Athena Crisis News

Community Map Of The Week: Cornucopia Express

If you’re in the mood for a lengthy fight with a friend, Cornucopia Express by CoconutTank is the map for you! This 1v1 map features a number of stumbling blocks that will prevent an early rush and ensure that both players have a chance to expand before the fight commences.

CoconutTank says: “A cornucopia is known as a horn of plenty, and meant to be a symbol of abundance, or being able to have a lot. I designed Cornucopia Express with the idea of being able to build and use every type of unit, in some capacity. Whether or not the units are all equally useful will be left as an exercise to the players! And well, the Express part of the map name is taken from the very apparent and very large rail network that spans the entire outer edge of the map, and can also be expanded further inland with a little bit of railway construction.”

Both players begin on the central island with only 100 funds arriving every turn, and from there economic expansion is going to be critical in the early game, as most funds-generating buildings are a bit of a hike from your starting base. Progress is slowed by barriers sneakily placed around the starting area to make it a bit more difficult to expand quickly early on. Cornucopia Express is the definition of a slow burn, but eventually you’ll have to decide whether to keep expanding or rush your opponent’s HQ after destroying the barriers. Good luck!

Post-1.0 Updates!

Hello everyone, we are so excited to announce that Athena Crisis shipped as 1.0 release on Steam yesterday. It's awesome to finally ship a version of Athena Crisis that we feel like is complete. However, we didn't want to just build a video game, we wanted to build a community! It's also why we wanted to build Invasions from the beginning.

Very few people noticed if you look at the keyart you'll spot the crystals and portals off on the side. They've always been part of the plan. That's why there are crystals in the main story, and we are excited that after our characters just talked about them, we can actually interact with them as real items! The entire Athena Crisis multiverse is now finally fully connected, what you do in the game has an impact on others, and it enables emergent gameplay. It's a truly unique feature in this genre.

Everything needed to fall into place to ship the feature on release day. Most systems were prepared to support invasions for the past 18 months. We intentionally didn't immediately announce it besides the teasers so that the community could discover the feature together. Thankfully, despite the massive changes, there are only a few minor bugs that will be fixed quickly.

[h2]Here is what's new from the past several days[/h2]

New: 6 Secret Maps & Secret Ending: The Athena Crisis campaign now features 6 secret maps that explore the factions in our main story further, bringing the total map count of both official campaigns to 50! All campaign maps now have star challenges assigned to them.
New: Invasions: You can activate the new Power Crystals to enable co-op with friends, but they also open your world to other invaders who may want to battle you. If you win in an invasion you'll receive Chaos Stars, a new type of in-game currency.
If you invade a player, you can always abandon (give up) the game. If you abandon a game after taking command of the AI, the AI will jump back into the game. As a reward for playing Early Access, each player received a number of crystals so they can try out the feature.
New: In-Game Shop: You can use stars that you obtain by playing the campaign or through invasions to buy in-game items like crystals, portraits, and skills. Watch out and check back regularly because we'll be adding more exciting items (and skills!) soon.
New: Feed: Games which can be invaded are posted in ⁠🔥-invasions, but you can also view all ongoing games from the past day in a new news feed that's directly in the game. Active Invadable (is that a word?) games will always be on top of the list.
New: Translations: The game is fully translated into 10 languages and we just shipped the most recent translation changes.
New: Chaos Star Rankings: You can sort the leaderboard by chaos stars. Who is the most prolific Athena Crisis invader?

Fixed:

There have been major rewrites and fixes to underlying systems around game actions, giving up, what happens when you miss a turn etc.
Fixed some issues around game timers and the timer bar not showing up.
Improved and fixed various design and styling related issues, polished up user profiles a bit.
Made it so clicking a portrait in the player card and then pressing ESC will take you back to the game you were playing.
Reduced volume of the fireworks sound.
Broke and then fixed a bug where skills that the user already unlocked were "temporarily" unlocked again at game end.
Fixed a bug where the game showed the wrong player turn banners in games with fog.

[h2]Improvements Shipped to Invasions Recently[/h2]

Every player invading with a Phantom Crystal now receives chaos stars as long as they are not defeated and the main campaign player gets beaten.
There is now a small chance that something slightly more chaotic happens when using a Phantom Crystal.
Adjusted the amount of funds a player receives when invading.
Fixed a bug where the "Command" crystal was disabled when it shouldn't have been.
Slightly improved player spawn points in some cases.
Improved invasion Discord messages.
Fixed an issue with multiple invasions at once.
Fixed an issue where two crystals might get subtracted when invading (may need more testing).

[h2]And last but not least, some balancing changes[/h2]

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.

If you've enjoyed Athena Crisis, please consider leaving us a review here on Steam! It really does help us out.

Advance Wars fans should check out Athena Crisis with the 1.0 release out now

Taking a heavy dose of ideas from Advance Wars, Nakazawa Tech / Null Games released the 1.0 version of Athena Crisis.

Read the full article here: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2024/09/advance-wars-fans-should-check-out-athena-crisis-with-the-1-0-release-out-now

Athena Crisis 1.0 Is Available Now!

Athena Crisis 1.0 is launching today! We are shipping a major feature today called “Invasions." Please read below for more details!

If you're an Athena Crisis fan, please consider buying and reviewing the game today. If you haven't wishlisted it yet, you can find it right here on Steam.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Here's what's new:

[h2]Invasions[/h2]

Invasions are a unique feature that turn the single-player experience upside down and make the game even more fun. The crystals that were previously only talked about in the story are now actual items in the game that you can obtain or buy using Stars in the new in-game Shop.

Power Crystals are helpful, but also dangerous.

If a campaign map is too challenging you can activate a Power Crystal to receive an attack bonus, but doing so will open your world to invasions. A friend can then join you for coop gameplay, but others might invade to hinder your progress or take over the AI of the main opponent directly.

At the end of a game with an invasions, the winning factions receive “Chaos Stars”, which supplement stars you receive from winning campaign maps to buy more items. The shop also features skills, portraits and soon unit customizations that you can unlock using stars.

[h2]Tutorial[/h2]
Athena Crisis now comes with a complete tutorial with 9 maps. The last map even ties into the Prequel Campaign’s story and answers a few questions that were left unanswered – until now!

[h2]What else is new?[/h2]
We polished every aspect of the game to get it ready for release. We adjusted the color of water in each biome, rebalanced various skills, completed the Spaceship biome, added hints for radial menus, fixed tons of bugs and we are launching a number of secret campaign maps this week.

If you haven't tried Athena Crisis yet, you can play one map instantly on athenacrisis.com.

If you bought the game on Steam, please consider leaving a review. Thank you!

Community Map of the Week: Ocean Liner

Sometimes when you want to balance a map for a turn-based strategy game, there’s no better solution than a little symmetry. Perfectly symmetrical maps (or “mirror maps”) ensure that all players have equal access to resources, building sites, and travel paths, while still allowing for a wide variety of actual gameplay as individual players make their own choices regarding unit construction and which direction they choose to expand towards. (Did you know that there’s a “mirror” tag in Athena Crisis allowing you to easily find all official and community maps that feature symmetry?)

This week’s Community Map of the Week is Ocean Liner by Large Nuggets. “Liner”…get it? You’re not going to build any cruise ships on this map, but both players will be encouraged to charge down the “transoceanic rail line” to get to the central island here, as it features both Factories and Oil Rigs. However, you shouldn’t neglect to build up around your starting point, as there are Barracks, Shipyards, and building sites ready for the taking.

(As another fun fact, most PVP maps are built to take into account what’s referred to as “first turn advantage” or FTA, which indicates that it’s generally best to be the first person to take a turn as you can start your exploration or economy more quickly than other players. Generally this is balanced by ensuring that the starting player has a unit that’s *just* outside the movement range of a building that can be captured, while the other players can begin capturing a building immediately on their first turn, but there are other strategies to account for FTA as well.)

Obviously the central island is key here, and the fact that the paths leading to it are rail tiles will come into play: most infantry units, including Pioneers, will have their movement speed greatly reduced on rails, meaning they’ll need a Jeep or other transport to move quickly along them. The player who winds up controlling the central island will also have the ability to create powerful rail-only units, like the Supply Train, Transport Train, and the mighty Mammoth rail gun.

Of course, any combat on the rail line will necessarily be somewhat constrained since you won’t be able to maneuver your units around the line, but smart players will also build a naval strategy to account for this, using Battleships and other units to bombard the land units as they come to and fro. If a player recognizes that they’re behind in the battle for the central island, all hope isn’t lost: Tugs can help build a second outpost in the corners of the map, and you can build another Shipyard near your base to strengthen your naval forces, but you’ll be on the back foot economically, so act fast.