Skyward Collapse:Pre-Beta Release Notes

Alpha 0.805

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

• 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.

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.

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.

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