Coloniser News

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!

We have quite a few items testing internally to push live in the next patch (or two), but we weren't able to get them stable enough for this build. We anticipate pushing next weeks patch a bit earlier with a few important bug fixes as well as some new features. I've outlined a few of those items below. Thank you to playtesters for passing along such great feedback. It's greatly appreciated.

[h3]New Features[/h3]

• Steam Tags in Chat
  

[h3]New Content[/h3]

• (new Technology) Escorted caravans
  
• (new Technology) Formation
  
• (new Technology) Recurve bow
  
• (new Technology) Mobile Artillery
  
• (new Technology) Artillery shield
  

[h3]Upcoming (within two weeks)[/h3]

• Big Server Overhaul (Better latency, faster connections, and few disconnects)
  
• Steam Tags in Diplomacy Menu
  
• Steam Tags with Opposing Units
  
• Map Visual Improvements
  
• Map Design Improvements (More buildable terrain, easier to navigate)
  

[h3]Bug Fixes in this Patch[/h3]

• Map 2.0 lacks any resources
  
• Non-aggresive and domestic animals are missing on Map 2.0
  
• High terrain is visible in fog of war on Map 2.0
  
• Palm trees are visible in fog of war on Map 2.0
  
• Era 2&3 Homesteads have visuals of Era 1&2 stacked together
  
• Buildings become invisible after rejoining the server
  
• User cannot place and build a Wall construction
  
• The construction preview of University doesn't match the preview of other buildings
  
• Multiple buildings are missing Selection SFX
  
• Steam users' nicknames are displayed as a sequence of numbers in the chat panel
  
• User can select animals through FoW
  
• User can select enemy/hostile units through FoW
  
• [Map] Walkable and buildable parts of the map are inconsistent
  
• Gate cannot be built
  
• HP bar for enemy Units is missing
  
• Section titles are unaligned in the lobby
  

Just in time for the holidays we're rolling out a big update. The biggest items in this patch are a new map engine (details below) , diplomacy mechanics (more below), and quite a few bug fixes.

[h3]New Map Engine[/h3]

• Vastly improved fog of war
  
• 4x the size of our previous map (tile wise)
  
• Improved terrain textures
  

We're still tweaking the terrain textures, lighting, camera movement, resources, and so on. If you could please pass back feedback on those items it'd be very appreciated. This is the first playtesting build with these big changes so apologies in advance if any gamebreaking bugs occur.

[h3]Diplomacy Mechanics[/h3]

• Request/Change Diplomatic Status with Players (War/Peace/Neutral)
  
• Shared Line of Sight / Non-aggression with Allies
  

Known Diplomacy Issues
The UI is the "old" placeholder interface. We're rolling out the fresh game interface next month and this will be updated to something much nicer looking. We'll share on discord!

• Users cannot use diplomacy system if they played before the instance was stopped In progress
  
• Units and defensive buildings lack Retaliate Upon Attack behaviour when attacking player has Peace status
  
• Diplomacy menu lacks requirements of Meeting New Players
  
• Players are able to change Diplomacy status from War directly to Alliance and vice versa
  
• Players are unable to leave Alliance one-sidedly by entering Peace state
  
• Caravans are unable to trade with the Marketplaces of other players with Peace or Alliance statuses
  

Known Map Issues
(Note: Please pass along any you encounter.) FPS/Framerate is much lower then it should be, we know the primary causes and will fix these asap although it likely won't be fixed until after the holidays since much of the team is out.

There is also an issue with "clipping" where units are sometimes not able to walk in certain areas of the map where there are elevation changes. We may be able to hotfix this with the team who are still here.

[h3]Bug Fixes:[/h3]

• Buildings lack line of sight and are unable to reveal fog of war
  
• Outpost's construction preview uses a placeholder asset
  
• Units can construct a Keep only from its one side
  
• Player colour is missing on Wooden Tower's model
  
• Keep's selection grid is not visible
  
• Wooden & Stone Towers' selection grid is 2x2
  
• Walls and Gates are z-fighting with their construction preview while they are being built
  
• The resource tile UI is still visible after selecting units with click&drag selection box
  
• Units are missing walking animation after being recruited and approaching the rally point
  
• Outpost's selection grid is 3x3 Bug
  
• Ballista has no highlight when covered by buildings or resource tiles
  
• Units are hidden without a green/red backlight behind leaves of some trees
  
• Units cannot progress with building a Stone Wall Pieces Bug
  
• Several units have fighting or death animation triggered after being recruited and approaching the rally point