Skyward Collapse:Post Release Notes

Official 1.009

(Not yet released; we're still working on it!)

Official 1.008 Massive Bigness

(Released June 12th, 2013)

• Town centers now cost the equivalent in rock that they used to cost in cut stone. This way you don't get completely hosed if you're down to one last town center and unable to place a stone mason so that you can then place more town centers. Aka, when Ultima happens, etc.
  • Thanks to Billick for inspiring this change.

• Updated the marsh tiles in the game to look much nicer, and have four visual variants rather than just repeating the same one over and over.

• The filter button on the left side of the screen now does a pop-out like the other buttons on that sidebar do. This makes it easier to manage rather than having to cycle through all the various filters.
  • Thanks to solosol for suggesting.

• Added a new filter mode: Tokens.
  • This lets you see just the tokens that are on the map, which is quite useful.

• The positions of the potter and the Jeweler on the left sidebar have been switched.
  • Thanks to Echo35 for suggesting.

• Made a couple of very minor improvements to the display of unit stats so that things are slightly better spaced and organized.

• It is now possible to have lightning-fast games that are only 20 turns per round.

• The exit game confirmation no longer shows when the current game has already ended.

• A new "surrender" option has been added in the main menu. This lets you log a lost game as a loss without having to play to the end, plus gives you the satisfaction of upending the board as if you were mad at the end of a board game. ;)
  • Thanks to madcow, Castruccio, LaughingThesaurus, Teal_Blue, and nas1m for suggesting.

• Fixed an exploitable bug where the woe timers would be decremented by one every time you loaded a savegame.
  • Thanks to Tripas and Misery for reporting.

• Improved the precaching of some tile types so that when the types change for the first time you don't see them blink into nothingness first. For instance a building turning to ruins.

• Fixed an issue with both the auto-follow and jump-to-first-unit playback modes where they would not jump to the first unit during the playback mode.
  • During auto-follow this didn't matter if the unit was moving or attacking, but if a unit was being created (such as a god appearing or a unit coming out of a building), then it would miss that.
  • For the jump-to-unit mode, it would just miss the whole thing.
  • This also fixes the issue with the playback pausing when the gods appear, unlike every other kind of playback.
  • Thanks to SRombauts, Mick, and Winge for reporting.

• Added Beacons to the game:
  • Has no gameplay purpose, but is great for marking locations on the map for other players or for your own later recall. If you place a new beacon on top of an existing beacon, it will instead remove the old beacon.
  • Did you know? You can hold shift while clicking in order to add or remove a bunch of beacons at once! This actually works with doing any sort of action or tile/unit placement from the left sidebar!
  • Thanks to TropeSage, yllamana, and Enzyme for suggesting.

• The achievements for placing tokens no longer are granted as soon as you place the token down (since the Undo button can make this very exploitable). Now the token achievements are granted when the tokens expire or are picked up or otherwise removed from the game after having been placed.
  • Thanks to FooBarTheLittle and Winge for reporting.

Two New Land Types

• New land type: Mountain Tunnel
  • Mountains filled with tunnels and bore-holes, which are thus easily passable to all units. It is so fortified that it cannot even be smited away...

• New land type: Bridged Lake
  • A lake with field bridges laid down, making it easily passable to all units. It is so fortified that it cannot even be smited away...

• Both the Lake Lure and Mountain Divide maps now have a small chance of seeding in the two new land types as new tiles are added to the landmass.
  • There's no other direct way for these to show up in game through placement or map seeding; the rest of their appearance is caused by bandit units and so forth.

11 New Unique Human Units For Bandits!

• The bandits will no longer directly spawn the faction-specific barracks, archery, or siege units; instead, they use the new bandit-specific units that they now have. All of the human bandit-specific units for the 2.0 version of the game are now in place, the new bandit-specific mythological units are not yet.

Barracks-Style

• Drukru
  • Slow-moving highly-armored heavy hitter that does half-power splash damage to units on the the tiles cardinally adjacent to its target (but not the adjacent buildings). Very dangerous up close, and particularly specializes in taking out enemy mythological units.
  • Does not emerge until round 2.

• Draconaria
  • Highly armored high-speed cavalry warrior. Attacks are not particularly strong, but she can close distances to targets very quickly. So swift, in fact, that she is immune to counter-attack when she strikes.

• Gladius
  • Midpower swordfighter able to deliver a flurry of blows when in close quarters.

• Rogue Paladin
  • Very highly armor, high-power fighter.

Archery-Style

• Triaria
  • Low-range spear thrower able to loose multiple volleys against a single target once in throwing distance. Specializes in taking out enemy ranged units.

• Sagittaria
  • Powerful, armored longbow-wielding woman.

• As a reminder, Hippo-Toxotes were already in the game prior to version 1.0 of the game, and are considered a bandit-specific archery unit.

Siege-Style

• Sarmantian Archer
  • Stealthy, low-health archer with incredible power at low range. Stealth prevents her from being attacked at range.

• Field Mechanik
  • Specializes in constructing heavily-fortified bridges over any lakes she crosses, thus allowing other units to follow her freely. Can only attack buildings, although will damage any units standing on buildings it attacks.

• Siege Drill
  • Specializes in drilling heavily-fortified tunnel networks through mountains, thus allowing other units to follow freely. Also deals heavy damage to buildings it reaches. Can only attack buildings, although will damage any units standing on buildings it attacks.

• Saltpetre Cart
  • Actually contains a few more ingredients than saltpeter, if you look closely. Incredibly powerful explosive can only be used once, but levels an entire tile for sure. Can only attack buildings, although will damage any units standing on buildings it attacks.

• Dragon Trebuchet
  • Does half-power splash damage to the tiles cardinally adjacent to its target. Can only attack buildings, although will damage any units standing on buildings it attacks.

Scoring System Improvements

• The unit and building stats now show the "points on death."
  • Thanks to Jab2565 for suggesting.

• The stats on the score tooltip now show the total number of deaths for red, blue, and yellow units and buildings, rather than the total number of kills.
  • Old data for kills in existing savegames is simply put into the slot for deaths: completely wrong, of course, but this way it doesn't affect score calculations.
  • The rationale for this change is that it has more to do with entity production and building losses, rather than aggression.
    • If bandits get into one of your towns and wreck the heck out of it, you actually do get the points for that, whereas before you would not.
    • If you are fighting an epic losing battle against some overly powerful bandits, you actually get points for your losses, as well. Better than having to scrape out the few points from the minority of kills you make against a stronger foe.
    • This in turn rewards more use of the human units, since more of them are likely to die as compared to using mythologicals where they are more likely to make kills.

• Rather than the score for a unit death being a flat 15 points, this now goes up by the level of the unit in question.
  • So a level 1 unit is 15 points, level 2 30, level 3 45, level 4 60.
  • This encourages the use of the higher-level units on upper difficulties, where otherwise high-level units are considered a bit dangerous due to how hard they can be to control.
  • Thanks to Jab2565 and solosol for suggesting.

• Lower turns per round now grant you higher final score multipliers, since those are harder games to hit your score gates with.
  • This also helps to normalize the longer games a bit, so that the highest possible scores don't always just come from the superlong games.
  • Thanks to Mick and solosol for suggesting.

• In order to keep the score goals from being easily achievable in ages prior to when the next score goal is set, the amount of score required and generated during the ages of monsters and gods have been increased:
  • The score gate for the age of monsters is now 3x higher, but all of the actions that generate score during the age of monsters also now generate 3x as many points.
  • The score gate for the age of gods is now 8x higher, but all of the actions that generate score during the age of gods also now generate 8x as many points.
  • In other words, it is much harder to make much progress on the age of monsters score goal until you are actually in the age of monsters, and the same for the age of gods.
  • Existing savegames will apply the appropriate multipliers for whatever age you happen to be in.

Military Commandment Fixes

• Military commandments now last for six turns rather than three, or until the god dies or moves away.

• Military commandments now take 0 action points to place, rather than one.

• Fixed a regression where once again military commandments were not working properly (so you couldn't order your guys to kill a god).
  • Thanks to RadioZone and Ipkins for reporting.

• Fixed an issue where gods were not properly counterattacking units that attacked them.

Limited Siege Unit Stacking

• A limited amount of unit stacking is now allowed in the game:
  • A single allied siege unit and non-siege unit can now share the same tile. Enemy units still cannot share at all, and any other permutations of allied units cannot share.
  • If a tile is attacked, all the units on that tile will take damage.
  • The chief benefit of this, however, is that it allows for non-ranged siege units to make their way through heavier armies that are in their way, thus reaching their targets.
    • For instance, this greatly increases the power and utility of trojan horses.
  • Thanks to Misery and Zeyurn for inspiring this change.

• When two units are stacked on a single tile, they now spread out horizontally in a nice fashion.

Unit Leveling-Related Improvements

• The level and the "star for if it has a bonus applied" now show up visually above the heads of each unit.
  • The star was previously shown larger and next to the faction flag behind the unit. But this was harder to see, and looked a little funky, and made the faction flag harder to see sometimes.
  • The level of units was never previously shown except in tooltips, and really this is pretty darn critical information if you are considering the flow of an upcoming battle.
    • Most likely the obscurity of this information was making new players not really do upgrades as much as they previously would have otherwise done.

• The mythological creatures directly placed by players are no longer automatically granted upgrades to higher levels in the age of monsters and the age of man.
  • Previously they would be level 2 in the age of man, and level 3 in the age of gods. This was just too overpowered compared to their human counterparts, and was messing with the resource usage in a negative way (ie, requiring too few).
  • You can obviously still upgrade these at any time, manually, but now you have to pay for the upgrades to the respective levels rather than getting them for free.
  • One reason we previously had the mythological creatures automatically upgrade was the confusion that new players would have as to why their mythologicals were getting trashed by enemy ones in the later ages. Now with the levels directly showing, this is no longer a point of confusion.
  • Thanks to Pepisolo for suggesting this rather strenuously. ;)

• The "upgrade unit" action now costs 0 AP. This makes it a lot easier to use, which is important for a few reasons.
  • Late in the game, you often wind up having way more resources than you might need, but not any more AP than you did before. This helps to balance that out.
  • Now that mythological creatures are not auto-upgraded in the later ages, you'll be manually upgrading them a lot more, and the extra AP cost would just be too extreme for them.
  • Side note: this does NOT devalue the schools too much. Doing an upgrade manually costs you 100% more resources for each level you go up. Schools produce higher-leveled units for free.

• The upgrade unit tooltip when hovering over a unit is now more informative, showing you at a glance the resources you have on hand for each resource required for upgrading that unit. Waaaay easier to make decisions that way.

• The upgrade unit text has been updated with the following addition:
  • Did you know? You can hold shift while clicking in order to upgrade multiple units, or to repeatedly upgrade a single unit. This actually works with doing any sort of action or tile/unit placement from the left sidebar!
  • Thanks to Pepisolo for inspiring this change.

New Soul Imprints Resource

• Added a new Soul Imprint resource.
  • Residue from the soul of a human departing from this mortal coil. Allows certain powerful abilities to be invoked by The Creator.
  • Every time a human unit or building dies, a soul is added to their factions stores.

• Bless Tile
  • Various types of tiles cannot be smited by force, but can be blessed into a more pleasing form. Building Ruins in towns that are still alive, Obsidian, Bridged Lakes, and Mountain Tunnels can all be blessed into forms that you can then work with further.
  • Costs 20 human soul imprints.
  • Strategically, this is super useful because:
    • It allows you some way to counter the new bandit drills and mechaniks and so forth. You aren't just stranded with completely unusable tiles forever; but getting rid of those things comes at a nontrivial cost, so you have to weigh that, which is good.
    • It allows you to repair slightly-damaged towns so that there are not ugly forever-there blots on them. This gives you a better chance to maintain the towns you already have, although it just turns the ruins into fields, so you still have to do the rebuilding after this. It's not something you can do infinitely, which is good, but it does let you make spot repairs and correct for relatively minor things. The loss of a whole town is still irreversible, however, which is particularly good.

• Convert Enemy Unit
  • Cause an enemy unit to have a change of heart and join your faction.
  • Costs 50 human soul imprints.
  • Strategically, this is really interesting because it provides a new (albeit expensive) way to deal with threats from overpowered enemies aside from using mythological creatures. This is huge!
    • If you have an enemy unit that is overpowered from some buff and running rampant... well, if there are enough souls on the losing faction's side, then that can be used to turn the over-strong unit right back around and send them at the other faction.
    • If there are a bunch of bandits coming from a keep, you can convert a couple of them to avoid getting overwhelmed.
  • This may be too powerful, we'll see; if so, then it's a matter of adjusting its cost. But right now this is so expensive that you really can't do it often, so it's more of an augmentation than anything else.

Official 1.007 Stats Fit For A God

(Released May 30th, 2013)

• Put in some safety-syncing code to make sure that if players somehow get out of sync, it never lasts for more than one turn. Specifically, it now does this safety-sync right before it goes to the after-turn playback phase, so if there are any differences that would cause errors in playback, it fixes those on the clients to match the server.
  • Ideally there are no desyncs anyhow, but this at least mitigates their effect to almost nil.

• The game now properly lets multiplayer clients see which players they are waiting on when they have finished their turns and are hanging out.
  • Thanks to Munsta for reporting.

• When other players have finished their turn and are now waiting on you, or have finished playback and are now waiting on you, a message now shows to that effect so that you know to get a move on.
  • Thanks to yllamana for suggesting.

• Bandits are no longer allowed to pick up the Nemean Lion token, since it's useless to them.
  • Thanks to nas1m, Winge, and FooBarTheLittle for reporting.

• Buildings that do not unlock until a certain round were previously unavailable in sandbox mode. Fixed.
  • Thanks to Pepisolo for reporting.

• Fixed a bug with the midgard serpent and a few other similar global-effect tokens where they could remove tiles after units had already precalculated that they would move there, thus leading to units leaping over holes and doing other really strange stuff like stacking up on top of one another, etc.
  • This also was affecting the labyrinth and Yggdrasil in terms of causing unit stacking.
  • Thanks to Mick, Bluddy, Misery, and matobinder for reporting.

• The tooltips for the resources on the sidebar now show the count of buildings for that faction that are involved in the production chain of that resource (just one building for raw resources, several for finished goods). Sunstone does not include moonstone production, as it's a raw resource.
  • Thanks to FooBarTheLittle, zespri, and yllamana for suggesting.

• In the left sidebar, when you are placing buildings, it now shows a count of how many of those buildings that faction already has on the map.
  • As an added bonus, when placing lands it also shows how many lands of each type are on the map.
  • Also also, this now shows the counts of directly-placeable units and tokens that are currently out on the map for that faction.
  • Thanks to James Allen, FooBarTheLittle, zespri, and yllamana for suggesting.

• Fixed an issue specific to the Lake Lure map where the starting towns were too close together and thus all sorts of wonky issues could happen.
  • Thanks to onyhow and Misery for reporting.

• When you can't play a token from the sidebar because of it being on cooldown, it now shows as grayed out.

• When you use the undo button while having a sidebar submenu extended, the sidebar submenu status now updates.
  • Thanks to FooBarTheLittle for reporting.

• When your cursor is outside the game window, it no longer shows tooltips for things you are hovering over outside the game window. MAN was that annoying in windowed mode.

• A couple of the finished goods producers have been moved around in the left sidebar to make them easier to find relative to their raw resource counterparts.

• The right-hand sidebar has been revamped so that its data is more compact horizontally, and thus can support two rows. Now you can thus see all your raw resources in one column (to the left), and all your finished goods in another column (to the right).
  • This solves a lot of requests of players without actually increasing the side of that sidebar much at all (less than 10 pixels wide) and without reducing the size of the font (though it is now overlaid over the images).

• The sword, pike, warhammer, and battle axe finished goods have all just been condensed down into a single "melee weapon" finished good. Also, the Bow finished good has been renamed to "ranged weapon."
  • This keeps from there being a fiddly number of weapons specific to individual units, which didn't add much except extra things to look at and take up space that could be better used for other things. Shifting these all to one finished good hardly even affects balance, interestingly.

• In the tooltip for finished goods on the right-hand sidebar, it now says "on demand: X amount of the finished good from Y amount of the other resources needed to convert into that."
  • Hopefully this will help to stop the confusion from people who think that they already have X amount of cut stone and Y amount of rock, and that they could get more cut stone if only the rock would be converted over.

• Whenever you view Nick's comic, it now plays the track "Running In The Sun" rather than whatever else happened to be playing in the background at the time (likely the title music).
  • This is a lot more appropriate of a tone for the comic, as one reviewer pointed out.

Official 1.006 Listen When I Command!

(Released May 28th, 2013)

• The maximum resolution of the game has been increased to support the 7680x1600 EyeFinity resolution.
  • Thanks to Mikuki for suggesting.

• Previously, resource costs were improperly refunded during the setup phase, letting you gain tons of resources just by placing and undoing.
  • Thanks to vince0018 and FooBarTheLittle for reporting.

• Fixed a huge bug that was causing MP desyncs as well as causing some melee units to act insanely during solo play -- but ONLY when you didn't skip to the end of combat, but instead watched it all the way through. The speed of playback could also mess with this.
  • Thanks to matobinder, Munsta, and Crimdal for reporting.

• Fixed an issue where the "What's New" link directed to the wrong wiki page.
  • Thanks to seiferkatt for reporting.

• "What's New" on the main menu has been replaced with a more clear "Recent Patch Notes" name, so that more players will know what that is.

• The range-of-one siege units now all have the mountainwalk ability, letting them no longer get bogged down in the same lines of travel with the main human entities.
  • This means the greek trojan horse, greek battering ram, and norse arsonist.
  • All of the ranged siege units are useful enough as it is, and can just keep moving with the crowd. But the range-of-one guys were a bit hard to use depending on the terrain.
    • If you still want to block them, of course you can use lakes; that just won't protect you from the ranged siege units, so you'd have to do double duty with mountains and lakes to make perfect protection.

• Mountains and lakes now cost 2AP to place, rather than one; this makes their use something to consider more -- as with smiting -- but still not something that is impossible to do.
  • Thanks to Bluddy for suggesting.

• Minotaurs and Trolls now only damage units on the cardinally-adjacent tiles to their target, not buildings as well. This makes it so that they aren't leveling towns in one or two blows.
  • Thanks to Bluddy for suggesting.

• Military commandments were accidentally broken right prior to the release of the game, but have now been fixed. Sorry about that!
  • Thanks to orzelek, Misery, restingsound, boho, nas1m, TropeSage, cnemus, Kamiyama, and Film11 for reporting.

• Updated military commandments so that they disappear as soon as the god on their tile is dead.

Official 1.005 Player's Choice

(Released May 28th, 2013)

• Mountains and lakes can now be placed on any difficulty level (having them on lower difficulty levels but not higher ones was a bit disorienting; and not having them on lower difficulty levels anymore has been massively unpopular).

• The bandit keeps are no longer immune to mythological creatures, and have had their health returned to 30k instead of 15k like they were recently reduced to. Again, these changes were hugely unpopular with players, so they're gone. You know we listen!

Official 1.004 Rise of the Valkyrie

(Released May 27th, 2013)

• The walls of bandit keeps have been upgraded with magical safeguards that prevent them from taking any damage from mythological creatures!
  • However, also reduced the health of bandit keeps from 30,000 to 15,000.
    • Bear in mind that the keeps are meant to be something you have to have siege units to deal with; that was their original intent, and not only were players circumventing that with mythologicals, in at least one case there was extreme cheese possible with the mythologicals.
  • Thanks to Levi and Mick for inspiring this change.

• Fixed the issue with the town names being different for each player in multiplayer.
  • Thanks to Zeyurn for reporting.

• Fixed a definite desync with norse mortars attacking and having a different amount of chance for themselves to die on each machine.
  • This was still something quite sporadic, but definitely could cause issues.

• Fixed an issue with the Undo feature where it would trigger Eldhrimnir, Odin, (theoretically) Tartarus Rising, and similar.
  • Thanks to brammel for reporting.

• Minotaurs and Chimera have lost their target bonuses against both buildings and heavy infantry.

• The frost giant bonus against gods has been converted to instead being a bonus against enemy mythologicals.
  • The light elf bonus against gods and light siege have also been converted to a bonus against enemy mythologicals.
  • The Valkyrie have had their base attack power dropped in general, but now get a massive bonus against enemy mythologicals.

Official 1.003

(Released May 26th, 2013)

• Fixed a rather embarrassing issue where a testing flag got left on and no more than two players were allowed to connect to a game, instead of 8. Sorry about that!
  • Thanks to Spud_02 for reporting.

• Previously, mountains and lakes were only place-able on medium difficulty and down, because they were known to be exploit-y but some people really like doing designs with them, etc. This was prior to the addition of sandbox mode, though, that we last evaluated this; so now we've made this sandbox-mode only.
  • Does this make the easier versions of the game harder? Yeah... you can't just plop down a mountain when the going gets rough. But really this seems pretty much in line with the game, you know?
  • Thanks to Trisdino for suggesting.

Official 1.002 Hunting Through Rubble

(Released May 24th, 2013)

• Fixed a small inaccuracy in the "no gods currently" text in the left sidebar, which said you could still choose gods.
  • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.

• Cerberus now has stats that actually increase with each upgrade to him.
  • Thanks to Misery for reporting.

• The score tooltip is now clearer that "red kills" means "kills by red" and so forth.

• The attack AP cost for Oxybele has been increased from 3 to 5.
  • Thanks to Misery and Ipkins for suggesting.

• Minotaur rebalance:
  • Health in general has been increased, while auto-regen has been dropped dramatically.
  • Attack AP cost from 3 -> 5.
  • No longer ranged at all, but instead are just melee.
  • Thanks to Misery, zharmad, and Mick for suggesting.

• Fixed an issue where sometimes entities, particularly gods, could spawn in different places in multiplayer.
  • Thanks to restingsound for reporting.

• When buildings are destroyed by whatever means (actual warfare, getting taken over by mountains, etc), their tooltips now show what kind of building they used to be before they bit the dust.
  • Thanks to Misery for suggesting.

• Fixed a bug where the town names would differ between players in multiplayer.
  • Thanks to restingsound for reporting.

• On the right sidebar, the tooltips for the finished goods now shows the explanation:
  • (Amount Available On Demand - This Is Not Produced Or Stored Until Needed)
  • Also, on the right sidebar in general, the finished goods counts now show up a bit darker and with some markings around them to immediately make them look different.

• Holding down the Ctrl key now shows all the building names in your view.
  • Even better, for all of the destroyed building ruins, it shows the name of what they used to be in a light red color.
  • Thanks to mrhanman for suggesting.

• Holding down the U key now shows all the unit and token names in your view.
  • Even better, all of the gods have their names highlighted in a pale purple, and all the tokens have their names highlighted in a pale blue, to make them easier to find.
  • Thanks to mrhanman for suggesting.

• Fixed a typo in the iron mine part of the tutorial.
  • Thanks to Breach for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where smiting your own buildings would grant you points and increase the building kill counts and loss counts for your faction.
  • Thanks to Bluddy for reporting.

• The cooldown on Brokkr has been increased a great deal, and the points from him are also now negative.
  • However, the cost in steel that he requires has been halved.
  • The same is true for Norns, except in this case it is the incense cost that has been reduced by 1/3rd.
  • Thanks to Misery for suggesting.

Previous Release Notes

Skyward Collapse - Pre-Beta Release Notes