Greetings, Wielders!

Prepare yourselves for another update, this one comes with a grave-like touch as we return to the eerie Barony of Loth and embrace our inner cultists! As always, this latest version of Songs of Conquest is packed with a little bit of everything. From essential bug fixes and AI behavior updates to a plethora of small tweaks and changes, we've left no tomb unturned. But let's be honest – there's definitely an undead theme lurking in the shadows.

The Barony of Loth travel agency really has their work cut out for them!

Ah, it seems we missed a buried treasure in last week's update – but fear not! The elusive Great Excavation map has been tracked down and added to the roster. It's almost as if it sensed it belonged here all along.

But that's not all – speaking of maps, we've got some exciting additions for all you cartographers out there! We've introduced faction-based wood generators, allowing you to tailor your maps even further to suit your vision.

And for those who prefer a more randomized playstyle, we've got you covered too! We've revamped the two-player Random Map layout for better balance, with more frequent and formidable guards and resource generators to keep you on your toes. Embrace the unpredictability and conquer the unknown!

You never truly know what you’re getting yourself into with a random map, but the menu helps!

In this update, even our AI opponents have been touched by the whispers of the tomb. Their build plans have been improved to create more diverse and strategic opponents. No longer will they construct duplicate small buildings on their first four build sites, and they'll now vary their choices for the first medium-build sites beyond just marketplaces. Plus, they've become adept at reserving sites for future upgrades.

Ah, but there's more to the AI's repertoire! It has learned the art of hunkering down in the face of adversity. When it senses the impending last stand, it will fortify its defenses and stand its ground, determined to give as good as it gets. While this may sometimes still result in defeat, on other occasions, it signals the turning of the tide – offering the AI a chance to recover and launch a counteroffensive!

The AI has started to sense its impending doom! Walls, towers, and a defending Wielder!

The Barony of Loth, steeped in undead legend and good intentions. We've delved deep into it and reworked its campaign, ensuring it integrates with our recent AI improvements. But that's not all – we've crafted both small and grand visual enhancements to all four maps, utilizing both old and new tools to elevate the experience.

Yet, our greatest efforts have been aimed at recalibrating the difficulties, based on our new system to improve this skeleton-powered campaign. Some challenges now stand as formidable tests of skill, while others offer a gentler path for those seeking a more forgiving journey. It's all in service of crafting a richer, more balanced story and experience for you, the intrepid Wielders. And all of this is thanks to the feedback that you, the community have given us, so thank you!

Now that is a man filled with good intentions. And a key figure in the Loth Campaign.

In addition to all these exciting developments, we've been on a bug-hunting spree, making small adjustments to game mechanics and fine-tuning general optimizations. As always, we highly recommend brewing a hot mug of cocoa and settling in with our freshly minted changelog to fully savor all the details of our latest update. Read all about it here.

Can you believe it's been a year since the first version of our third campaign clawed its way out from its shallow grave? Now is the perfect time to revisit the tombs, cities, and mysteries that the Barony of Loth has to offer. Prepare to delve into the depths once more, and uncover the secrets that still lie buried.

Our eye turns now towards eliminating bugs and doing the last bit of play-testing for our last campaign. The dunes of Barya are closing in and we can’t wait to share that last adventure with you. Stay tuned as we will share news on that precious release date soon.
Turn to Conquest Wielders, the Barony of Loth awaits!

/Everyone at Lavapotion

Changelog
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Fixes:

• Respawning in a checkpoint after dying will temporary "save" the gems you collected, but not count towards the save file. This has since been fixed.
  
• The total amount of gems missing / collected in a level is incorrectly displayed in the overworld.
  
• Trying to counter a Grabble-Jaw with a kick can cause damage back to the player sometimes, which has been fixed.
  
• Hitting Jim with an acorn or an apple will make it go in a random direction. This has been changed to match how physics should work.
  
• Enemies can respawn in an "un-grabbable" state if the player manages to hit one off screen. (New to v1.1.4)

Changes:

• Full screen shortcut has been changed to F11 instead of just Backspace.
  
• Removed OpenGL implementation since it's not needed for Steam Overlay.

Changelog 0.9.8.1g


Patch which aims to make the first games easier and rebalance the previous patch which was a bit "brutal". Thank you very much for your feedback!


Bugfixes:
-Fixed a small bug in the calculation of store rarity probabilities

Balancing:
-The rarity rate of appearance of "crises" is now indexed to the difficulty level, it starts lower at level 0, and then increases slightly to reach the original level around level 8, and then increases slightly until level 16.
-The starting rate for "silver" cards in the store increases from 0 to 15%
-Increased rarity rates in the store (+50% for Gold cards, +100% for Platinum cards), which ultimately offers a higher rate than in the original version (before 0.9.8.1f)
-"Léon" now starts with the "Bullying" card which allows a start with authority points for the first crew

Yet again fixed more bugs, it should now properly unlock when you reach the checkpoints, 2,4 and 6, rather than when beating it and reaching 3,5 and 7.

The MMORPG has been live a few times with multiplayer enabled. This time we're not turning it off this time. We go live tonight, tomorrow or very very soon!

The reason to come in and play these early patches is to follow the unfolding storyline of your player, and your crew that you meet along the way.
I've been told by nearly everyone that my Space Pulp Bounty Hunter story lines are better than any scifi they ever heard of. Expect really really really really really exceptional story writing. You can tell I'm really good at writing by how many times I wrote really.

As you come in and play through the story arc, you'll be leveling up, and powering up for future patches.

Once we finish the story arc together and the player gets warp drive to leave The Sol System, then the Grand Space Opera begins!

Starfighter General used to be known as Intergalactic Bounty Hunter. It's an unpublished RPG I played mostly with friends in Jr High and Highschool since 1989. It now has has over 40,000 man hours development and coding. This is not your run of the mill MMORPG. This MMORPG has been in design since 1985 when I heard of Darpa Net in Compute Magazines. Yes, this Starfighter General was one of the earliest MMORPG ever designed. Even more epic, Starfighter General began as a MMORPG before the first MMORPGs ever started their coding! But even more EPIC THAN THAT: Starfighter General will have techs and game play the world's literally never seen. Are you stoked? I'm stoked! I been working on this for over three decades and it's been very very hard to have no community support, but maybe you guys and gals can help me cross the finish line like a champion!





Features of Starfighter General listed by the most ridiculously cool one first:

1) Unlimited multiplayer networking-Yes all 8 billion people could play in one zone, if you had computers with a good enough video card, cpu, and processing ;) Networking is not a bottle neck and Starfighter General Servers will not have to close ever due to nearly free maintenance fees vs 50,000$ a month other companies pay. So your character never getting closed with the game.

2) Ai controlled aliens simulate real people Never before has a game simulated real people with personality, dreams, ambitions, attributes, goals, emotions, history of interaction with player, with voices generated in game for each... Grudge em, make friends, make trading companions, respect mutual treachery of a formidable foe... This system & tech which is intellectually property protected by registered mail which acts as a patent also will allow for real life dolls and action figures to talk with you, joke with you and hold conversations with other dolls and action figures... Read more: https://www.starfightergeneral.com/2023/05/its-not-ai-its-better-the-memento-npc-system/ & https://www.starfightergeneral.com/2023/09/soon-npcs-roleplay-better-than-humans/

3) Live Game Masters coming-Omnipotent to change anything... Good RP sessions kept for a comic book online, possible anime series... Imagine your own character, doing things in an anime movie, that YOU DID!

4) 100-10,000x things rendered with new multicore tech

5) Designed for the late game... The grind for power never ends, yet its fun so you don't focus on the grind because of so many things to do!

6) Easter Eggs, find em, hide em someplace and the longer they stay hidden the more reward you get and they get for finding em

7) PVP bounty system-Someone blows you up, they pay you back if apprehended as their bounty

8) System Control-Play like a warlord to get power

9) Soft perma death makes it so you can have huge fleets and lose them. When you blow up, you get a PINBALL screen where you get rewards you'd never get in game, depending how well you played. When you're done, you can start from a better position depending on loot/stats/etc you got. It's fun to blow up! It's fun to rise and fall for it allows for a rush of power gain faster than a normal MMORPG! Lets gooooo!

If you want this game to happen faster, buy some virtual goods as a tip even if you don't need em. The big players in AAA will use and abuse you and they don't need the money. Indies really do develop your favorite games faster when they have enough money to buy food and water. So look at the virtual goods store as a crowd sourcing, a tip jar, a way of pushing the gaming community to a better place.


You can help me achieve the vision faster by encouraging my development with purchase of virtual goods. While most people live for money, selfishness and worldly possessions, I live to make and play video games for the spirit of Love of humanity. I live in a house without water and I'll be evicted soon unless I can get some help from the community. Even even just a little can make this game develop months or years sooner than it would.

Thank you,
Jim

PS: Enjoy the Ascended mastery video: https://rumble.com/v4n45nn-starfighter-general-patch-soon-ascended-mastery.html?mref=sbycb&mc=11sm2

Greetings adventurers!

We have another content update for the game. This time we're finally bringing trainers into Thornhill city as well, and they'll have plenty of new abilities and skill improvements to sell. This update also adds two new quests into Thornhill city, alongside other smaller features, improvements and bugfixes. More details below!

This will be the last Early Access content update for some time, as we're working on sweeping changes to transition the game out of its Early Access state. We'll still be delivering bugfixes and otherwise update on our progress through blog posts.




Within the Academy of Masters you'll find trainers for all the skill disciplines, who may expand your powers and abilities now all the way to level 50. The trainers will also ultimately provide crafting stations as furniture to be obtainable for player homes, as well as special tool racks.



The advanced combat skill trainers provide a number of abilities to be unlocked, such as leaping at your opponents or firing exploding arrows at them, to make combat a little bit more active and to give further tools against challenging boss opponents.



There are more utilitarian abilities to unlock as well, for instance you're now able to turn logs into river canoes near bodies of water to make traveling around the map more convenient.







The Thornhill Academy has a lot stricter standards of admission than Haywind College! Not just anyone can be let in, you know. You'll have to impress the instructors and the headmaster in a new quest "Tribulations of Higher Education", which you can start by talking to the academy's Headmaster Trevelyan.

Within the quest you'll gain access to a sheltered area accessed within Thornhill city, which will contain all the crafting stations within a single location. It serves much the same purpose as the crafting guild in Haywind, adding an easy go-to alternative for when you need to access one of those workbenches.









The Curator of Thornhill's Preservation society has a new task to further open up Thornhill's catacomb area. It should no longer cause confusion regarding to what extent that dungeon is accessible.

In theme with the Curator's previous quest, completing his task will unlock additional new furniture to decorate your homes with.







Our previous update on the swamp smuggler's village left the location looking very unpolished. To be fair, it's not the only one of its kind in the game as of currently, but we took the opportunity to give the building interiors appropriate decoration and lighting.

Additionally the location is now packed with miscellaneous, highly interactive npcs, which should breathe some new life to the place when traveling through.


We're now updating the game with a new, completely overhauled pathfinder. From the beginning the absolute most commonly occurring bug report we keep receiving is the player character becoming stuck somewhere. The new pathfinder ought to resolve the majority of these issues, though ironically it may also have introduced some new ones.

If you encounter getting stuck somewhere, somehow, please do keep reporting on these. We'll do our best now to regularly iron out any remaining wrinkles regarding this issue.


We're aware of the stuttering issues in the game and continue looking into solutions to address the fundamental causes. We've mentioned potentially reworking a lot of the houses before, which in their current state are causing problems especially in/near the large cities.

For now, we've brought a few additional settings into the game that should hopefully help alleviate the issue if you're running into unbearable stuttering:

• Disable Background Characters - hides "useless" characters that cannot fight or be interacted with, should improve performance in crowded areas like cities, at the cost of making them look more empty. (At the moment selecting this also removes most background conversations between random npcs...)
  
• Reduce Movement Quality - improves performance and stutters, at the cost of less smooth character movement
  
• Lower Characters Load Speed - improves performance by limiting the rate at which characters are loaded, but might result in more characters visually 'popping' into view

• The large pillars in the main quest's final boss fight now successfully block the spinning spell that slowly follows the player
  
• Screen sometimes turning black and game freezing during boat travel
  
• Interacting with Horsy the pack mule sometimes resulting in multiple Horsys
  
• Arakite hammer can now be used for refining ore
  
• Fixed three trainer spells - Deadly Strikes, Flight of Arrows and Meditation - to have cooldowns and mana costs, which they previously did not have.
  
• Adjusted all hostile npc stats and loot within thornhill catacombs
  
• Fixed broken combat stats on some trolls and adjusted all trolls stats, for instance to include hp regeneration.
  
• Added trader icon and right-click trade option to Agathe in swamp village after her quest is complete, which was previously missing.

At this stage we're pausing larger updates, as we're focused now on delivering some sweeping changes, sorting out all clearly unfinished things and trying to polish out as much jank as possible, so as to haul the game out of Early Access. Before then, we'll still deliver small updates in the form of bug fixing where needed. We'll also do our best to write dev blogs to showcase our progress and what will be coming in the "release" update of the game.

Thank you all for the continued support, feedback and for playing the game as much as some of you already have - thank you, and happy gaming!

Regards,
Pura

Fixed a bug that caused Winter Lake- level to glitch out on some players.

Captains!

As you might be aware Whiskey is arriving to the game in patch 13.3 as the final reward of the upcoming dockyard. However, you will have an amazing opportunity to command the mighty ship on the first day of the update as we're inviting you to share with us - why should the Wisconsin become part of your fleet? Impress us with your creativity, and the most compelling argument will see the Wisconsin added to their port!

1. Submit a detailed explanation in the comments to this topic on why the Wisconsin should join your fleet.
   
2. The author of the single most persuasive submission will be awarded the Wisconsin in their port!

"Dear Admiralty,
I believe the Wisconsin should join my fleet because......... ."
Nickname/Server.

• Post your submissions in the comments to this topic.
  
• Only one post per person will be considered.
  
• Submissions must be in English.
  
• The Wisconsin must be the ship you’re advocating for in your submission.
  
• Your submission should be articulate, compelling, and respectful.
  
• End time of the event: 10th of April 12:00 UTC.
  
• The winner will be announced on the day of the event's conclusion.
  
• By participating in this event, you agree to its terms and consent to the publication of your submission.

Embark on this challenge, Captains, and let us know why the Wisconsin deserves a place in your fleet!

Good luck!

• twistfish 

Thank you to everyone who took part, we really appreciate your letters! 

🎉

With a release date set for April 25, I am already preparing a delicious cake! 🍰



Finally, the day has come! With the WHYDF final build in Valve's review phase, I can safely say that the game is finally releasing! How long was it? Around 6-7 months? Hehe, it was incredibly fun to work on this game. For me, it is a huge achievement since it is my first game I have fully programmed from scratch. I'm really curious how it will do upon its release.



However, if you have read some of my previous updates, you may have some "outdated" ideas about the game's contents, and I feel like I have to be transparent. In a previous update, I mentioned that there would be a final location - the church. However, after some planning and game design changes, I have decided to replace that location with something different to create a more interesting and exciting ending. Don't panic, although there won't be the chapel for you to explore, you'll get to investigate a different location, smaller but packed with all sorts of interesting stuff to discover! What else can I say? I am beyond excited, and I am grateful for everyone who has joined me and has added the game to their wishlist! With a release date set for April 25, I am already preparing a delicious cake! 🍰



Are you excited for the upcoming release? 🎮

Check out the newest screenshots on the Steam page; they are awesome! 📸