Songs of Conquest News

Spooky greetings to everyone!

By a crazy coincidence it’s just about midnight and me and the awesome moderator team have a very seasonal art contest to announce! By ANOTHER crazy coincidence I’ve gotten my hands on a couple of prizes for the three winners including keys from some awesome games from our publishers (Valheim, Deep Rock Galactic, Satisfactory, etc.) and some sweet sweet SoC merch!

So what do we have in mind? Well, our thought is a Halloween or “spooky” themed art contest. We have also spooked together some rules:

• Visual or physical Halloween themed art only. All art styles welcome.
  
• The art must contain at least one reference to SoC (e.g. Wielder, spell, symbol, and so on).
  
• You and/or LavaPotion must be the copyright holder of the art. Ai art is not allowed.
  
• Three submissions per user only. Content must be PG 13.
  
• Latest submission can be done at midnight October 31st (CET)

How can I submit my fan art? You can submit your art by either:

• Uploading it on our Discord in the #fan-art channel and mentioning #SoCHalloween
  
• Sharing it on X (formerly Twitter) using the #SoCHalloween
  
• Sharing it on the SoC Subreddit using the #SoCHalloween

We will have three winners and the judge, jury and whatever friendly version of executioner we have will be me and some of the other Lavapotion devs.

The winners will be announced on the 1st of November!



Good luck and let us know if you have any follow up questions!

/Anders and the Moderators

Greetings, brave Wielders!

Another sprint is done and we’re thrilled to announce a new update. This one is all about making your adventures smoother and a bit more random, in the very best of ways.
We are bringing you sought-after bug fixes, reduced loading times, new events for Barya, and more besides! Let’s dive a bit deeper into it and take a look at some of the highlights!

This puts the total amount of random events to over 400!

Wielders are now masters of maneuverability! They can effortlessly move through other friendly Wielders, creating more tactical opportunities. Teamwork at its finest! This means a lot, especially for the AI as this helps plan paths much faster and smoother, making it easier for the AI Wielders to go where they really want to.

It’s a Wielder shuffle! Friends shouldn’t stop friends from going places!

Let’s talk about online games! Everything is working smoother than ever and we have slashed online loading times across the board. We’ve also taken down another bug that was a major villain when it came to online disconnects.

And speaking of loading times, we have managed to make our save files smaller than they were before. Ensuring that every load, whether you are booting up an old multiplayer game or a skirmish map goes a lot faster.

Not even the Roadrunner can catch our loading speeds now! Meep meep!

We've tweaked the way skills are selected during level-up to ensure a more evenly distributed set of abilities. Say goodbye to always seemingly getting the same set of new skills when you level up.

The same fix worked solving an issue with random Artifacts on maps. They are now much more random or should we say evenly varied than before!

Don’t you want to collect them all?

And is that all? Of course not! Our AI just keeps improving as it gets closer to that end-game goal of being a varied and challenging opponent. This update introduces enhancements and fixes to both Adventure and Battle.

A great example is that the AI is now better at saving its essence for when it really matters and choosing its targets! Why waste that Justice spell on a common frog when killing an expensive and noble dragon is an option?

Poor Dragon, whatever did he do to deserve that Justice?

Besides all of that, there is still loads more to tell, both small and big additions coming together to form a great update. If you want to dive deeper you should read the full Changelog and really dig deep into all those details, we know you want to.

As always we want to say a special thank you to our community for helping us find bugs, give awesome feedback and just in general be fantastic. Your creativity and your helpfulness really gives the entire team all the reasons we need to give you the best game we can!

Peredine is really all of us devs, just so that we are clear here

Was there anything in this update that really stood out to you or is there something special that you just can’t wait until it comes out? Perhaps that last final campaign where we sort of wrap our story up?
Write us a comment or join in on our awesome discussions on steam or over on our Discord.

We hope you enjoy playing our game as much as we enjoy making it. Keep up the Adventures, we love hearing about them!

/Everyone at Lavapotion

https://www.songsofconquest.com/changelogs#changelog088


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Greetings Wielders, fearless adventurers, and strategists!

We are absolutely thrilled to bring you our latest update. Get ready to dive into it and read up on all the pixelated details! We are blazing ahead and ticking off those items on our new roadmap at a great pace and in general, it’s really looking like we are just perfectly on time.

Version 0.87 gives you a whole bunch of quality-of-life improvements, making sure that things are starting to reach the quality we want before reaching 1.0. For example, we are now introducing an improved version of our sim-turns, making sure it’s more dynamic and tactical than ever before. We have also, thanks to our amazing community, identified and taken care of a bunch of bugs, so thank you for reporting them!

We sent our best guy on bug fixes!

So what about those sim-turns? Well, we finally got around to improving them, making sure it all just runs smoother. The basic approach is that we want as many players to play simultaneously as possible, but still avoid situations where players would benefit by doing something as quickly as possible (for instance frantically buying all the troops your coffers can afford before the other player has the time to click to attack).

In short, human players are grouped together in as few groups as possible. Putting you together with your co-op partner is a given but you can also sign a little non-aggression pact while playing using a new “friendly” icon on the banners. Be warned though, that little icon is in no way a guarantee that your neighbor doesn’t pull a sneaky move on you, beware of backstabbing!

We never trusted that Robin guy anyway, clearly up to something.

As we said, we did a lot of work with quality-of-life stuff, and that includes a bunch of polish by our look-n-feel team. We have reworked a bunch of VFX and added or redone a whole heap of tooltips, everything to make things look just a little bit better. This might not be game-changing stuff but you have to do some polish as well as the big things.

It's worth getting a brand new Hellroar just for the new combat animation!

But wait there’s more! Well to be fair the list is pretty long and you’ll have to read the changelog linked below to really get a grip on the amount of work we’ve done. There is however one more massive thing that we just have to mention!

There have been a lot of multiplayer fixes, making sure that there will be way fewer disconnects by reducing the amount of traffic sent during an online game. We have also added an option where you can try to reconnect or gracefully leave the game through a menu if a disconnect does happen, you aren’t just lost in the void! Another new thing is the option of replacing any team with a human or an AI when loading a multiplayer game!

A bit harsh, but you get the point

And speaking of AI, it’s just getting better and will continue to do so every single update until launch! There have been improvements in path-making decisions, tactics, and adventure behavior. A great example for that is that is an improved threat assessment and increasing chances of making fewer suicidal attacks. After all, we want you to feel like the great Wielder that you are after defeating a worthy foe!

We have great faith in our new robot overlords.

In short, get ready for an enhanced multiplayer experience, smarter AI, and a smoother adventure in Songs of Conquest. We can’t wait to see you all in action!

So what are you waiting for? Start up the new update now and experience the magic of our little game. Share your epic tales, strategies, and feedback with us - your adventures really are a great inspiration for us!

Let’s conquer this world together!

/Everyone at Lavapotion

Read the new changelog here!

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Greetings Wielders!

We’ve been in Early Access for just a little more than one year now. To all who've played, joined our community, or given feedback: a heartfelt thank you from the Lavapotion dev team! Initially, we aimed for a full release this quarter, but after careful thought, we've decided to move it forward. Please allow us to clarify the decision.

Nearly half a million people have wishlisted our game, which is to be honest both unexpected and humbling. The Adventure Strategy genre isn't the largest anymore, yet you've demonstrated that the demand endures. But to put it simply: if the game isn't 1.0-ready, we have to acknowledge it and persevere through ongoing development. So let's check out the new roadmap, upcoming changes and the reasons for them.

A version with better resolution, or simple text format, can be found on our webpage!



The AI
First of all, we want to acknowledge that we are not satisfied with the current state of the AI for a full release. We have a solid development plan for it and we know what to do, it just has taken longer than we had planned. It takes a lot of time to get all the basic systems working and we are close to that point right now. With nine out of ten play sessions being single player it is obvious that the AI is of utmost importance.

The new region system features natural borders and minimizes changes to it over time, in order to better guide the AI in navigating and expanding across the map.



Randomly generated maps
Around a fourth of all game sessions are played on random maps. We want to make sure that the experience is varied, exciting and perfect each time. We are currently collecting feedback regarding the random maps in order to refine and improve the code and design elements behind it all. For the game to stay relevant long term it is important that the randomly generated maps feels and plays just right.

Iteration, testing and improvements, that’s the recipe for success they say! So, we’ll iterate this some more and then improve it with the help of your feedback.


New user experience
Since we released into Early Access, we have created a lot of new features. We need to make sure that new players get to try out these new features and get the best possible experience when trying the game for the first time. This means taking a look in the rearview mirror and coming back to things (like campaign maps) that were designed years ago and making sure that they use all the new cool stuff. Similarly the UI needs to be adapted in order to best present all the new features, as well as highlighting the wonderfully handcrafted maps that you've created.

In March 2017 the game looked like this. Sometimes it is good to take a step back and remind ourselves just how far we have come…



Steam Deck release
This one might come a bit out of the blue, but a lot of you guys want to play on your Steam Deck. Let me be clear that the addition of Steam Deck support has not impacted the decision to delay the release. It is an added bonus, rather than an obstacle in our development process. It is a lot of work, mainly because our UI needs a lot of re-scaling in order to work well on smaller screens. Fortunately we are helped by a great studio called Bitwave, so the time required on Lavapotions end is minimal. Bitwave are currently working with us to ensure that playing on the Steam Deck will feel like a native experience, not a sloppy port. The added benefit is that this will also enable us to have full gamepad support.

The game is running well on the Steam Deck, but UI elements and fonts still needs to be scaled up.



To sum it up
In the words of Shigeru Miyamoto: a delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad. We are here for the long haul and we want to make this the best game it can be. The best days are still ahead of us and you can expect more exciting news in the coming months!

With utmost respect and gratitude,

/Team Lavapotion

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