We need your axe!
Greetings Wielders!
As the release date for 1.0 is creeping closer day by day, we are trying to focus mainly on stability and a good experience.
However, unexpected issues before a release are almost more of a rule than an exception. And we have just found a pretty serious issue with the AI and how its trading has worked.
When the AI tried to trade resources, it looked something like this:
- (AI) “Hey! I want to buy two extra stone to be able to buy this building. How much does it cost?”
- (Trader) “How much gold do you have?”
- (AI) “20.000 Gold. So how much do I owe you?”
- (Trader) “20.000 Gold, please”
- (AI) “Uhm, sounds a bit expensive… But ok, here you go!”
We had a nice, but stern chat with the trader and passed some new laws that it’s not allowed to raise the prices depending on the budget of the AI like that. So, good news, the issue is now fixed. Huzzah!
But as you probably understand, even though it is a small fix, it can cause a snowball effect making the AI much more difficult to beat - on all difficulty levels.
For example: If the AI could break out of the first zone by round 7, it might now sometimes break out at round 5 or 6 instead - which would give it an advantage in later stages of the game.
Consequently, if we look at the end game with an AI that wants to trade a resource to buy research - this would before deplete most of its gold reserves in the process, so now it would just have more gold in general resulting in more troops, research and all that good stuff.
The positive thing about this is that the AI will feel more competent, especially in the later stages of a session. The negative is that the easier difficulties might be too difficult to be called easy - and our efforts to give every player a difficulty that feels appropriately challenging might be unbalanced now.
But the thing is, we don’t know yet. And to find out we need lots of testing and data, something that takes a lot of time.
Yes, we are asking for your help, but we are also treating you with this brand new screenshot! How's that for a tradeoff?!
This is not something we expected to happen so close to release, and this is where we need your help. The time is nigh, and we need as many eyes as possible on both our campaign maps and our conquest maps and collect feedback on how difficult it feels to play.
So if you have the time, we’d greatly appreciate it if you could play the game with this in mind for us. If you want to be extra helpful, please use this template below to describe your experience in a comment to this post.
I see myself as a: Player
I played with difficulty:
On map:
Thoughts: (How did it feel, how many times did you reload, quick battles etc)
Thank you!
Best Regards,
Niklas Borglund
Lead Programmer & CTO at Lavapotion.
Changelog
UI
As the release date for 1.0 is creeping closer day by day, we are trying to focus mainly on stability and a good experience.
However, unexpected issues before a release are almost more of a rule than an exception. And we have just found a pretty serious issue with the AI and how its trading has worked.
When the AI tried to trade resources, it looked something like this:
- (AI) “Hey! I want to buy two extra stone to be able to buy this building. How much does it cost?”
- (Trader) “How much gold do you have?”
- (AI) “20.000 Gold. So how much do I owe you?”
- (Trader) “20.000 Gold, please”
- (AI) “Uhm, sounds a bit expensive… But ok, here you go!”
We had a nice, but stern chat with the trader and passed some new laws that it’s not allowed to raise the prices depending on the budget of the AI like that. So, good news, the issue is now fixed. Huzzah!
But as you probably understand, even though it is a small fix, it can cause a snowball effect making the AI much more difficult to beat - on all difficulty levels.
For example: If the AI could break out of the first zone by round 7, it might now sometimes break out at round 5 or 6 instead - which would give it an advantage in later stages of the game.
Consequently, if we look at the end game with an AI that wants to trade a resource to buy research - this would before deplete most of its gold reserves in the process, so now it would just have more gold in general resulting in more troops, research and all that good stuff.
The positive thing about this is that the AI will feel more competent, especially in the later stages of a session. The negative is that the easier difficulties might be too difficult to be called easy - and our efforts to give every player a difficulty that feels appropriately challenging might be unbalanced now.
But the thing is, we don’t know yet. And to find out we need lots of testing and data, something that takes a lot of time.
Yes, we are asking for your help, but we are also treating you with this brand new screenshot! How's that for a tradeoff?!This is not something we expected to happen so close to release, and this is where we need your help. The time is nigh, and we need as many eyes as possible on both our campaign maps and our conquest maps and collect feedback on how difficult it feels to play.
So if you have the time, we’d greatly appreciate it if you could play the game with this in mind for us. If you want to be extra helpful, please use this template below to describe your experience in a comment to this post.
I see myself as a: Player
I played with difficulty:
On map:
Thoughts: (How did it feel, how many times did you reload, quick battles etc)
Thank you!
Best Regards,
Niklas Borglund
Lead Programmer & CTO at Lavapotion.
Changelog
UI
- Fixed incorrect threat levels being shown sometimes in battle menus
- Added fade transitions when moving between heavy scenes
- Made sure spellbook/bar tooltips are never drawn outside the screen
- Fixed team queue beacon layout bug for >20 beacons
- Fixed AI difficulty dropdown misleadingly being initially visible even if AI team is not forced to have a specific difficulty
- Added ability to see trigger identifier names directly on the map in the editor as a gizmo
- Fixed issue on the Community Campaign screen where an exception sometimes were thrown due to a missing prefab
- Fixed exception when trying to open spellbook in battle using hotkey while playing as a hostile in multiplayer
- Fixed bug where some options forgot to check if a fight was against the neutral planet.. I mean a neutral hostile! This stopped the AI from attacking player wielders sometimes
- Fixed vision and exploration issue that could lead to the AI not finding enemy player towns and settlements
- Fixed softlock in AI recruitment when it tried to move too large stacks between commanders, i.e the owner had a +1 stack size artifact
- Fixed issue with calculating capacity of an army (how full it is) before scoring and trading troops
- Fixed severe bug where AI would pay all of its gold instead of the calculated price when buying resources from the marketplace
- Fixed incorrectly scripted building requirement for Smoldering Cave that caused AI not to build it
- Fixed bug where AI would not build a required building on a built site it had reserved for upgrades
- Fixed bug where AI would reserve too many small build sites for medium building upgrades in large settlements
- Fixed AI not being aware of what buildings are already under construction in a town or settlement
- Fixed ranged defenders in siege ending up exposed near the enemy
- Fixed so that melee defenders in siege are more likely to be positioned towards the center opening
- Fixed various issues that affected Macs running on Apple Silicon processors to run slow when Songs of Conquest lost focus.
- Fixed not being able to change the screen resolution in the options menu without encountering an exception
- Added option to clear local player stats under Gameplay options
- Fixed AI difficulty button in lobbies being locked when a team is actually just forced to be AI controlled but not forced to a specific difficulty
- Fixed bug with “Auto equip stronger artifacts” feature, that would override validation and allow for unequippable artifacts to be unequipped. I.e remove a +2 command artifact with something else, leaving you with more troop stacks than allowed.
- Fixed showing Range and Deadly Range in codex entries of troops that have no ranged attacks
- Fixed issue where rebinding an action with multiple default bindings (such as “End Turn”) did not override all default bindings
- Changed the bundle ID on mac builds back to its original value to fix issue with missing savegames