43 Regular Update, Fixes, QOL and improvements!

Hello again folks!

For this Regular Update, I've tried to mostly focus on bug fixes and stability across the board. I decided to tackle some refactoring also of some of the older core codebase, and in doing so made a few of the Roadmap items a lot easier to achieve in upcoming updates :) As well as these main items, balance, difficulty and some ground combat improvements were made.

Compass changes

Never lose track of your ships or capture points again! The top compass bar now shows objectives, friendly and enemy ships! These are color coded as follows:

• Vessels and capture points: Green for friendly, Red for enemies, and Blue for allied.

• Surrendered or abandoned ships show in White, and sunken vessels show in grey.

Some of these items are also represented with on-screen, and some off-screen indicators. Holding shift will reveal these indicators.

Spawn Improvements

A large refactor of the code base around the spawning issues was the central focus for the first few days of this patch. This has improved reliability, squished a few bugs, and allowed me some wiggle room with regards to how battles start! The main items that are included in this patch around this area include:

• the roadmap item: "Mid-Battle encounters!".

• Enemy Spawn formations.

• Island defense fleets now spawn across multiple defend points.

I have plans to expand on this over the next few weeks :)

Difficulty Customization

One of the most impactful improvements over the past few weeks has been the inclusion of the difficulty settings popup. This kind of customization was heavily requested and discussed on the discord and I've improved it a lot for this patch. I'm delighted this feature has been so well received and look forward to improving it more in future. Please do keep the suggestions coming on what you'd like to see here as this feature is entirely driven by your feedback.

The overall difficulty has been replaced with difficulty presets - you can open up the difficulty customization and change the parameters before a new campaign, or change at any time during the campaign through the pause menu.

Ship combat and Ground combat difficulty has been split up and a bunch of scaling related items have been added to the options.

I've also heard your frustrations here and on the discord about ships sinking after surrender, so I've added a new difficulty setting there that will allow them a lot more armor after they've been abandoned / surrendered. Still, if you're choosing to blast the enemy with multiple 120 SOTL they may still sink!

Campaign Scaling improvements

Depending on selected difficulty settings, enemy fleets will scale differently on the campaign map and become more aggressive.

Bug fixes

Some major frustrations have been addressed in this patch, a full list is below but some of the ones you may recognize are:

• The jittery movement on the campaign map.

• Command wheel blocking some UI elements depending on ship positions.

• Some ships having an extra w key press required to drop 2nd sails.

• Muskets Overkilling targets instead of re-targetting once their primary target is killed.

• Enemy fleets fleeing early and peeling one ship at a time to engage.

Manage Settlement

Some more planning, artwork and scaffolding has been completed since the last patch with regards to this. I should be able to get the building and production systems in for an upcoming recent patch.

Here is the full list of items completed for this update:

New

• Compass items show for friendly and enemy ships, as well as Capture Points.

• Holding shift now reveals helpers to identify ships and Capture Points on and off-screen.

• Defending fleets will now spawn in less uniform positions.

• Spawning for both Player and Enemy troops, ships and islands has been fixed up / improved & refactored, improving reliability and predictivity.

• Roadmap Item - Fleet Mid-battle Encounters. Encounters you join will now have the involved parties involved in battle.

• Added Difficulty Preset selection to the Difficulty Customization.

• Added 3 new Scaling Difficulty Sliders - Scaling for Gold, Renown, and Experience.

• Added Difficulty Slider for Treasure Scaling.

• Added Difficulty Slider for LevelUP Exp Amount Scaling.

• Added 2 difficulty selectors for Ship Combat and Ground Combat.

• Seasons now change in time.

• Right clicking on a selected ships' unit card will now bring the player camera to it. s

• Campaigns starting at Hard or Impossible difficulty will have harder enemy starting fleets and they will scale faster.

• Added cheat for Campaign to change Character Class.

• Added new Difficulty Setting which is Enabled by default - surrendered / unoccupied ships take less damage.

Fixes

• Fixed issue where some ships would "Skip" a sail unfurl order when hitting the W key.

• Fixed issue where unoccupied ships would be identified even if sunk.

• Fixed control lock on Visits.

• Fixed spawn issue with 3+ enemy fleets.

• Fixed a multitude of spawn point issues.

• Spawning Enemy fleets will no longer idle when the flagship is outside of range of an enemy ships or has no cannons.

• Enemy ships should no longer have invalid underground spawns.

• Enemy spawn points no longer shift to below some background islands.

• Fixed out-of-bounds spawn issues for fleet battles containing over 4 fleets.

• Fixed issue with Sink victory conditions sometimes duplicating.

• Fixed issue where Visiting an Island would sometimes not show the defending fleet.

• Fixed issue with Fleet Review mode having some invalid parameters causing some spawn issues.

• Fixed issue where Above-ship UI would block other functionality.

• Fixed sporadic issue where enemy ships would flee and peel one ship at a time in some cases.

• Fixed issue where gunfire would sometimes overkill dead enemies instead of attacking other enemies in range.

• Fixed issue where sometimes End Game Melee Units would stand idle after engaging.

• Fixed some splash damage issues for end game units.

• Fixed issue where Pistoleers would sometimes double-shot before reload completion.

• Fixed Level Up scale issue where values were reversed at some difficulties.

• Fixed Path Finding issue where sometimes smooth paths were not possible on the campaign map causing pathing issues.

• Fixed issue where player ship would stutter on the campaign map during movement at 4x speed.

• Fixed minimum crew issue for Schooner, Sloop and Brig starts.

• Fixed issue with dismissal of crew members from ship cargo in drydock.

• Fixed issue where trees would sometimes snag and block paths after being hit by cannonballs and falling.

Changes

• Updated colours of Capture Points.

• Player spawn stability has been improved.

• Players should now always spawn into a battle in the same locations.

• Enemy fleets will now auto-join formations with other friendly ships in the area when spawning.

• Defending fleets will sometimes "hide" after spawning.

• Enemy fleets now choose other formations.

• Some changes to the victory conditions for Fleets, Pirate fleets require every ship to be subdued, colonial defence fleets only require their flagship defeated, some larger fleets will have 2 or 3 sub-flagships to defeat.

• Improved Difficulty Settings reliability and defaulting for non-campaign games / tutorials.

• Removed on-screen indicators for Ships.

• Rebalanced some Cannonball Difficulty.

• Added much more prominent trails for Tower shots.

• Decreased the reload time for Towers at higher difficulties.

• Removed some UI scaling from unit cards.

• Some performance related improvements in RTS mode.

• Buffed the Grenadier damage.

• Nerfed Grape Shot damage - Scales with Ship Combat difficulty.

• Nerfed crew death on Round shot hit chance.

• Some small changes to fleet aggression on the campaign map.

• Changed some compositions for enemy starting fleets.

• Flagships in a Hard campaign will start with some upgrades.

• All ships during an Impossible campaign will start with upgrades.

• Improved targeting logic & performance for ships, towers and soldiers.

• Increased formation separation amount for campaign NPC fleets & fleets spawned by cheats.

• Removed fleet size restrictions (balance) for Hard and Impossible ship combat difficulties.

• Rebalanced some ground combat.

• Setting Ground Combat to Easy will now make your shots hit every time, this scales into Impossible difficulty as you'd expect.

• Cleaned up logging.

• Rebalanced Melee attacks.

• Improved hold position "armour" for soldiers.

• Buffed Musketeers for all factions.

• Sped up reloads for all soldiers except Archers.

Upcoming events

I'll be heading to TwitchCon at the end of the month, Run for The Border during the summer, and Nexus in September.

This coming week we'll be bundling with Corsairs - Battle of the Caribbean to celebrate their launch & I wish them all the best with their awesome looking Pirate game!

Corsairs Battle of the Caribbean

Thank you!

This patch was heavily driven by interacting with you all here in the discussion forums, and on the discord. Thank you to everyone who requested improvements to the game, reported bugs, and provided constructive critique :) Delighted with how things are shaping up and excited for the work in front of me.

Until next time,

John