Himeko Sutori News

Units now have a zone of control on the battle map and the world map. The hexes surrounding an enemy are in the zone of control, and you cannot move from one hex to another within the zone of control. I think this will make flanking the enemy more difficult, and you'll have to plan your movement in battles more carefully. Also, it might force you into battles on the world map more often.

I would love to hear what you think about this new feature. Like it? Dislike it? Why?

Thank you everyone for helping Himeko Sutori take shape!

It sounds like so far you've been enjoying the battles in Himeko Sutori, but we really felt like they needed more variety. For months or years we've had ideas to mix up the battles a little more, and over the past week and half or so, we finally implemented them.

Today we are glad to show you flying units and castle walls.





Castle walls provide a bonus to ranged and magical attack range. Lances on top of walls also get offensive and defenses bonuses against opponents below them. Climbing onto a wall costs 1 extra movement point.

Flying units--such as dragons, fairies, and imps--can cross over obstacles and ignore the cost of climbing a wall. More flying characters will be coming in the future.

And we adjusted the movement code so now your characters won't get stuck on obstacles and corners between hexes.

We have a few bugs to work out (for example, when not all characters in a lance arrive at the top of a wall), some other details to think through (for example, should we even allow melee attacks between a lance on top of a wall and one below the wall?), and a couple more features that we really want to have (such as destructible gates). But so far we're very pleased with the progress.

For those who are interested, you can try a test castle battle right now. Take your army out to the world map, open the console with F1 or ~ and then type "ce TestSiege" and press enter.

We have lots more work to do with castles and flying units, and also reworking old battle maps to allow flying units to go over obstacles. And we also have a big pile of bugs that our players recently reported. We're going to work on those for the next few days. But after that, we will add some castle battle maps where you will both attack and defend.

Thanks for following Himeko Sutori and we'll be back soon with more updates!

Here's what we've done this past week:

Added popups to status effects to show you what stats they affect.

Added some visual variation to the mechanical soldiers. They now have new portrait and sprite details to make them a little different, and not just a blank face.

Fixed the AI's target selection. Usually at the start of a battle, the computer would try to gang up on one of your lances, walking right past closer and better targets. Now the AI favors closer targets as intended.

Added an interior to Sword Keep, which eventually will play a role in the story.

Changed the way Acolytes' and Druids' actions work. Acolytes now heal and apply a defensive buff. Druids heal and apply an offensive buff.

Cumulative patch notes for the last week:

Big change to crafting. Now, only your recipes are visible. Select a recipe, and all the ingredients get autofilled. If you don't have enough of something, it shows up a little transparent. Hopefully this will make crafting quicker and easier for you.

Flanking in combat. If you attack an enemy lance from one of the 3 rear hexes, and you have one of your lances in front of and facing the enemy, you get a flanking bonus of 25% to all attack powers.

Cumulative patch notes for the past week:

Added tavern interior map to Al-Ramliyah. Added more interior maps to Icy Reach and South Point: outfitters, tavern, enchanter, alchemist, druid lodge, blacksmith. Still need to add NPCs to the new locales.

Added smaller grassy battle map for early game. More small maps to come.

Fixed visual bug where some grass patches were too bright.