Coloniser News

Hope you're well! We've just released a major patch on both our Playtesting and Demo branches. We'll concentrate on hotfixing small issues & bug fixes this next week during Steam NextFest before continuing with our regular patches. We will also be publishing an updated roadmap on feature and content releases towards early access as well as soon after.
[h2]New items[/h2]

• Updated server selection screen with both regional server selection and map selection.
  
• Steam Tags live with your units/building as well as opponents. You can now see other players units labeled as such.
  
• Unit/building stats including health, armor, and other parameters display in bottom left UI.
  
• Additional settings options in main menu
  
• Improved water visuals
  
• New wooden wall/gate visuals (known issue with the wall not displaying the endcap)
  
• New stone wall/gate visuals (known issue with the wall not displaying the endcap)
  
• New building icons (still a work in progress)
  

[h2]Balance changes[/h2]

• Resources adjusted to slow game speed and improve the overall pacing
  
• Spawn points tweaked based on playtesting feedback
  
• Caravan/marketplace/trading adjustment to resource calculation
  

[h2]Bug fixes/adjustments[/h2]

• Updated hovertext descriptions for some units/building
  
• Servers reboot automatically overnight to help with some connection issues
  
• Animal animations fixed
  
• Visuals/textures more balanced across eras
  
• Adjusted lighting (fewer harsh shadows) and camera angles
  
• Faster camera move speed
  
• Shelters no longer incorrectly occupying 3x3 grid instead of 2x2
  
• Settings tab is opened when user launches the game or leaves the match
  
• Player is unable to place and build turrets in Era 3
  
• User cannot destroy a turret on Era 3 with a destroy button
  
• Era 3 turret colours don't match player colour
  
• Multiple buildings are placed unevenly or go out of their selection grid box
  
• Buildings built after placing a turret and advancing to Era 3 disappear after rejoining
  
• Unit recruitment stops working for the player after recruiting and losing multiple units
  
• Name and capacity of Stone/Ore resources are inconsistent with their model sizes
  
• Mute FX button lacks functionality in Audio Settings
  
• Ambient sounds are tied to the music slider in audio settings
  
• Voice lines of units play loudly and are clipping when selecting multiple units of the same type
  
• Areas in grey fog of war are hidden by black fog of war after player rejoins or reconnects to server
  
• Hotkey Info Panel covers the minimap
  
• Already built University lacks techs for research after reconnecting to a stopped server
  
• Hover text of Population Counter shows 888/888 Max
  
• Some resource gathering SXF are missing
  
• Multiple units are missing SFX
  
• Hovering a mouse over a tree results in highlighting an adjacent tree
  

This patch has numerous critical bug fixes for server connection/disconnection issues and quite a few smaller fixes as well.

[h3]Improvements/Adjustments[/h3]

• Combat sounds added
  
• UI hover overlays show more information
  
• Support for Steam Tags in additional languages (Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Korean, Thai, Japanese, Arabic)
  
• Some building and unit names have been adjusted
  
• New Chat UI
  

[h3]Bug Fixes[/h3]

• Players can hear other players resource gathering sound effects
  
• Players sometimes can't join server when several players join at once
  
• Resource bar shows text instead of actual resource values the first time a server is joined
  
• Build hover info missing resource requirements and descriptions
  
• Chat Panel cannot be closed with 'C' button
  
• Diplomacy flag, Chat & Shortcuts icons don't open intended tabs
  
• Insufficient resources toast notifications are missing for buildings/recruitment
  
• Minimap doesn't display discovered area
  
• Empty UI squares have SFX when user hovers the mouse over them
  
• Users can hear each other's SFX for constructing action, finishing construction and destroying a building
  
• Unit recruitment stops working while in a session in which another player has been defeated on same server
  
• Defeated Users are invisible to other Players after rejoining
• Changing the resolution in a windowed mode creates a tiny game window after relaunching and accessing Settings again
  
• Sometimes fog of war breaks and player is unable to control units after rejoining a server
  
• Mobile Artillery tech grants significantly higher movement speed bonus for Artillery units
  
• The diplomacy system stops working for Users who receive diplomacy request when they are away from an instance
  
• User gets a Timed Out error when trying to connect to the server which had no activity for 5 minutes
  
• Sometimes loss conditions don't apply when user loses all production buildings and units on server
  

[h3]What's coming soon?[/h3]

• New Server/Game Selection UI
  
• UI Stats properly loading unit stats (e.g. health, strength, armor, and so on)
  
• UI Correctly labeling units with the player's steamtag.
  
• Region specific server filter
  
• Improved Era 3 building visuals
  
• New Homestead design
  
• New Stone Walls and Stone Gate design
  

Note: A couple small bugs with windowed mode and low FPS have appeared in this patch. We will Hotfix asap.


This most recent patch rolled out quite a few new visual improvements and other items, but unfortunately new bugs with farms and servers appeared. Both of these critical bugs as well as some other new ones have been fixed in this patch. The server bugs were more challenging to address so we went ahead and rolled out the fixes in this full patch.

Thanks for everyone who playtested this past week as well. We got a lot of great feedback on balance changes, quality of life improvements, and some new bugs that we've fixed.

[h3]New & Improved Features[/h3]

• Many new additional sounds and audio
  
• Game sounds are now "3D" so they will change based on camera location
  
• Resource visuals are now more varied (size and position)
  
• Functional settings menu for resolution and audio
  

[h3]Balance Changes[/h3]

• Resource tiles uniformly have higher resources now
  
• Colonist resource gather rate reduced by 25%
  
• House's support (5) population now instead of (10)
  
• House cost dropped from (60) wood to (40) wood
  
• Wooden wall cost dropped from (20) wood to (5) wood
  
• Wooden gate cost dropped from (100) wood to (20) wood
  
• Stone wall cost dropped to (10) stone
  
• Stone gate cost dropped to (30) stone
  
• Archery Range cost increased by (20) stone
  
• Barracks adjusted to only cost wood and increased
  
• Herdables increased by roughly double
  
• Raiders/aggressive animals increased by roughly double
  
• Wood and stone wall armor increased
  

[h3]Bug Fixes[/h3]

• Player cannot build on depleted resource tiles
  
• Neutral Trading Hub has a Rally Point
  
• Water and purple textures are visible through FoW on the edges of a map on Map 2.0
  
• Farm doesn't generate Food resources
  
• Mouse cursor is not locked on the game's screen
  
• Sometimes fog of war breaks and player is unable to control units after rejoining an AWS server
  
• Units cannot build and are stuck in a walking animation after gathering resources for some time (AI Manager Crash)
  
• Chieftain and Colonists are able to place and construct buildings on water on Map 2.0
  
• Neutral Trading Hub has a Rally Point
  
• Minimap cannot be pressed
  

This is the first of our two big patches in preperation for Steam NextFest (February). We still have quite a bit of new stuff in the pipeline that we'll be pushing next month before NextFest.

We've cleared almost four dozen bug reports, but this is such a huge patch that I'm sure we'll find some more. We greatly appreciate any that you share in the Steam Discussions or on our Discord. We're working hard to clear as many as we can before the Fest.

We have made several optimization performance related to the l..o..w FPS on the most recent map. Our FPS dropped by about 66% on average with our QA team (not great we know!). We've fixed the most glaring issues and FPS is close to the older map. We are still working to improve, but getting there.

[h3]New Features & Improvements[/h3]

• New trees & terrain visuals
  
• Server notifications when players join/depart
  
• Large performance improvements to fix some FPS issues
  
• Server / Network Upgrades (Faster and more stable connections)
  
• Minimap Improved (High resolution)
  
• Neutral trading hubs reintroduced with new visuals (and more locations)
  
• Level/map improvements to spawn locations and resource distribution
  
• More buildable terrain! (Note: We'll be enabling building outside line of sight as well, but still in progress.
  

[h3]Bug Fixes[/h3]

• Camera scroll no longer blocked by UI elements
  
• Camera locked to playable area
  
• Player is unable to ungarrison Farms
  
• User cannot move the camera by hovering the mouse next to the minimap
  
• Double-clicking on buildings produces errors and displays unusable icons in the UI
  
• Gate's construction grid gets stuck and produces errors when hovering mouse over buildings
  
• Units' movement is stuttering on Map 2.0
  
• Units are able to move over the cliffs' edges on Map 2.0
  
• User cannot place constructions on some areas which look buildable on Map 2.0
  
• User can order units to move inside a water on a Map 2.0
  
• User can move the camera away from a map's playable area on Map 2.0
  
• Title's performance drops to ~25 fps after Map 2.0 implementation
  
• Waves around the coastline and rock textures look unnatural
  
• Some AI hostile units are placed under the ground
  
• [Map] Multiple resource tiles are placed in inaccessible areas
  

[h3]Known Issues[/h3]

• Building placement incorrectly allowed on some cliffs/nonbuildable areas
  
• Unit/Building stats like health not populating into the UI
  
• Defeated player sometimes "breaking" the server and not allowing others to join as well as resetting progress. We'll attempt to hotfix asap.
  
• Players are spawning with max resources we will try to hotfix this ASAP!
  

[h3]What's next?[/h3]

• Functional settings menu!
  
• Remainder of the new UI/Menu rolls out
  
• New and improved building and in-game sounds
  
• Revised Era One & Second Era Visuals for some resource collection buildings
  
• Combat improvements
  
• And much more but this is getting to be a long announcement!
  

This week's patch was a little smaller then anticipated. The server/network upgrades are taking quite a bit of effort, but they're almost completed. We hope to have those patched in next week.

On the plus side let's cover the new, the broken, and the soon to come!

[h3]New Features / Updates[/h3]

• Top UI (Resources) has been updated to our new UI design.
  
• Diplomacy UI (legacy) now shows SteamTags instead of PlayerIDs.
  
• Default Map/Level now has flatter topology and other improvements based on player feedback. (e.g. Easier to wall, larger passages, etc)
  

[h3]The Broken / Bug Fixes[/h3]
Our new map engine improved many things (Fog of War for example), but introduced a few challenging bugs (like units spinning/getting stuck). We have moving back to our other pathfinding solution that has fixed those issues, but appears to have also introduced a few new ones too. Fun times! We'll get it sorted, but in the mean time we apologize.

Between our internal QA team and playtesters we've got over a hundred bugs on our backlog. We're working diligently through them and really appreciate those reporting them!

[h3]What's on the way this month?[/h3]
Big server/network improvements next week. Faster connections, fewer disconnects, and better latency.
New UI will continue rolling out into more places. This should be fully implemented by month's end.
New foliage / building improvements. This includes some new visuals.

Thank you as always for the feedback!