Version 1.4.9 Release Notes

[Keyvias]

New contents:

Alliance Beta (For Open Period)

Special Ability System

Special Abilities (official name TBD) are new class specific unlockables designed to give each class more strategic options and create impactful gameplay moments.  Normally unlocked via playing Alliance matches as each class, we’ve unlocked all of them for your perusal.  Like the ultimates in other games, careful strategic planning and usage of these abilities can dramatically change the tide of battle.  Emit an electrical blast to disrupt enemy components as an Engineer, trigger ship mechanisms to speed reload all the weapons with larger clips as a Gunner, unlock the engine’s true power for a devastating forward ram as a Pilot, and many more.
If you go to the Character Loadout screen, you’ll find a new ability slot for every class. Once you equip one, you can use it in match like you would use other class specific skills with the 5 key.  The ability has long cooldowns, so use it wisely!


The Stormbreaker

The Arashi faction is not in the game yet, and we have our own ideas of what changes need to be made for the next iteration of this ship, but we’d love to hear your feedback as we embark on the next iteration.  The Stormbreaker’s engines, scavenged and retrofitted from larger ships, provides extreme acceleration that’s perfect for skirting enemies.  The asymmetric design speaks to Arashi’s make-it-work philosophy and finding gems in the rough.


Infiltration

The ship in the first match lobby slot is the VIP.  The VIP must survive at all costs and is the only one who can infiltrate enemy refineries that are scattered through the map.  Infiltrate each refinery by flying near it while teammates defend the infiltration process.  After all refineries have been dealt with, the VIP, escorted by teammates, must escape at the very end of the map.

Survival & Survival Mini


Basic but vicious survival lives up to its name. Go through 8 or 5 waves of objectives ranging from drill destruction, VIP targeting, boss battles, and more!

Defense 2.0


The primary objective now is to destroy the enemy resource drills.  Barges will heal your base, but they are not required for victory. After  you destroy the last drill, you’ll need to wipe the remaining enemies off the map or survive and defend your base for 5 minutes!  Good luck.

Alliance Tutorial


With all the new objectives and ways to fight in Alliance, we created a new tutorial segment specifically designed to illustrate new the Alliance mechanics, such as destroying the drill, capture barges from enemy ships, depositing barges, and battling the enemy outposts.  Captain Morrison returns to guide you on this new training mission.


New Faction Leader Influence

Players that earn the most efforts over a period of time will become leaders of their faction. We’ll be using an accelerated version of this time period for testing purposes.  Leaders unlock the ability to set Rally Points at the location they are currently deployed at.  As more and more leaders coordinate to rally at the same territory, their faction gets War Effort buffs.  These buffs range from a few percent to pulling all players who have not made a choice on which location to deploy at (it can be a lot!).


New Unlock more attacks on the world map

Factions can coordinate to spend their well earned Coins to unlock additional attacks against factions of their choice.  When enough Coins are invested, the system will choose a new location to unlock.  Be careful!  The more actions you have on the world map also means your efforts will be spread thinner as well so make sure to coordinate.

War!
Resources will now come into play.  Each territory has a set number of resources.  Conquering a new territory will add that territory’s resources to your factions’ coffers.  Each faction has a Resource Goal, and once a faction has reached their goal (aggressor) a War will be initiated.  The factions will be split into two alliance, the first is seeded with the aggressor and the second will be seeded with a faction of the system’s choosing.  Remaining factions can then vote for which alliance they want to support.  The faction with the highest % of votes towards an alliance will win the vote and go to the alliance of their choosing.

When War starts, each alliance has a new Resource Goal to complete.  Once that is reached, the War will end with a winner and a loser.

To supplement territory resources, Missions are still available.  Each Mission has different objectives (e.g. conquering specific faction’s territories) and has different rewards.  Look through the Missions and attempt to complete those are that are beneficial to your faction, or block others from completing from theirs.

Wars could be won and lost with Missions!

Integrated World and Faction Progression

The world and faction menus are one click away, and with the new UI, you’ll be able to access these menus from the lobby! Apply war loot, devise strategy, and talk to your faction from any lobby or menu.


Compiled History and Lore

After the war, we will be compiling everyone’s actions and using the information to create unique lore entries for a player-wide history book.  Flip through its pages to find the exploits of factions, clans, and players.

Here is a snippet of the previous alpha test, a short tidbit of what to expect:

From the compiled records of the Traveling Historian—

There are days when the people can relax without fear of conflict, but those days are often few and far between.  The power in the world are shifting and the new factions are arising to take it for themselves.  The rugged Anglean Republic gained tide after tide of supporters and began to wreak havoc in the central plains against the Fjord Baronies.  The Baronites were overwhelmed by the incessant onslaught of sure numbers and had no choice but to defend their territories by the teeth.  After losing many lands to the fur-cloaked marauders, the Fjord Baronies managed to hold their ground and stem the tide of defeat as the Angleans lost their momentum and by investing in fortifications like armored walls and bulwarks.  The Anglean Republic had spread itself thin.

Across the narrow channels to the east, a small but extremely well organized contingency of Chaladonians led their forces against the Mercantile Guild in the south.  The Order of Chaladon was able to break into the mainland due to their superior leadership to contest on Anglean and Baronite lands.  The islanders continuously assaulted key locations in all surrounding factions.  A push like this may have tipped the scales to war but the unexpected happened.

In the 11th hour, the Mercantile Guild managed to scrap together their weakening forces to retrieve valuable caches of weaponry, coin, and information from enemy factions.  The Guild was once again rich with their regained their lands.  They advanced back into the mainland to challenge the Angleans, Baronites, and Chaladonians.
When the war broke…

The last few pages of this account were lost so we’ll never know how the war played out (okay, there was no war in the alpha but let’s play pretend).  We’ll have to wait for the next installment to see who wrests the seat of power this time around.


Skirmish

King of the Hill: Frostbite Occupation

The call to adapt the maps was made, and we’ve heeded the call. First up is a KotH of Anglean Raiders. Dive into the breach and try this brutal capture point map.


Vs. AI in Practice

Novice AI made a huge splash during our last patch with many vet players wanting to fight against our in-human captains and crews. We’ve unlocked the ability to fight these AI ships in practice mode.  Please note that matches in Practice will not count towards player progression, as Practice is a safe zone for people to learn and hone skills. Enjoy the destruction of AI!



Skyball 2.0


Removed defensive spawns to combat easy turnovers that turned into incredibly long matches, and revised spawn locations overall

Increased winning points to 3 (from 2)

20 minute timer for all matches.  Team with the most points at the end of 20 minutes will win (if less than 3 points).  If there is a tie between the two teams at 20 minutes, a 5 minute sudden death round will commence.  During sudden death, the first team to score wins.  Furthermore, captures are instantaneous during sudden death.


General

New Alliance & PS4 Compatible UI (Work in Progress)

In this beta period, we’re testing a new UI that spans across all Guns of Icarus products (Skirmish and Alliance) that have allowed us to increase information density and functionality, and will allow us to have full controller support and target new platforms in the future.  We’ve streamlined primary and secondary navigation, incorporated a number of ease of use changes that you’ve requested, and audited navigation for controller ease of use and compatibility.  We’ve also made information hierarchy clearer.  For example, on the main screen, people would only have to make a selection between the PvE Alliance and the PvP Skirmish, and they can enter the play screen right away.  With the new design, we were able to place map and mode objectives on the lobby, so people will have clearer ideas of what the mission objectives are before they start the match.  The chat display is also cleaned up, making identification of different statuses and channels hopefully easier.


The UI is still work in progress, in that it has not gone through a final Steampunk embellishment pass.  The alignment of chat and social panels is also shifted from left to right to accommodate the updates we’ve made to the navigation scheme.  We’re looking for your help during this open period to test drive the new UI and give us lots of feedback, so we can work on remaining issues and continue to improve upon it.  Thanks!


Birthday Goggle giveaway

Celebratory Fireworks

Birthday cakes provided in our birthday theme


 


Changes:

General

Unity 5.4 Upgrade

• Improves stability and performance for all platforms
• Mac OSX 10.7 is no longer supported
• DirectX11 is the default mode
• Updated Workshop client (engine and video options)


Alliance Beta (For Open Period)


• Allow captain priority entire squadron, and make it more forgiving to mark planes
• Ram killing planes no longer counts in stats
• Tweaked Anglean player ship mesh for wider room for the back engines
• Spectator - HP bars of NPC enemies being attacked by players should now be visible
• Auto display enemy health
• Tweaked collider to Arashi player ship
• Tweaked particles for planes destructions
• Enemy physics more responsive to disables
• Always Spot bosses
• Changed Merchant boss ship's weak points around instead of its sails
• Display enemy health when crew damages enemy ship
• Tweaked texture particles for polish
• Female Yesha Hat receives hair color changes
• Barge capture more obvious and consistent
• Shrike: metal pillars are removed near heavy guns to avoid character animation clipping
• Crusader: adjusted collisions
• Better decision making and targeting of player by bosses
• Tweaks to higher difficulties to emphasize more coordination and responding to threat instead of bigger meat shields
• Retrieve game mode escalates faster and has better initial enemy spawning to prevent too-fast matches
• Reduced number of objectives in Assault game mode
• More fine tuned hull and component health scaling on convoys and bosses based on # of player ships in match for additional dynamic difficulty
• Difficulty and threat level across bosses should feel more similar


Skirmish


• Pilot tutorial: countdown to reach area starts when ship starts moving instead of when player mounts the helm
• Gunner tutorial won’t remind you not to shoot the balloon when the mortar damages it with AOE
• Wilson’s Notes expanded

 

Balance:

Squid

• Increased hull armor to 335 (from 230) so that it requires an additional rebuild hit with the Spanner
• Decreased hull health to 450 (from 950) to address complaints about tankiness and maintain the design goal of “nimble but weak”

Mobula

• Gun arcs more forward to emphasize weapons platform design
• Lower side guns turned forward by 5 degrees (-45 to -40, 45 to 40)
• Top side guns turned forward by 10 degrees (-50 to -40, 50 to 40)
• Decreased forward and vertical maneuverability to increase attack commitment, but same rotation maneuverability to maintain close range effectiveness
• Top forward speed decreased to 26m/s (from 28)
• Forward acceleration decreased to 3.5m/s2 (from 4.25)
• Vertical acceleration decreased to 4.75m/s2 (from 7.5)

Fixes:

General


The engine upgrade fixes some major threading/rendering issues that manifested as:


• “Stuttering” framerate (seemingly random periods of lower framerate)
• Low framerate plus low resource (GPU and CPU) usage
• Lower framerate and stability as more matches are played in a single session
• [LINUX] Missing tray icon
• [LINUX] Missing UI elements

Alliance Beta (For Open Period)


• Restored missing Devil's Eye/Alleron lightmaps
• Flickering textures on building (parous glen)
• World map Icons stick around after territory flips
• Traveller theme on merchant ship isn't using cubemap lighting shader
• Devil's eye lod and mat was pink
• Missing map colors
• Misplaced main engine on boss ship
• "against your faction" warning stuck on screen
• In World Progression, the foggy fade gradient on the sides of the map screen prevents players from clicking mission buttons
• Added planer mesh for the chandelier on Magnate
• Main base UI health bar does not line up with the weakpoints
• Different ship flickers in ship menu when player completes match
• Escape pods not spawning
• When in Faction Screen, the territory markers in Battle are still showing in the back
• MasterBase Stages needs specific colliders for the weakpoints to be targeted inside of the shell
• Mispositioned Fire Control FX
• You can attack drill before it lands on Defense
• Clean Up Navigation Meshes for All Coop Ships & Some PvP Ships Under Components
• Laser gun's ray goes through target
• Unlocking territories on faction map adds one point per click
• Odd visuals for faction territory
• Missing textures for player freight ship in wrought lod
• Missing fire Particles on Heavy guns
• Missile Circus: mismatch between server and client paths
• Damage smoke was too white
• Missing flyby sound on the boss beam gun
• Faction avatars lack lighting when choosing to switch factions through the skirmish mode menus
• OSX memory crash/corruption
• The needle of the gas mortar jumping out without animation while reload
• Lightning gun missing unpredictably
• Crash on exit
• Decoration of Traveller theme blocks view on Crusader in third person
• Crusader fade out/in on the engine
• Rubberbanding on Crusader between the heavy guns
• War chest size is 0 before playing for the faction
• Armor kit and fail safe displaying swapped skill upgrade descriptions
• Masterbase mini. Fixed z fighting and reverse normals
• SFX volume slider has no effect on lens gun sounds
• Figureheads placed at the helm on Corsair
• Flickering Damage States every time the hull was shot
• Player receives negative progression score after losing an Alliance match
• The last drill doesn't show up in Defense
• Crusader + traveller theme carpet placing issue
• Crusader top left and right light guns placed slightly above the floor
• Crusader navigation mesh is causing AI to get stuck
• Balloon tube missing on Crusader and Magnate
• damaged Magnate rope clipping
• Crusader + fortress theme barbed wire placing issue
• Stormbreaker AI path issues


Skirmish

• Initial spawns can overlap on some maps
• In lobby, switching to spectator may change class
• Match end screen "team" tab doesn't get highlighted by default
• Startup crashes in some cases
• FPS lock not working when window is minimized
• AFK when you are in end match screen and there is nothing you can do to end it
• Engine volume differences
• Getting stuck when jumping down at the ladder on Spire
• Last shot of a Heavy Carronade has no firing effect
• Crew form system message typo
• The target dummies do not attack you at the end of the Engineering tutorial