May 3, 2019

Precipice - Kodiak

Hey everyone!

We wanted to share what we've been working on in an update that will be coming later tomorrow.

First, thank you so much for your support and constructive feedback. We know this game can't be all things to all people, but we think we're steering it in a positive direction and we hope you like the changes that are coming.

We've been working with a few players still experiencing connectivity issues with debug builds of the game to help isolate where the issues are occurring. We're ruled out a lot and it's clear that in many of these cases, when the connection fails, it fails after joining the Steam lobby. We are investigating whether there is something going on in our code that affects the connection in a minority of networks, or if there exists a bug in the game's engine that again only affects certain networks. In many cases, however, resolutions could be found on the network side. We will continue to do all we can.

Mechanically, we are changing things so that escalating a situation past a given threshold will have a guaranteed cost in country loyalty. While these costs are always lesser than the cost of backing down from an escalation, we hope this will give players pause as to whether an issue that is caught is truly important enough to dig one's heels in on. This will likely change player strategies significantly.

Also, we agree it's kind of weird to face a 6-army resistance in Greenland. In the new update, the randomness of local army strengths has been softened significantly. Local army strengths will be calculated as a range between two reasonable figures based on historical data.

And most importantly, the AI is getting a major behavioral update that is going to push us into the weekend. We've heard a lot of your feedback about the AI, and we'll be ensuring that the cost of escalating a challenge is also built into the new AI decision-matrix.

There will also be many bugfixes and quality of life improvements coming tomorrow.

Again, thank you for your patience and for being a supportive fanbase.

May 3, 2019

Early Access Update (v0.9.0)

Drafting Tales - istotex

Changes:

Visual improvements on the Write, Character, Work Status and Task progress dialogs
When working on Freelance Jobs you will now receive a warning message a few days before the deadline
When starting a new game the "Write" button will be initially disabled, until you get at least 1 additional Effort Slot
Books awarding Effort Points now have different textures than Topic books
Enabled tooltips for some icons (Money, XP, Fans, Inspiration)
The "Query" button has been renamed to "Publish"
Market Reports in the mail-order catalogue will display the year during which they are valid
The game should now load considerably faster on older computers

This update should not break old saves, however if you run into issues you should try starting a new game.

May 3, 2019

Public BETA V1. Naval Warfare & More!

Holdfast: Nations At War - AGS | Refleax

Prepare to set sail once more as the relatively sizable naval update has entered its BETA phase! We need all hands on deck as the new game-play additions will require plenty of testing to make sure everything is in order before the update sees a full release.

Have a read at our latest blog post for a brief look at what’s to come.

What To Expect? A Brief Rundown

Well, where to start? When we said that the update is relatively sizable, it is indeed relatively sizable.

Starting from the largest of additions, the 50-Gun Frigate based on the ‘La Proserpine’ is truly a sight to behold! She packs enough arsenal to make quick work of other vessels pending that its crew is sufficient to the task. Rocketboats will also come in especially handy during the bombardment of coastal fortifications. Work your way through the enemies’ defences and create a breach before the landing parties do their deed.

Speaking of coastal fortifications, the Coastal Siege game mode will also be making a comeback! We have done extensive development to ensure smoother server performance. Prior to this update, servers on both the Coastal Siege and Naval Battlefield game modes idled at a 100% CPU usage due to several inefficiencies with how a third-party plugin functioned.

Now that this is over and done with, monthly costs for renting a coastal or naval server can be reduced by providers to almost match that of servers hosting army-based game modes. We do certainly hope to see crews forming up and more events taking place on this front.

It’s going to be quite the task to consolidate all that was done into one ‘brief’ summary. Row-able rowboats, completely redesigned the Naval Battlefield game mode so it functions according to a score-based mechanic, a new interface detailing the ship’s current statuses, designated rowboat spawns ensuring that players always find an available spawn point to join the round irrespective if a particular ship has been sunk, players are now rewarded with personal score for contributing towards the primary objective of sinking enemy ships and a whole lot more.

If you’d stick with us for a while longer, we’d like to let you know of other game-play oriented features present in this BETA besides all the naval and coastal goodness. Roleplay sits quietly in the current of a game like this and seeing the popularity and daily occurrence of community-hosted events, more functionality in support of this would indeed make for a great addition.

Providing solid groundwork for various roleplay scenarios to occur, hosts can now configure limits for classes, define the allowed spawn-able classes per spawn point and the equipment they spawn with, spawn props on a pre-defined location per map rotation, allow players to equip weapons from racks or even replenish ammunition and the list continues. Guides detailing how hosts can make use of this new functionality will be provided for.

Be sure to check out our updated roadmap if you’re interested in knowing more about our plans for both the naval and coastal scenarios. A new coastal siege map currently in the works is planned for release with the same update.

Holdfast NaW - Development Roadmap

Participate In The BETA!

Would you like to have a go at what’s to come? Join us in the BETA! Hop in on our Community Discord to do so. You'll find all the details on the #announcements channel. It’s a great chance for you to provide us with feedback before the update sees a full release and help us make sure that everything is working as intended while you’re at it.

Everything present in this BETA is still a work in progress and bugs are to be expected.

https://discordapp.com/invite/holdfastgame

Once again, thank you for your support and until next time, may good health be yours.

We're working on the next update.

- Anvil Game Studios

May 3, 2019

20XX 1.40.0 Test Notes - May 3, 2019

20XX - batterystaplegames

Hello! Today's 1.40.0 Test patch introduces a few much-requested features, fixes a handful of bugs, and introduces Revenant versions of Hawk and Draco. It also adds fully translated Datalore for German! We've got more to do, but that's all we've got time for this week.

ICYMI, we're still collecting feature requests as we prepare to move full-time to other projects here.

We've also seen some discussion lately about character balance, so I've opened up a thread to chat about that, too - hop in.

This test patch will likely be updated a few times with additional work before it goes live. Thanks for playing!

--

CHANGES:

Hawk and Draco now have Revenant models of their characters. The art for these may or may not be final - at present, they're recolors.
When Nina hits a Boss with 2-3 shots in a row, the attacks after the first now do more damage (1.0x/0.8x/0.8x, up from 1.0x/0.5x/0.5x). This means that a base 3-hit combo from Nina now deals 10+8+8 = 26, up from 10+5+5 = 20. (This may be 0.1x too far. We'll see!) This change also applies to Draco's projectile combos.
Nina's (and Draco's projectile) shot-refresh timer (the time after which a shot no longer counts as "on screen" for "can I shoot again?" checks upped to 0.75s (from 0.5s).
World Slug removed. The world now moves at an appropriate pace.
Added Auto-charge in Advanced Options. We know this one's contentious, but we've (finally) decided to add it - folks who play the game a lot report hand pain as a limiting factor in their time spent playing 20XX - and we're trying it out. As a note: while this is on test, the code for this is not pretty, and I'm sure there are bugs.
Death Lotus will now ping his next emerge location a bit in advance.
Steam users J.Clockson_YT and xankriegor have translated the game's detailed enemy & item Datalore into German! (So it's now available in German.) Some of the descriptions run over the text box size. Turns out German uses a lot of characters.
In Endless play, 20XX will now forget what items it's generated every ten levels as long as the endgame gauntlet hasn't begun. This means Once Per Run items will spawn again - repeated pickups won't do anything.
Rebeginners past the third available unit will no longer display or factor into the Repro chain.

FIXES:

Fixed what I'm hoping is the primary cause of co-op play Endless run crashes.
Implemented a potential fix for the "vaulting" issue some players have noticed.
Fixed an issue that could cause enemies to rarely appear out of nowhere (they were being reset to their spawn points at really inopportune times). This usually happened with Agnisort Bzzombs (bees), but was possible elsewhere. This may also take out the rare "invisible enemy" bug where you collide with an enemy hitbox that you can't see or shoot.
Fixed an issue where black-square Prototypes could appear late in Endless runs.
Fixed an issue where Save & Quit resulted in catastrophic Nut Loss.
Fixed an issue where Intensifier wasn't boosting Vika's charged shot.
Fixed Murderdrone doing 8 damage (should be 10) - did I change this on purpose?
Entropy Lock no longer shows up in Boss Rush.
Fixed an issue where the Get Equipped & Provoke achievements would fail to trigger for the client in online co-op.
Fixed an issue where Meganut could be taken into Challenges (if it spawned in HQ as a next-run item).
If the game window loses focus while it's unable to pause (say, because you're looking at a boss intro), it'll pause as soon as it can (instead of not pausing).