Major Update 6 – On Fire! – Control Towers, Firefighting, Accidents and More

Things are heating up at your airbase! Major Update 6 is now available and introduces fires, airplane accidents, and the long-requested Air Traffic Control Towers to Ground of Aces.

A big thank you to everyone who helped us test these features on the Steam testing branch over the past weeks. Your bug reports and feedback helped us improve the update before release.

If you participated in the test, you can now switch back to the default Steam branch and continue playing with the official release.

Fires and Fire Accidents

Explosions, crashes, and other incidents can now start fires. Fires can spread across terrain, buildings, aircraft, and even engulf crew members. The fires must be extinguished before they get out of control.

Useful info:

• The chances of fire spreading on the terrain depend on the type of terrain tiles.

• Charred tiles revert to normal after a while.

Firefighting Tasks & Management

Crew members can now be assigned to the new Fight Fire task in the Crew Management window. Like Building or Gathering, Firefighting now has its own work priority. Crew members assigned to this task will even wake up from sleep to respond to emergencies.

Air Traffic Control Towers

Build an Air Traffic Control Tower from the Buildings menu and assign crew members to it. Each assigned air traffic controller reduces the chance of airplane accidents by 1% for aircraft operating within the tower’s range.

Three tower variants are available, each providing a larger operational radius: Metal, Brick, Concrete.

Airplane Accidents

Aircraft now have a chance of experiencing an accident when taking off or landing at your airbase.

The chance of an accident happening depends on airstrip tier, pilot flying skill, and the air traffic control tower in the airstrip range. However, which event will happen is determined by the airplane health points. The more damaged an aircraft is, the more severe accidents are possible.

Useful info:

• Planes can have wobbly, overshooting, smoking, or even burning landings.

• The aircraft will receive a landing defect and must be repaired to become operational again.

• Planes have a small chance to crash into the ground when they have too few HP

• We added a camera follow button to the event log entry.

Updated Airplane Visuals With Transparent Glass

Aircraft now feature transparent cockpit glass, allowing you to see your aircrew while they’re inside their planes.

New Aircraft for the Free Wings of Valor DLC: De Havilland Vampire

The De Havilland Vampire has joined the Wings of Valor DLC as a new flyable aircraft.

Ground of Aces Wings of Valor

Twitch Integration for Livestreamers

Alongside Major Update 6, we’ve also implemented a brand-new Twitch Integration that allows viewers to actively participate in a livestream.

Chat participants can assign names to crew members and vote on events that affect the airbase. They can help the streamer with useful deliveries or make life considerably more chaotic with additional attacks, random fires, or exploding furniture.

Are you a Twitch streamer and want access to the Twitch Integration?

On the 27th of July, we’ll launch a campaign on Dare Drop, where Ground of Aces streamers can complete challenges and unlock rewards for their communities. The Twitch Integration will be part of these challenges. Find our Dare Drop page here: https://daredrop.com/e/ground-of-aces

If you don’t use Dare Drop, you can register your interest with this form. We will check your Twitch account, and if you’re eligible for access, we will send you access to the Twitch integration: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfa0fg6WIsaHYGpnWgPwJAw6caqxW3cFjApCdY0jh7pB4cNsw/viewform

Other Improvements

• Added explanation of effects of air crew stats to tooltip

• Added long grass terrain

• Adjusted enemy attacks to be physically more spread out

• Adjusted enemy plane speed and attack patterns

• Adjusted camera clipping distance

• Adjusted camera edge scrolling cursor threshold

• Adjusted camera panning speed. Camera panning speed is now dependent on zoom level.

• Adjusted fog distance

• Adjusted intro camera animation

• Adjusted low HP particle effects for planes

• Adjusted default resources for shipments and fixed default amounts being incorrect

• Adjusted some quest icons

• Adjusted wording of "Pro mode" to "Unlock all buildables"

• Updated ground textures

• Lowered bomb explosion damage to balance with fire

• Lowered negative morale effects caused by crew deaths

• Lowered difficulty of hard missions

• Increased map object HP

Fixes

• Fixed Kittyhawk perpetual smoking

• Fixed Kittyhawk name in plane management

• Fixed Blenheim interaction points

• Fixed Blenheim blueprint image in plane management

• Fixed save & load buttons being interactable in tutorial

• Fixed issue where people would remain in bed if they had fully recovered

• Fixed some issues with plane textures

• Fixed takeoff being overwritten by landing reaction

• Fixed issue where rubble would spawn ghost blueprints after load

• Fixed music in intro cutting off

• Fixed perpetual bomb drop

• Fixed plane follow camera stuttering

• Fixed low HP icon for planes

• Fixed logic for firing crew members

• Improved optimization

Issues we are aware of

• Recovering crew members may not leave the bed when on fire

• Fire accidents may happen without realizing it - accident visibility in event log will be increased

Please let us know what you think about the new content and use the in-game feedback button if you encounter a bug. We will monitor the new reports and feedback that will come in and continue to work on the game.

Thank you so much for all your previous reports, feedback posts and reviews!

• The Blindflug Studios team