Genre: Real Time Strategy (RTS), Role-playing (RPG), Strategy, Indie
Andalia
A tiny map and optimizations
This patch adds the 15th map to Andalia: "Valley of Death". It is a simple two-players map at which the competing players are connected via a single valley between them. All battles will be condensed to this narrow area, hence the name "Valley of Death".
Additionally this patch changes the material shaders of the map ground, the mountains and various environmental assets to be vertex shaders rather than pixel shaders thus greatly reducing the shader instructions and relieving the burden on the graphics card.
This is all for now. I hope you like this patch.
Happy playing!
Two gameplay improvements
This patch introduces two gameplay improvements based on recent player feedback:
Starting resource generation
When starting a new game you now have the guarantee of at least a second gold occurence and an occurence of one of the rare resources (gems, crystals, sulfur) found within a a radius of 12,000 units around your starting position.
This helps to even out the current unpredictability of starting conditions and hopefully makes very uneven multiplayer matches a rarer occurence.
Move to and auto-attack command
This is the ability of sending units to a destination location and letting them auto-attack enemy units on their way. It is a common feature in many modern RTS games and now Andalia has it aswell!
When you press ctrl having selected combat units, you will be shown their radius of auto-attack. Now when you send them to a destination location, they will move there with auto-attack enabled meaning: If they encounter enemies on their way they will engage combat by themselves.
From now on your troops are not messed with as easily when you send them to far away locations.
This is all for this update. I hope you like this addition.
Happy playing!
Savegame Hotfix
When starting a randomly-selected game, the name of the respective savegame was automatically being set to the name of the map, so you couldn't assign an own name to it.
This patch fixes it.
Randomly selected maps
Happy holidays everyone!
This minor update brings the new feature of randomly selected maps. A feature for times when you are in the mood of playing but you can't quite decide which map to pick.
If you are in the singleplayer map selection, pick the first option in the map selection.
A new menu will be opened with a variety of customization options to have you spawn at random start position in a randomly selected map with randomly selected AI players etc:
If you choose there to be teams in the game, you will be put into a team with one or more AI players, granted that there are enough AI players available on the map. If there is an uneven amount of players, you will be the player put into the team with less members to increase the challenge.
If you select the random map option in the multiplayer map selection, you will open the regular hosting menu, but be able to choose how many players the map, which is randomly selected, should be supporting:
After confirmation, a multiplayer lobby will be opened in a randomly selected map, which fits the selected player count.
Andalia will become free-to-play on Christmas 2023
Dear players.
More than two years after the release of my hobby project and more than two dozens of patches, including the addition of an entirely new civilisation, I'm at the point where my active development on this project has mostly ended and I'd like to put a mark here to symbolically give away my claim on what this game may still yield for me, financially.
My responsibilities outside of the world of games, in the so-called real life, have become bigger. I have a decently paid job now and it's become more difficult to devote time and effort into this project.
The development of Andalia has been a unique and involved undertaking, which has taken me 5 years alone, from the October 2016 onwards to October 2021, when it's been released, and 2 more years of continued polishing and improving, a lot of which was possible due to the friendly feedback of interested players.
Even if the game hasn't received a big amount of attention, I've very much enjoyed working on it and playing it with friends, family and players. I'm glad that you people gave the game a try and even figured out you liked it. That means a lot to me. Thankyou!
With that said, let anyone know that they can play have this game for free, from the 24.12.2023 onwards!
And to those, who have paid for this game and supported me financially (aswell as providing feedback) up to this point: A big thankyou to you all!
I wished I knew of a good way to express my gratitude to you (A unique achievement doesn't seem to be in the cards, unfortunately). But be assured that your interest in the game and feedback is what kept me going and improving on it in the recent two years. Again, thankyou!
I'll still be around on the discord server and I will probably keep doing minor patches. If you have any questions or requests regarding the game, you may best meet me there.
See you there,
Worsas
A pure balancing patch!
A patch to further improve on the game's balancing. Most importantly I've changed stats to make life easier for Ziggurat players and to make some rarely used options in other civs more interesting.
The Lizard Den (Ziggurat) now costs only 300 gold (400 previously)
The damage of the Gnoll bruiser has been raised by 1.
The resource costs of all Resource Silos have been lowered to 150 to be on a level with the Bastion - Outpost. The Resource Silo of the Ziggurat now costs 140 bricks instead of 200 bricks
The Dwarven Mine (Academy) costs no ore anymore to prevent situations where it becomes impossible to build one anymore without the help of a marketplace.
Energy Pylons, Sun Pylons and Bird Nests have been made stronger.
The size of the Goblin hunter traps has been increased and their damage slightly raised to turn them into a more interesting tactical option.
The damage caused by the Falconer hawk has been increased by 10.
Gave the Justicar 10 more hitpoints, since it's a very slow unit that somehow needs to make up for it.
A bug has been fixed where the death bolt curse effect would not disappear on a unit when it has died.
An anniversary and a new map
Dear players!
It's been now two years, since Andalia has been released on Steam. And just in time for this anniversary I've been able to complete the 14th map for this game:
Crater Lake
Crater lake is the first and only map for Andalia designed to be played with 3 players, a map circular in every respect.
Not only do the mountains follow a ring shape, even the tunnels of the underworld are aligned with the overall ring layout. Scattered around the central lake you will find numerous deposits of ore, gold and other minerals.
Apart from this, I have done some more balancing tweaks which were requested by the more frequently playing people on discord:
Goblins and Goblin hunters turned out to be consistently overpowered when used for early rushes in 1 VS 1 matches. For that reason, I have raised the costs of goblins to 50 and goblin hunters to 60 gold again and their hitpoints have been reduced from 80 to 70. Later bastion units have also received stat adjustments.
The hitpoints of the Harvester have been raised from 150 to 200. This is to compensate for the fact that the harvester does not regenerate hitpoints like heroes of other civilisations. Moreover the effect duration of the Death Bolt spell has been increased from 7 seconds to 18 seconds, so there is a little more time to kill the affected unit to retrieve its skeleton.
The Rock Shower spell of the Geomants has been modified, so it only causes 1/3 of the usual damage against dwarven units (mountain dwarves and geomants). That way groups of geomants are more likely to survive their own rock showers.
Optimizations, Gameplay Improvements and Balancing
After the recent influx of feedback there were a couple of other things I still wanted to implement, so I could feel assured that the game is in an as-good-as-possible shape.
Optimization:
One of these things I wanted to do badly was the optimization of the terrain and mountain shader which take a lot of instructions on the GPU and slow down the game significantly on some machines.
After analyzing existing maps I created various variants of the existing terrain shader all of which only include a subset of the terrain types that are in the game, so the terrain shader would only have to compute the terrain types that are actually relevant for the map it's used in. Furthermore I split the mountains into a lower and an upper part with the upper part using a simplified shader which is also a lot lighter on the GPU.
While these optimizations are not a huge breakthrough there is a noticable improvement with my own GPU now being able to render the main menu in 120 frames (previously it only managed to get somewhere around 90 frames). Within the actual maps the improvement is less big but still present.
Gameplay Improvements:
Some people noticed that units that were set on auto-casting didn't do their auto-casting when they expected them to. This was because units would only do their auto-casting when they weren't specifically commanded to move somewhere or attack a particular target. Now units will also do auto-casting during attacking an enemy unit of your choice. However, after completed casting, there is no guarantee the unit will resume attacking the same target again. So this is something to look out for.
Another proposal from a player was displaying how many workers are assigned to harvesting a certain resource, making the management of your economy a much easier task. I felt that this was a neat idea, so I added a number display infront of the resources if workers are assigned to said resource.
Yet another request of a player was being able to sell resources in the marketplace of the Necropolis, which previously only allowed buying resources for souls. Now you can sell most of your gathered resources and get souls back (which you can again trade for resources you might need).
A player also asked for being able to set a higher population limit. While the game doesn't handle big amount of units particularly well, I added the option to crank up the max pop up to 250 or 300, which is an option you can take at your own risk.
Last but not least it's now possible to reset the rotation of your camera to default by pressing [backspace].
Balancing:
In accordance with player feedback, I decided to reduce the speed of various fast-moving units in the game, as their fast movement turned out to be a tactic advantage in multiplayer games that outruled various other tactics, partly since their high availability removed the need to keep defensive units at the base.
Multiplayer matches also made apparent that cavalry units like knights or pegasus riders are generally a bit too strong at this point. I addressed this by adjusting their attack speed, so it matches that of other melee units.
Refuge houses now need 5 rather than just 3 herbs each tax cycle. To balance this out, the herbs of planted gardens now give 20 rather than just 8 herbs per plant. I have done this to prevent building up dozens of elven houses without needing much to back it up.
More out of a gut feeling, I decided to slightly boost the hitpoints of later Ziggurat units: Serpent Fly +10 Basilisk +20 Wyvern +20 Hydra +10
Balancing this game is an ongoing task. The next patch will probably see some improvements on the Necropolis, among other things.
Implementing feature requests
According to some recent feature requests, I've added the following features to Andalia:
An FPS - limit setting, which is at 120 fps by default. There is also a V-Sync option included here.
A setting to disable the Team Omega mechanics for the Necropolis, allowing it to be allied with other civilisations (this is not the intended scenario, but fine for the people that prefer it this way).
Now the game speed can be increased up to 2x of the default game speed in the settings.
Possibility to select all idle workers at once by pressing the respective button (or
) and having SHIFT pressed.
Possibility to drag-select additional units by having SHIFT pressed while doing so.
Raised the amount of gold on regular gold occurences from 1200 to 1500.
Double clicking on a worker unit will now only select all worker units on the screen that are pursuing the same type of work.
Bug fixes:
Red crosses on the mini map should now disappear properly on remote clients.
The ramp of the Dragon gate should now always allow the bone dragon to get down from it.
I hope these additions will improve your gaming experience. Further gameplay improvements are already planned on for future patches.
A new map and more neutral units
This patch adds a new large map to Andalia called "Fertile Delta"
Fertile Delta is subdivided by countless waterways and consists of patches of woodland, swamp and grass plains.
Due to the unusual layout of the map, it only supports up to 5 players. However, in exchange it also houses various remote places with hidden resources or treasures.
This patch also adds numerous new variants of neutral enemy units to the game. The "bandit groups" in the existing maps have been diversified with new bandit variants (orcs, halflings, robber-knights).
More treasures, guarded by neutral troops, have been added to various places on existing maps. Mines (except for ore mines) are now generally guarded by groups of neutral units.
The hive now features a new, more powerful variant of the Troglodyte, the Inferno Troglodyte which is usually encountered close to the hive main building, but may also appear in hive offensives during a long-running game.
