What’s this unrest I hear below deck? You want to know more about Cross Blitz? Right then, come aboard and hold on tight!
First thing you rookies need to know: Cross Blitz is an RPG card-battler so better prepare yourself for:
A story-driven adventure with memorable crewmates
Intense card dueling that’ll test your wits
You’re still here? Your curiosity is commendable for a newbie. I’ll let you in on some more secrets:
THE SETTING
Your adventures will take place on Crossdawn Isle.
“Where’s that?” you say?! Have you been living under a rock?!
Crossdawn Isle! The land where settlers from all over the world come to seek their fortune and begin anew? The magical island of the Scaleskins, Sprout Elves, Mushfellows, and the Riverclan?
Arrrrrr, I don’t have the time to teach you about basic geography right now! Just know that this island attracts all kinds of folk searching for their fortune.
Surely you must have at least heard of the mighty pirate Redcroft?... I can’t believe it, you truly are as ignorant as a barnacle!
Listen here: Redcroft is the son of the legendary pirate Redbeard! He’s one of the last honorable pirates to abide by the Red Code, meaning he never loots from the less fortunate.
You may hear rumors of his untimely death but I wouldn’t trust them if I were you, he’s not one to disappear without a fight!
COMBAT
Speaking of fighting… You empty-headed sea whelp must not know a thing about battling with cards, I imagine. Sigh.
Alright, c’mere and listen closely. Every dispute on Crossdawn Isle can be resolved with a test of strength and wit! So you better learn about building card decks and using them strategically!
The key to building a powerful deck is to figure out the right combination of cards to match your preferred fighting style. Are you more of a heads-on fighter? Do you prefer to sabotage and lay traps?
Or are you more inclined to survive as long as you can with strong defenses? Whatever deck you build, don’t forget you can swap decks at any time to match the enemy you’re facing!
Now building a strong deck is not enough to win a fight. You gotta know how to use your cards strategically! Lady luck may have a hand in picking which cards you’ll draw, but only you can decide how to play them!
Will you use a card to wipe out your enemy’s minions, at the cost of your own? Will you place a minion that lowers the cost of another card? Or one that hurls a cannonball at your enemy? Plan your moves wisely and anticipate the enemy’s actions for the best results!
I’ll let you in on more advanced fighting techniques later. You might need them if you’re ever going to adventure into the Tusk Tales, a roguelite mode for the strongest adventurers!
EXPLORATION
Don’t neglect a key part of adventuring: exploration!
There are treasures to claim and people to meet! Some can help you in many ways… For instance: I hear about a card merchant that offers the best deals on some useful cards, a Scaleskin rumored to deal in powerful artifacts, and a Mawpaw that can forge new cards for you, provided you have the materials!
You’re itching to get adventuring now, aren’t you? Sadly the winds make it difficult to sail to Crossdawn Isle right away. But rejoice, I hear that if you wishlist Cross Blitz you’ll be the first to know when we can depart for Crossdawn Isle!
Greetings everyone! EU community team member Ryagi here, today we bring you another Mod Spotlight.
Since our last mod spotlight we've had a few folks ask us to bring our previously covered mods to steam, and so today we can begin with that. We plan to post these retrospective spotlights until we're all caught up to our "live" spotlights. In addition, we'll continue to post up to date spotlights here when they are out too.
Please note this spotlights original posting was on the 17th of March 2023 and can be found on our forums here. If you've already read that spotlight, there is nothing new here. If this is the first you're seeing it, enjoy!
--------
Hello and welcome to our first-ever EU4 mod spotlight!
We consider mods and their communities a core pillar of our EUIV ecosystem, to showcase some of the amazing creations you the community have fostered we want to make this a semi-regular series giving modders a chance to show off their work.
For our pioneer feature, we’ll be looking at Europa Expanded. Without further ado, we'll let Stiopa and Lord Varangian introduce themselves and their work on EE.
--------
Hello Europa Universalis Enthusiasts!
We are the Europa Expanded team and since 2018 we’ve been working on expanding your Europa Universalis Experience. With years of content design experience, in our mod, we strive to create a player-made update for each subsequent area that we work on. Our goal is to enrich your gameplay while also keeping the experience familiar to what you are already used to. It is natural then, that some of our scripts have even made it into vanilla.
In this post, we will present just a glimpse of what our mod has to offer and what direction we are heading in. So, to give you an idea of what our mod is about, let us look closer into what our latest update has brought forth.
One of our latest major updates, The Caliphate, added over a thousand unique missions for 30+ nations, giving much love to the entire Muslim world, which has not seen any updates since Cradle of Civilization in 2017.
To present our mission trees would take a while, so here’s a roster containing just a few of the newer ones for your viewing pleasure:
Mamluks
[expand type = details] [/expand]
Granada
[expand type = details] [/expand]
Timurids
[expand type = details] [/expand]
Mughals
[expand type = details] [/expand]
Arabia
[expand type = details] [/expand]
Austria
[expand type = details] [/expand]
Malaya
[expand type = details] [/expand]
Rûm
[expand type = details] [/expand]
Our mission trees are not just any mission trees, for along with them, we are also making innovations in content creation, introducing Incident Mission Trees, Subject-Oriented Mission Trees, Preview System for Branching Missions.
And then there are the countless mechanics in the mod….We have made dozens upon dozens of mechanics for the mod. All of them seek to bring flavour to regions, nations, and even dynasties. Our latest and more glamorous additions are the:
Abbasid Caliphate Mechanic
The Abbasid caliphate mechanic allows you to serve as the puppet master of the Abbasid Caliph, exerting his influence over the Muslim World for your own gain, later being able to claim the Caliphate for yourself.
Timurid Legitimacy
a measure of how legitimate is your Timurid dynasty. Your key to gaining support for founding a new nation.
Spoils of War
The conquest frenzy of the Timurid Hordes. The more you win, conquer and raze, the more buffs you'll get. But inactivity will over time render it useless.
Trade Outposts:
Expanding your trade empire through diplomacy. Not through the sword, but through the pen. It has been used for several nations, from Hormuz, the Hansa, Mughals and it will only find more uses in the future.
That is not to say the rest of the mechanics are lacking. Japan itself has the Onin War mechanic, the struggle between the Hosokawa and Yamana clan, in which you can choose a side to support similarly to the League War. And lastly, the prestigious Habsburg dynasty has access to the Habsburg Glory mechanic, allowing you to either spread your dynasty, or to establish loyal allies.
You’d be mistaken if you thought that missions and mechanics is all that we do - our commitments lie far beyond that. We also add hundreds of new events, dozens of decisions and so on Below is a selection of other components that we touch upon, including, but not limited to:
Government Reforms. While we have always had some commitment to adding new government reforms, we have recently decided to expand our horizons and are planning to add an increasing amount of government reforms.
We’re also adding new estates. 1.12 “The Caliphate” itself has added two new Estates, the Berber Tribes for Maghrebi nations, and the Turkic Tribes for Aq and Qara Qoyunlu. We also have some older estates and are itching to add more of them, as we go on.
Our focus doesn’t lie just in adding more estates. We are also interested in adding more variety in privileges for the default estates. Here’s but a small selection of new estate privileges from our latest patch. We are also committed to updating old content. In “The Caliphate”, we have gone through most of muslim events, making the options more balanced, trying to add more choice to your average event and making mysticism options more viable.
But flavour isn't necessarily all full of sunshine. There's plenty of pitfalls and disasters that you may found yourself spiralling towards. Whether it be you, or the AI, you will certainly feel the impact of the disasters showcased below.
We do, of course, add much more than that, but I’d like to keep the rest as a mystery for the people that do choose to explore this mod themselves, which I highly encourage to do so. ;)
And for the people who are wishing to play the mod, here's a map of all the nations we've touched as of now, to a greater or lesser degree:
Starting Nations
Endgame formables
Cultural Formables
We also have bookmarks designed specifically to serve as a guide for finding flavorful tags, so make clever use of those!
If you are interested in following our work more closely, we post weekly Developer Diaries on Stiopa's Reddit Account. Currently, the developer diaries stopped, but they will resume as soon as we are ready to showcase 1.13.
If you want to experience the mod second-hand, check out the following videos:
Fixed a bug where player names were missing in the player list for the social hub
Potentially fixed an issue where lobbies disappeared quickly from crime.net
Added compensation for all players who've lost their items & progress on side jobs from launching the previous update. These players will be rewarded with all items from the event side jobs, even if they had only unlocked one. These must be claimed from the side jobs menu again.
Fixed an issue where side jobs were reset upon launching the previous update.
Fixed an issue where multi-day heists showed the wrong title in the social hub when a player was invited
Fixed an issue where full servers would remain visible on crime.net
Updates may be incompatible with the mods you may have installed. Even seemingly unrelated mods may cause unexpected issues. If you are experiencing any problems with the game; try removing any mods you may have installed and try again.
If you are having issues with an unmodded game you can try to verify the integrity of the game files. In the Steam library; right-click on PAYDAY 2. Select "Properties" from the menu. Under the tab "LOCAL FILES" select "VERIFY INTEGRITY OF GAME FILES...". The process may take some time to finish.
While the work on the new update is still in progress, we decided to have some fun and share more funny moments related to the development of the game. You really welcomed our previous post and this is the second part — unlike our game, which IS NOT A SEQUEL TO REDEMPTION, as we're never tired of reminding everyone :) There will be lots of silly memes and adorable cats, just as promised in the title.
CATS & MEMES
If you've already played The Way, you know how much Kleta appreciates good beer. That's why our art director decided to give him a special gift in the form of an exclusive T-shirt. 100% Berkanan cotton.
Kleta obviously has never met Dr. Livsay. But we've watched "Treasure Island" carefully, so we're warning you:
Meanwhile, things were happening on the battle arenas. The death of a comrade made one of the warriors so angry that he went berserk.
And in Wodan, an enraged mother has come to the battlefield to find out who bullied her little boy.
Meanwhile, the archer still couldn't calm down...
Of course, we hoped for the best and followed the golden rule...
But Eik got tired of that nonsense and decided to leave with the only person he considered worthy:
And the berserk archer had already managed to inspire other fighters...
It went on for so long that birds started building nests on the visual effects:
Archer wasn't paying attention, though. He was busy working hard to hit Guinness Book of Records as a perfect ''glass canon''.
In the end, Unity gave up and decided to put an end to it by displaying a grim version of the main menu. It was us, of course, who added the guy with the sand. To achieve a more dramatic effect.
The art director wasn't happy about that, so he decided to add some colors to the game... Can you help Finn find his way?
Yes, we are not into cats and memes only, we are also in love with animation. That's why we refer to the girl in charge of QA as Lady Bug, the protagonist from "Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug & Cat Noir" series.
Since in our region the cartoon is known as "Ladybug and Super Cat," we quickly turned it into "Lady Bug and Super Code." Although our programmers have repeatedly hinted to us that the code is actually с#@p :( Which is probably why they have to resort to unconventional methods to keep everything from falling apart.
Sometimes we had to resolve serious conflicts between characters. Chief Hargell refused to turn to the advisor when he found out that he was spending too much time with the protagonist.
Meanwhile, the protagonist was busy with a very important task — battling a worthy opponent.
Fortunately, no matter what problems we faced, our pets always supported us!
As you can see, we still don't have any dogs, but we do have a parrot enthusiast. We also tried to train MidJourney, and here's what it came up with for the queries 'Ash of Gods', 'Ash of Gods: The Way', and 'Ash of Gods: Redemption':
And we were also thinking about how much emojis say about a person. We made a VERY IMPORTANT research (after all, who needs work?) and gathered the necessary statistics. However, we'll leave the conclusions up to you:
That's all for now. We hope you enjoyed our silly memes.
As for us, we're getting back to work on the update. We really wanted to release it in the middle of the month, but most likely it will become available on June, 29th — coinciding with the start of the Summer Sale — as there have been more changes than we initially planned. Well, you know how it goes:
Nonetheless, we are working hard and really want to thank each and every one of you for your invaluable support, for sharing your thoughts and giving feedback. Thanks to you, the game has significantly improved since the beginning of the development — it now has a story and dialogues, mechanics that make the game more enjoyable, and many other small yet significant enhancements.
Make sure to join our Discord if you want to discuss something or simply chat with the developers. We would also greatly appreciate your support in the form of a review on Steam — it will help us reach new players and uplift the spirits of the team.
・In magistrate's territory, "Hereditary" has been added to inherit the territory even if generations change. ・Some commands such as function buttons and magistrate's territory buttons have simple animations that slide windows. ・Add a little warlord ・Other small additions and corrections
UPDATE (22/06/2023): We unfortunately had to delay the update due to a last-minute issue our QA team discovered today. After a lot of guilt-filled internal debates, we decided that we'd rather work a few more days on the build than to risk it for the biscuit.
The fix doesn't seem to be deterministic, though currently it looks like we can get to the bottom of it in 1 week, 2 weeks tops. I'll write up a new Steam news as soon as I know more.
Sorry guys and gals. :( Cheers, A Sad Dan
--- ORIGINAL NEWS ---
We finally have a date for the upcoming PvP/mod support update: June 22!
We're nearing the end of our pre-RC tests, meaning we'll be able to make an RC (release candidate) build early next week. We still have a few hoops to go through, but so far so good!
Early headsup though, don't expect a top of the line modkit at first - since it's a new area for us, and since we're hacking it into a game that didn't have modding planned at the beginning, we're moving slowly with this one, which means that only PvP maps and basic single player/Co-op missions will be moddable. Speaking of which, PvP is finally coming, we can't wait to get our arses kicked by y'all!
That said, modding will happen in Unreal Engine and through mod.io, so grab your wildest map ideas and get ready to mod the sh*t out of our beloved Zero Cal!
Cheers, - XREAL Games Team
P.S: the update will contain many many fixes and improvements as always, mostly based on y'all's feedback. Much love! <3