bombs and Corrosive Air Missiles that inflict poison. This was one of the earliest unit concepts and I'm so stoked that we'll finally get to meet her in the Athena Crisis campaign!



New: Power Station Building! You might come across this building in various places in the campaign. If you capture it, all funds generating buildings will produce 30% more funds per turn.

New: All remaining tiles now have a description. Look out for the elusive 7th biome with a ton of fun tiles and explanations soon.

Fixed: Multiple optional (+ 1 required) objectives can now be fired through a single trigger, thanks @dxdydzd.

Updated Skill: Maximum Sniper: This skill now gives snipers the ability to capture buildings! The skill now also has a power that expands the Sniper's range by one.



New: Skillslot unlocks In future campaign missions you might be able to unlock another skill slot or two, finally allowing you to "Dual Strike" with your skills, if you know what I mean.

New Skill: Octo Wrath: The power of this skill is devastating! It takes 20 health points away from every opposing units. The game was adjusted to allow multiple factions to lose through one action like activating a power to take out all remaining units. It's fun!

New Biome Unlocks: The Swamp, Snow and Volcano biomes are now also unlockable! If you previously designed a map, they were backfilled. All other players have to beat the primary campaign to unlock them.

New Building: Medbay This building works the same as a Shelter in the 7th biome which you can discover and unlock in Act 3.

Fixed: Various fixes to polish the game.

New Skill: Alien Invasion: This skill unlocks the Alien. The power spawns Alien units at each HQ and Barracks.

Biome & Alternate Keyart Unlocks: Support was added to unlock the hidden biomes and alternate keyarts in the main campaign. More on this later!

Balancing: Unfolding a Sniper on a Mountain should stack it's vision bonus to +3, it was previously just +2.

Fixes:

• The player card should no longer cut off when the player has objectives and skills.
  
• Bots no longer "temporarily receive a skill" at the end of a game.
  
• It is no longer possible to have two leader units when using Zombies to convert opponents to your faction.
  

Various improvements shipped over the past several days:

New: Some skills like "Brutal Call" or "Commanding Force" will now show a brief scripted dialogue when activated by the AI. This will only happen if they have at least one unit that matches the type of skill, like the Brute for Brutal Call. We'll be adding more of these soon.

Balancing:
AI: The AI now builds significantly fewer Jeep and Support Ship units. I was watching somebody play on this absolutely massive map where the AI on one side built 11 Support Ships in 10 rounds 😅 In a playtest with the change the AI only built 4 Support Ships instead.
AI: The AI makes a better determination on whether to activate a power or not, depending on how many units would be affected by the power. This stops the AI from activating a power at the end of a turn and not making full use of it.
"Bazoo's Bond" Skill: This skill received a power which spawns Bazooka Bear units at each Bar building that the player owns.
"Eagle Eye" Skill: Added this experimental skill that allows moving air units a second time but with an attack debuff.

Fixed: When a long-range unit like the X-Fighter can attack from its current location, it no longer proposes moving elsewhere first.

Polish: Various design and gamepad adjustments, notably the Skill Dialog with only a single skill is now much smaller, pressing "links" with the gamepad now shows the pressed style, the current round is shown in the game info panel, icon gaps were adjusted and the leaderboard now uses the player's chosen color for portraits. Also adjusted the attack animations for X-Fighter and Fighter Jet.

Finally getting back to adding new gameplay content as we are working on the full campaign.

* New: Status Effects! When Aliens attack or counterattack, they inflict the opponent with poison and acid! Unless the unit is healed, poison takes away 20 health points at the beginning of each turn.
* New Unit Ability "Morale Boost": Any unit adjacent to a Commander unit receives a 10% attack bonus. This bonus stacks up to a 40% increase if you surround a unit with 4 Commander units.
* New Skill: Commanding Force: The power of this skill increases attack strength by 100% for one turn for leader units.
* New: Gamepad support for the account settings page.
* Balancing:

• Significantly reduced damage of the Alien's Bite attack.
  
• Changed cover of Ruins from 20 to 10.
  
• Lowered the "Cheap Trick" charge cost from 5 to 3.
  
• The Zombie's ability to take over other units was turned into a "unit ability" called "Convert".
  
• Some special units were changed to be able to attack low altitude aircraft.
  

Fixed: * Fixed a kerning issue where ij was appearing as i j in the Athena Crisis font.
* Fixed an issue where labels associated with secret objectives were revealed in fog, cc @dxdydzd.

We also made a large infrastructure update on the backend, but seems like nobody noticed so that's good.