Plan for the Rest of the Week

While MM is away I’ve been faced with a bit of a decision - do I work on CTF and delay the release of the current stuff further, or shelve it and try to get a patch out for TTH?
I’ve decided to go for the latter so that the archer changes can be trialled, the performance optimisations can be measured in practice and the larger map and angelscript issues (if there are any) can be identified.
To recap, the major changes that’ll be patched in are:
Archer changes:

• Archer has no knife
• Archer has grapple hook on right mouse button instead
• Archer can overcharge his bow to shoot 3 arrows in quick succession. Holding the overcharge too long
• Archer spawns with 30 arrows in almost all cases
• Archer arrows have implicit knockback (eg even on boats, shielding knights, siege machines)
• Archer arrows stun actors they hit if those actors are forced against a surface and the arrow is at full speed (allows combo shots if you manage to jump over a knight and full-speed shoot it downwards)

Large Engine Changes

• Angelscript version increase to 2.27.1 - might make some old scripts not work as intended or break some mods, check the console for errors and the behaviour of anything, especially anything using angelscript classes. This was actually quite a pain to do, it broke the linux build for a while.
• Tilemap underlying structure changed quite a lot - this one will only really matter to modders, it should be quite a bit faster CPU-wise though. Mods working with setting up tiles will need to pay attention to API changes.

General Changes

• Halls have units in them - this hasn’t been properly tested yet and will need some work, but the basic idea is that a hall will become easier to take for a time if people are spawning out of it faster than tickets regen.
• Halls drown when they have 2 or more layers of water in them - this state can be reversed with sponges. Drowned halls are for all intents and purposes the same as a neutral hall but you cant convert them until they are cleared.
• You can buy an extra migrant at a hall for 100 gold! The migrant is bound to the hall, not the team, so you can still take the enemy stronghold with 10 military supplies factories :^)
• Builders and archers start with the basics they need to survive and do good - 30 wood for ladders or blocking a door in the builder’s case, 30 arrows in the archer’s case.
• The starter has been cleaned up a little, the layout improved, twitter feed fixed, and it has manual resolution entry for those with non-standard resolution screens like on netbooks.
• Builders get materials when breaking solid constructed tiles. Short but sweet, makes forward building a little more feasible, and also less of a pain in the rear to “clean up” team constructions that honestly suck.
• Dinghies do no damage. “Sorry” to those that have been abusing this. Much sorrier for not patching it sooner :^)
• Servers are now split into competitive vs cooperative - we’ll make this a little more mod friendly asap but basically the modes are split based on how much fighting other people you’ll do.
• Save the Princess mode is now several separate levels, using the new “Challenge” Framework, which will be finalised soon to allow for campaigns to be built for cooperative servers.

That’s it, off the top of my head. so, quite a lot of changes, which is why I want to get it out before they keep piling up and another week goes by with you guys stuck with old bugs.
Feel free to give your thoughts in the thread, some of these are somewhat debatable and most of the game flow related ones have easy to tweak variables in the scripts for those that want to revert them - the archer knife being a notable exception to that rule.
More info coming soon, it’ll mostly just be cleaning and testing until friday though!
Max/Geti

Original DevBlog post.

 

FYI, this is a typo, the grapple is used on RMB.

 

OCD ;-;
//Fixed. ~fbb


Doesnt that make archers a little overpowered?

 

OH YES, dinghys are finally being nerfed. i cant even count how many times some guy just dropped one on my head and said trololololol quickly afterwords x.x

 

Why ? :( WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY

 

I kinda think it should....i mean...if you pick up a freaking boat and throw it at someone, its going to hurt.
Perhaps, make it easier to push around, put need 2+people to pick it up? that way it could be like a Dinghie battering ram....
or have a battering ram upgrade?

 

R.I.P knights. And what about getting arrows from trees we will do it with grapple hook? :D

 

Hmm, well heres what i propose, we should at first see how this works out with the dinghys not doing and damage. I know people are going to complain simply because they cant one hit kill every player on the field any more with their ridiculously overpowered dinghy. However dropping a dinghy off of a roof makes sense to kill someone below. I really am dead set against trollers just dinghy rushing and dropping dinghys one inch above your head for an instakill. So yea thats what i propose, only dinghys dropped from high above should do any damage at all. About the legolas shot, i feel it would be great if the arrows dont stun enemies as that would be op to just instakill a shielding knight. grapling hook seems like it will be good for getting out of situations quickly. I am sure that its already been thought of but just saying it would be bad for the legolas shot to do stuns.

 

you start with 30 now :/ you can get more with mil supply factories

We shouldn't put realism over balance, if I stabbed you with a sword you wouldn't keep jumping around and attacking me, you would be dead or pretty close to it. Dinghy's were an OP troll weapon and I'm glad they finally decided to nerf them

 

Overcharge takes about 3 seconds, via Geti, this is where you try to prevent them from firing.
[it would make a great replacement for the mounted bow]

Stuns, let me tell you how they were supposed to work, they were supposed to stun on a full shot, and mini on half shot, but all in all, they never happened, except one-tenth the time on a mounted bow, but you know what happened there.
[Anyways, this makes an archer a more valid defender, and be able to actually hold ground against a god damn knight, but this mains there is more value to straddling a knight than just simply attempting to get obliterated at a slightly slower rate as they kerfuffle with hit detection]

Anyways, it's is pretty neat that the archer is now a more dignified ranged/speedster aggressor, and come off as a support class from their special ammo, and otherwise status effects [knock back/stun].

As for Halls, finally Geti, but I'm still curious about the mess with Migrant population in War, back in the day. [As far as I can toss it, Migrants were the Tickets]

 

Coins are better. Please change this to coins. Coins need to come back.

 

Now that I think about it, "Halls can Drown" sounds more like "Migrants use Water Soluble Dye"

 

Finally ,that thing is gone!

 

In line with what GreenRock said, I too think coins should come back though I don't think they would work well with TTH. I would think you would need to change quite a few things in TTH to accommodate coins.
I suggest coins be added to CTF and more gold deposits added to TTH maps.

 

There is no point in adding coins , gold does all the thing.
How people will get coins? classic way or you might say sell resources, well it will create to many disbalances + as I can see there are tones a lot more important things to do and tones of bugs to fix.

 

Thanks for adding my suggestion in! Keep up the good work!

 

Coins are still the best idea that Classic brought, it gives this feel of being rewarded since you can go and buy new shiny toys to play with and if you are not careful you will lose them, the only thing that should not be in beta is being able to farm coins through mining or cutting wood, it needs to be just purely combat oriented and for capturing the hall so team gets coins and perhaps coins for successful hall defence.

 

Then what about builders? they love shiny thins as well , but they cant fight, only build