Winter Balance Update is out!

Hi everybody, we managed to prepare one more game update for you before the Holidays! This time the main focus is game balance, but there are also quite a few new items, creatures and a map with a twist.

As usually, this is not all that we've been working on, as some of the team are focusing on content and improvements for the looming full release, which will come with the last campaign, maps, AI improvements and more.

Now, release notes and all the details:

New creatures

• Void Walker teleports to a different location every phase and gives you an option to teleport back to any visited tile when you beat him

• Craborg gets really angry when its stack loses half of the original units

• Edge hog is just ... spiky! :) It also has unlimited retaliation and causes a few status effects.

New content

• Neutral Zone map that will give you an opportunity to play with all the different neutral creatures

• Neutral spawner map object

New items

• Biotic Mentor is an artifact that allows your commander to use BIO abilities twice per round

• Genie is an artifact that causes your PSY abilities to last twice as long!

• Triffid Root is an equipment that gives a commander 10 new Triffid units each cycle!

• Tax Collector's Banner gives you extra Aura Coins when taking over buildings

• Pathfinder Drone removes movement penalties for rough terrain

• Expropriator lets you take over turrets and outposts after defeating them

• Piercing ammo allows ranged units to always deal critical damage

• Burn Puncher deals burning or corrosive damage based on which unit gets hit

• Stim-tac is a consumable that increases Combat power by +5 for three phases

• Potion of Motion is a consumable that increases Exploration proficiency by +5 for three phases

• Brain fuel is a consumable that increases Ability power by +5 for three phases

Balance changes

• Biomancer skill revives more units

• Renewed Spirit skill restores both MP and EP

• Scavenger also provides more resources when picking them up on the map

• Fungors have a limit of how many stacks they can split into

• Drone dogs give debuffs to enemy commanders while in range

• Outposts have the option to buy an extra turret

• Defensive upgrades of mines: cheaper and better

• Draining coil steals some of the drained energy

• Overall nerf of PSY abilities

• Magnesium torch can be thrown on nearby tiles, has a new effect

• Free resources on the map give on average a little bit more

Balance changes - Globetrotter

• Show resources also shows production buildings

• Rush has a stronger effect

• Eagle eye has a bigger range and highlights discovered commanders on the minimap

• Protective field also protects against turrets, traps and environmental hazards

• Supercharged cloud can now be placed next to commanders to affect them immediately, it also stops them for one turn

• Evacuation now gives you the choice of which base to evacuate to

• Summon creature - a new ability allows commanders to summon random creatures on the map

Features and improvements

• Configurable keyboard shortcuts

• Polished a lot of the UI and dialogs (commander list, statistics, gateway panel at the base, commander meeting panel, added a little animation to level up and similar dialogs)

• Improved a few unit animations from the Tumori Tribes faction and neutral units

• [EDITOR] Added a parameter for locking staring armies in maps

Fixes

• Fixed rehired retreated commanders showing up as DEAD in their tooltip

• Fix spawners can have wrong day-night variant of the units at the first part of the cycle, units in armies of commanders visiting bases were not updated according to day-night cycle

• Fixed morale tooltip wasn't showing actual value of active status effects

• Fixed Traveling merchant and Wanderer could spawn blocking routes

• Fixed dead Panzer Worm surfaced at the end of the battle if it died underground due to torpedo explosion

• Fixed planned routes not immediately updated in a few cases (like equipping items protecting from environmental hazards)

• Fixed the 4th tier unit next to its basic spawner building in the Sovereign base showed upgraded unit graphics and the upgraded spawner showed basic unit graphics

• Fixed commander/outpost selector getting enabled in negotiator panel when not used in actual negotiation but when an outpost exists (slave camp, base slave camp, war machine shop, spawners)

• Sovereign Fleet campaign, mission 1 - fixed Gran Manny could die "prematurely"

Thanks for reading, we hope that you will enjoy the update over the holidays and as always, we'll be happy to have you on our Discord server:

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