Skyward Collapse:Pre-Beta Release Notes

Alpha 0.808

(This hasn't been released yet. We're still working on it.)

• Yggdrasil now only works on red and blue faction members, not bandits as well.
  • Thanks to Misery for suggesting.

• Due to an -ahem- oversight, the freebies granted by Hera, Skadi, and Norns were showing as free in the interface, and letting you place them, but then actually charging you the full amount. Fixed!
  • Thanks to Misery for reporting.

• When the game is exited, all of the floating texts and debris are now cleared immediately rather than hanging around and finishing their animations on the main menu!

• Fixed an issue where Odin's ability was triggering based on the faction of the tile the unit was standing on, rather than the faction of the unit itself!

• Fixed a crash bug that could happen in odd circumstances where an entity had its tile swept out from under it, but the entity didin't die yet.
  • Also put in cleanup code so that these entities actually get removed during the next loop cycle.
  • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.

• Inhabited forests and dead forests can no longer directly be placed by players.
  • This removes a source of player confusion since those only really work when they exist in large volume (as on certain map types).
  • Thanks to Misery for suggesting the removal of these.

• A new Expert set of difficulty levels has been added.

• On Expert difficulty levels, the ability to smite buildings has now been removed.
  • Thanks to madcow for inspiring this change.

• Lakes and mountains can no longer directly be placed by players on Hard and up difficulty levels.
  • This puts the players a bit more at the mercy of the RNG.

God Tokens

• Odin: Hugin and Munin
• Odin: Gugnir
• Odin: Draupnir

Upgrades To... Upgrades

• The ability to upgrade buildings has been removed, as it was not something that players were using, wasn't something that had much effect, and was something that added some negative complexity for no real gain.

• New for the Hard class of difficulties only:
  • Veteran System: Whenever any unit kills another unit, the killer gains a level (up to the normal max of level 4). This makes balancing your sides much harder.
  • Thanks to Greywolf22 for suggesting.

Alpha 0.807

(Released May 8th, 2013)

• Fixed a crash bug in the prior version.
  • Thanks to Cinth, Mick, and madcow for reporting.

Alpha 0.806

(May 8th, 2013)

• Fixed an issue that could cause errors at the end of the tutorial of a new-in-this-version game if you had selected any other turns-per-round length other than 40 in past versions (easy workaround for players is just to select an actual currently-supported turns-per-round length when starting a new game.
  • Thanks to greywolf22, AragonLA, and GigaClon for reporting.

• Updated the graphics of the dropdowns to be way slicker and nicer-looking.

• Updated the tooltip text for rice/fish to reflect their current use.
  • Thanks to Mick for pointing out that we needed to do this.

• The descriptions of the difficulty groups are now a bit more clear.

• In the hard difficulty group, the bandits now all emerge with the bloodlust ability on them (ability to cross mountains and your towers).

• Hera's passive ability has been changed from allowing placement of free civilians to instead allowing free placement of all the basic resource buildings. There aren't enough civilians left for her prior ability to matter!

• Fixed an issue with projectiles not always visually rotating properly.

• Fixed an issue with projectiles not always traveling a consistent speed, but rather going faster the further they had to go.

Balance Changes

• Arsonists now have more than double the attack against buildings that they did have. They should also focus on attacking buildings more.
  • Thanks to misery for pointing out the need for this.

• Trading Posts now cost 3 Pottery and 10 Lumber to place.

• Embassies now cost 5 Horses and 15 Lumber to place.

• All the unlockable buildings now have a build cost associated with them.
  • To be clear, they still can't be placed until they are unlocked, but, now when they are unlocked, they won't be free.

• Norse Berserks have had their level 1 attack drop from 250 -> 200.
  • This is the first of many upcoming changes like this to unbalance the factions a bit more.

• Norse Hersirs have had their level 1 attack drop from 350 -> 300.
  • They've also had their auto-heal rate drop some.

• Seers now produce .75 incense per turn rather than 3.
  • The scarcity in the incense used to come from the fact that they had a very low storage value, so the seers spent a lot of time just waiting for a chapman to pick up their wares. Now that chapmen are gone, this change was necessary to ensure players aren't swimming in incense. Doing so might make them smell nice, but, it would make some things in the game far too easy. :)

Slight Redefinition Of Genocide

• Once again, the "Red's Turn" / "Blue's Turn" display on the top bar has been removed.

• The top of the screen now shows not only the population for blue and red, but now also shows the number of towns that each has.
  • If the number of towns held by red or blue drops to 0, that now counts as a genocide even if they still have other units.

Profile Levels

• The level of player profiles is now based on 1 plus the number of unique games won.
  • This means you can actually up your profile level now! It also means that you may already have some profile levels and suddenly some new unlocked buildings.

• The trading post is no longer available until profile level 2.
  • Njord and Hermes are no longer available until profile level 2, since their passive abilities have no point until that level.

• The embassy is no longer available until profile level 5.

• All of the unlockable buildings now have their functionality in place. Previously that wasn't too important since people couldn't unlock them yet!

Trade Revamp

• Traders have been removed from the game.

• The functionality of trading posts has been revamped:
  • While you control at least one trading post or bazaar, excess basic resources will be traded for higher-level resources based on the chart below. For each trading post or bazaar that you control, the yield that you get from each trade goes up by 1x the base yield (aka, a yield of 4 goods goes up to a yield of 12 when you have three trading posts). Yields cannot exceed 50% efficiency (ex: 100 of an item traded for 50 of another), and will not happen if your stockpiles have less than 300 of the resource to be traded.

• The functionality for bazaars has been added:
  • Bazaars act as a secondary trading post available in each town, for producing higher-yield trades with fewer towns.

• The passive abilities of both Njord and Hermes have been adjusted to give a 15% reduction in the cost of goods required to execute a trade.

• Since the diplomat was the last civilian, the civilians group has been removed from the sidebar. The diplomat (who is expected to survive the civilian cuts) is now to be found under the Other Town Buildings section, right next to the embassy.

• Our first stab at trade table values:
  • 100 pigs for 1 diamond
  • 200 iron for 1 incense
  • 300 rock for 1 sunstone
  • 150 logs for 1 diamond
  • 200 wheat for 1 moonstone
  • 100 horses for 2 sunstone
  • 100 sheep for 1 diamond

Building/Smiting Adjustments

• Town centers must now be placed 8 apart from one another, rather than 6. Not that this doesn't apply to yellow towns that might spring up during cataclysms.

• A bunch of building types now only let you build one of them per town, for your own sake -- so you can't build two fletchers in a town by accident, etc.
  • This is only applied to buildings that would have no added benefit to having two active buildings of their type in a town in the first place, and mostly applies to finished good producers and some of the unlockables.
  • This also has the side effect of making towns get partially disabled when a fletcher, for instance, gets knocked empty to a white flag. That means no more fletcher at all in that town for 10 turns, versus you just plunking down a new fletcher.

• You are no longer allowed to directly smite a tile that would cut a town center off from its fellows. However, other abilities like the Midgard Serpent can certainly do this.

More GUI Adjustments

• A resource bar for raw resources has been added along the right-hand side of the screen.
  • Thanks to a lot of players for suggesting this.

• The "auto follow" checkbox in the playback window has become a dropdown with the options "Auto follow" (the default), "jump to units" (works better than before by jumping at a better timing relative to the pauses), and "no follow."
  • Thanks to Misery for suggesting.

• Removed the "skip civilians" checkbox since it was basically pointless now with just diplomats left (and there are never many of those anymore).

• Added a new "Pause After Each" checkbox that allows you to have the game pause after the playback of each unit, so that you can stop and take stock of what is going on if that's your style.
  • Thanks to Misery for suggesting.

• Added hotkeys for all of the big buttons on the playback window. The skip and end buttons default to unbound, just to be safe. But they are there if you want them.

Alpha 0.805

(Released May 7th, 2013)

• Zeus's passive bonus has been reduced from 3x to 2x, because good grief!

• Fixed an issue with unit pathfinding that was causing some strangeness.

• Fixed a small typo in the description of Pandora's Box
  • Thanks to Aquohn for this one.

• Fixed a minor draw issue with tokens, which were able to draw above entities in some places.

• Gods now have a strong preference for attacking units rather than buildings.

• Fixed a mild visual issue where sometimes entities would not draw from the bottom of the screen until they got a bit onto the screen, and then they would pop into visibility.

• The "End Turn" button now flips colors between red and blue as you switch which faction you are playing as. With it being always that orange-red color, it was really confusing as to when you were playing blue's turn.

• The word "within the two rings around the town center" are now replaced with "within two tiles of the town center," for added clarity.

• Fixed a few small typos.
  • Thanks to Cyprene and winge for pointing them out.

• While you are in the process of placing buildings, a green underlay is now shown under all the town centers where you may place these buildings.

• A bunch of tile graphics have been improved minorly to substantially.

God Tokens

• Gods now finally can be moved! When you place one of their god tokens, they will move to it and take the appropriate action upon reaching it (as those actions are implemented, anyhow).

• God token implementations:
  • Thor: Mjolnir
  • Thor: Lightning Bolt
  • Thor: Iron Gloves
  • Zeus: Lightning Bolt
  • Zeus: Cloud
  • Zeus: Aegis
  • Poseidon: Trident
  • Poseidon: Golden Fleece
  • Poseidon: Poseidon's Chariot

Playback Improvements

• Combined the play and pause buttons into one.
  • Thanks to Admiral and SRombauts for reporting.

• Made it so that you can scroll around while auto-follow is on but the playback is paused.
  • Thanks to Pepisolo and SRombauts for suggesting.

• Fixed up the skip civilians bit so that it works a bit better and doesn't happen until after you press play.
  • Thanks to SRombauts for reporting.

• The speed of each playback level has been halved, so that 1x speed is now half as fast as it was before, and so on.
  • Thanks to Admiral for suggesting.

• Right-clicking the playback speed button now allows you to go down (from 2x to 1x, etc) rather than having to always go up and loop around.
  • Thanks to Mick for suggesting.

• Between unit actions, the game now has a short pause (1.5 seconds) so that you can tell what just happened. After switching to the next unit, it has a 0.5 second pause.
  • On higher playback speeds, this gets reduced correspondingly.

• When your view is following units around, it now follows any projectiles they fire.

• When you click "end turn," it now automatically starts unit playback rather than making you click play first.
  • Thanks to SRombauts for suggesting.

• Added a highlight ring under the currently acting entity during playback mode, so that it's easy to tell which entity is acting at the moment.
  • Thanks to nas1m and GigaClon for suggesting.

Enlightenment Balance

• You can now only build one diplomat per embassy.

• For each embassy in a town, the crime rate goes up by 2x the base rate of the town.

• For each diplomat killed, you now lose 5 enlightenment at all towns on that diplomat's faction.

• Towns that are enlightened no longer produce military units from their barracks, siege workshops, or archery ranges.

Base Economy Revamp

• Chapmen have been removed from the game, as they were:
  • Boring to watch move around.
  • Cluttering to the game board.
  • Not really at much risk of getting killed by enemy forces because of the way attack priorities worked.
  • Otherwise did not contribute anything except for mild added complexity to the game.

• The distinction between "town buildings" and "resource buildings" has been completely removed. Thus you now must place all of your buildings, period, within the two rings around a town.
  • This makes for more opportunity cost with building placement, and keeps the towns more visually compact (and easier to target -- no hiding a rice field way off in the middle of nowhere, etc).
  • This is also less confusing for new players to learn, as an added bonus, but honestly this is more about preventing exploits at a more experienced level of play.

• Resources that are produced by raw resource producers are now just dumped directly into the stores for their faction.

• The way that resource drops work has been completely redone:
  • Nobody collects them now, and they are not faction-agnostic anymore.
  • They instead have a faction flag, and last for 5 turns.
  • During those 5 turns, they generate a certain amount of the resource per turn. That amount is specified on the resource drop's tooltip.

• The cost of all units has gone up from 3.5x to 6x the values from a few releases ago.
  • Thanks to Oralordos's crazy countrysides for inspiring this.

• The human military production buildings now have cooldowns on them that make it so that there are gaps between when units can pop out (no more units coming out every turn). This incentivizes using yet more of your limited town space to have multiple military production units even in a single town.
  • Barracks Cooldowns: 4 greek, 5 norse
  • Archery Cooldowns: 4 greek, 5 norse
  • Siege Cooldowns: 2 greek, 3 norse
  • You'll notice, of course, that siege units are suddenly easier to produce. This is actually a malicious motive to create more turnover in building destruction, heh.
  • You'll also notice that the greeks get quite an edge compared to the norse; as a general rule we've been giving the greek stronger human military, but norse stronger mythological stuff.

• Yellow faction military buildings are not subject to any cooldowns on unit production, so, uh, watch out for that. Heh.

• Previously, once a town building tile was knocked empty (white flag), there was no way to recapture that building until the entire town was lost and regained. With the recent changes this was far too severe.
  • Now it takes 10 turns before the buildings are repaired to full health (albeit at level 1), and returned to control of the faction whose town they are in. This is still a super long time, but at least it's not something that is permanent dead space in your town.

Game Start And Tutorial Changes

• The setup round has been changed to simply be a single turn in which you get 9 points (this is down from 5 turns with 3 each, and thus down from getting 15 free actions to 9).

• The edict selection in the main menu has been removed, and now it's just a matter of selecting a difficulty directly. These will be filled in a bit more as we get further into the design of them.

• If you select the tutorial difficulty, it now forces you to have the red faction as norse, and blue as greek.

• The tutorial is basically nonfunctional right now, but we have it set in place so that we can finish this up probably tomorrow.

Alpha 0.804

(Released May 5th, 2013)

• Points and the idea of score have been removed from the game.
  • Those are a time sink, they're opaque, and the game is plenty of fun without it. We have a fixed amount of time that we are able to work on this game prior to release, and frankly we'd rather work on all the polish stuff you guys are bringing up rather than fiddling with points for days at a time. Between the detailed stats on the profile, the challenges, the edicts, and the propositions, I think there will be so many intrinsic reasons for keeping on playing the game that a weak extrinsic motivator like score just isn't needed.

• The "Blue's Turn" / "Red's Turn" notation at the top of the screen has returned, since we again have room for that with the removal of the points displays.

• Fixed a fatal error that could happen in 0.803.
  • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.

Alpha 0.803

(Released May 5th, 2013)

• Put in a potential fix for a silly fatal error that has been happening. The stack traces seem to be lying, or something very mysterious is going on; at any rate, one way or another it should not impact gameplay now.
  • Thanks to Kjara and Professor Paul1290 for reporting.

• Five world map building tiles visually improved.

• Fixed the main cause of the "Chapman infinite loop averted!" error. It is something that may well resurface (it in itself is an error-correction procedure), but not for the same reason.
  • The error wasn't really an error, in the classic sense: when a chapman literally had nowhere to go at all because of a traffic jam of units, the chapman would not draw down movement points and thus the cycle of searching for a way to move would spin for a thousand tries and then give up with this message.
  • Now it notices better when the situation is hopeless and the chapman just simply has nowhere to go (as opposed to needing to look for an alternate route), so that both suppresses the warning message noted above, as well as makes the time it takes to process the turn way faster.
  • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.

• Diagonal movement is still possible -- goodness it's awkward without that -- but diagonal movement through cracks in mountains or lakes that seem impassible is no longer possible. That was awkward, too.

• Fixed an issue with negative auto-heals showing as "+-" rather than just "-".
  • Thanks to GigaClon for reporting.

• Fixed an issue with military commandments showing auto-heal popups as their "number of turns remaining" counts down.
  • Thanks to GigaClon for reporting.

• Small typo fix in the description of Huscarls.
  • Thanks to Aklyon for reporting.

• Small typo fix in the description of Sunstones
  • Thanks to Aquohn for reporting.

• Units no longer pathfind through enemy units that they can't damage at all; this makes several cases of unit AI make more sense.

• Fixed an error that would occur when clicking the "Abilities" tab in the keybindings window. The error was happening because there was nothing to go in that tab; and now that tab has simply been removed.
  • Thanks to nas1m, Hearteater, Winge, and Misery for reporting.

• Chapmen are no longer allowed to step on embassies or trading posts; traders are no longer allowed to step on embassies; diplomats are no longer allowed to step on trading posts.
  • Thanks to zharmad for suggesting.

• The game now disallows direct placement of entities on tile types that they could not walk through (this prevents entities from starting out stuck with no warning).

• Military commandments can now only be placed on enemy buildings and enemy gods, which was their original design. This prevents some of the abuses that otherwise were possible.
  • Thanks to Misery for suggesting.

• The "Red's Turn" / "Blue's Turn" thing at the top of the screen has been removed.

• The pop-outs from the sidebar now also carry the border colors of the faction whose turn it currently is, to make a much clearer visual indicator of what faction you're about to take actions for.

• The "Round 0/1/2/3" terminology has been removed.
  • Now they are instead known as: "Setup", "The Age of Man", "The Age of Monsters", "The Age of Gods"
  • Thanks to Hearteater for suggesting.

• Water crossers no longer get any speed penalty from crossing marshes.

• Flying units and water crossers no longer get any attack penalty from being in a marsh tile.

Remaining Mythological Tokens

• All of the "unit pickup" style of mythological tokens have previously been completed, so now starting in on the "global effect for limited time" mythological tokens:
  • Greek: Palladium
  • Greek: Chair of Forgetfulness
  • Greek: Hebe
  • Greek: Cornucopia
  • Greek: Labyrinth
  • Norse: Fenrir
  • Norse: Brokker
  • Norse: Norns
  • Norse: Midgard Serpent
  • Norse: Eldhrimnir
  • Norse: Yggdrasil
  • Note: these are all of the global effect mythological tokens, so that's actually the full implementation of all the mythological tokens!

God Passive Abilities

• The passive abilities of the gods are now being added:
  • Norse Greater: Thor
  • Norse Greater: Odin
  • Norse Greater: Tyr
  • Norse Greater: Idunn
  • Norse Lesser: Heimdall
  • Norse Lesser: Skadi
  • Norse Lesser: Ullr
  • Norse Lesser: Njord
  • Greek Greater: Apollo
  • Greek Greater: Zeus
  • Greek Greater: Athena
  • Greek Greater: Poseidon
  • Greek Lesser: Pan
  • Greek Lesser: Hera
  • Greek Lesser: Hermes
  • Greek Lesser: Ares

Alpha 0.802

(Released May 3rd, 2013)

• Previously, popups on a single tile could overlap one another when you were zoomed out (this was not the case when zoomed all the way in). Fixed.
  • Popups from neighboring tiles can still overlap at times, but that's a different issue.
  • Thanks to GigaClon for reporting.

• Fixed a couple of issues with the "skip civilians" logic added in the prior version, that accidentally skipped past some of the military playback also.
  • Thanks to orzelek for reporting.

• Fixed a bug that was allowing chapmen to stack up on top of one another.
  • Thanks to nas1m for reporting.

• Civilians are no longer able to step onto military production buildings at all.
  • Chapmen are now allowed to deposit their goods on ANY town building, thus making congestion of them far less likely.
  • Thanks to orzelek and zharmad for inspiring these changes.

• Fixed an issue with Frost Giants having 40 attack instead of... 1800.
  • Thanks to JAlfredGoodwin for reporting.

• Fixed an issue where resource drops could be placed on buildings, which then led to other issues (this was not supposed to be possible in the first place).
  • Thanks to AlgaeNymph for reporting.

• Fixed an issue where bandits could spawn on blockade tiles.
  • Thanks to zharmad for reporting.

• Fixed an issue with the image for Hippo-Toxotes not being found.
  • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.

• The health of all units has been increased by 3x of what it previously was, so that units in general are more sturdy and not dying instantly. This makes the combat bonuses more meaningful, since attack powers have NOT increased.
  • Going along with this, the resource costs of all units have gone up 3.5x of what they previously were, so that there are also a lot fewer units on the board. Previously there were far more units moving around than we had intended. The idea is fewer units, each of which is more meaningful. This is easier to tell what is going on, as well as quicker to move through on each turn.

• The inventory sizes of individual chapmen have been doubled, and their movement speeds have been increased by 50%, to again account for needing fewer of them.

• Given the other recent balance changes, adamantine now only spawns 10 angry bandits rather than 20.

• More mythological tokens implemented:
  • Greek: Nemean Lion
  • Greek: Pandora's Box
  • Norse: Hlidskjalf
  • Norse: Singasteinn

• Land tiles can now be placed anywhere, including right up next to your town center if you want. Sometimes it's really useful to be able to just place some fields for your guys to have more moving room; you can always smite them later if you need the space.

• While you are placing units or buildings, it now keeps their flag in its base color. That way you can easily tell if you are placing a red or a blue person/building as you are doing it.
  • Thanks to Aquohn for inspiring this change.

• While you are placing units or buildings, the tooltip shown relating to them is no longer giant and overpowering the screen.
  • Thanks to Aklyon and Cyprene for reporting.

• Previously, the "Jump To Units" option did not work when "Auto Play" was also enabled. Fixed.
  • Thanks to GigaClon for reporting.

Alpha 0.801

(Released May 3rd, 2013)

• Updated the trader logic such that there is now an increasing chance of getting awesome items the longer they wind up doing nothing with their accumulated trade value; and the chance of them doing something with that value also goes up correspondingly.
  • This fixes the bulk of the last thing that we felt was really weak with the trading model as it stood before.

• Removed references to a DLL for window-focus-detection that may have been causing freezes on Windows 8.
  • Thanks to iozay for reporting.

• Made the "Entity is already at the target tile!" error message a lot more informative so that we can track it down, although we can't yet duplicate it.
  • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.

• Fixed a really stupid issue where lesser and greater gods were throwing issues because of some changes we made to support Cerberus fully right before we went to alpha.
  • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.

• Greek Lithovoloi now have sensible attack numbers.
  • Thanks to zharmad for reporting.

• Fixed a typo where the word "hill" was used in the marsh tile description instead of "marsh." The description was accurate other than that, though.
  • Thanks to zharmad for reporting.

• Fixed a minor typo in the "Ruins Rush" map type mouseover.
  • Thanks to mrhanman for reporting.

• Added a new "Skip Civilians" option on the playback menu.
  • Thanks to zharmad, nas1m, and orzelek for suggesting.

• Fixed a minor typo thing with some Valley 2 notations still being in the keybindings screen.
  • Thanks to Aklyon for reporting.

• The turn no longer automatically ends when you are out of action points. This is super confusing and leads to mis-placed buildings.
  • Thanks to orzelek for inspiring this change.

• Right-clicking now cancels the current order you are in the process of giving, same as hitting Escape does.
  • Thanks to orzelek and nas1m for suggesting.

Skyward Collapse