Genre: Real Time Strategy (RTS), Role-playing (RPG), Strategy, Indie
Andalia
April Update
Hello dear players.
Herewith I present you the last update of Andalia for a while. I'll be quite busy in the coming months and weeks, so it's good that I've been able to put some more work into Andalia to get it closer to where I'd like it to be.
So what's new?
Auto-Casting
Now it's possible to let casters automatically choose to cast supportive buff- and healing spells, such as the healing spell of the mystics or the bark skin - and revitalization spell of the unicorns. To enable this behaviour, you only need to right-click on the respective spell button, after which the unit will situationally choose to cast the spell at own measure.
Spells that allow for this can be recognized by the dotted frame around the spell button.
The following units are affected:
Mystic (Healing)
Sprite (Sprawling Growth)
Unicorn (Bark skin and revitalization)
Ogre Priest (Mass Frenzy)
Stunning
Blunt attacks now have a chance of stunning the hit enemy unit for a short time. The chance differs depending on the amount of damage dealt by the attack and the full hitpoints of the affected target unit. Golems, being non-alive mechanoids, are immune to this.
Loading screens
Whenever you transition between the main menu and the map preview or between the map preview and the map itself, you will now randomly get to see one of 9 different loading screens that provide info on possibilities or aspects of Andalia that might not be obvious on a first glance.
Apart from this, I have implemented the following changes:
The EP required for units to rise beyond level 2 has been lowered a bit. Meaningful levelling generally appeared to occur very rarely in my playtesting rounds, so I hope this is going to help.
The area of effect of unicorn spells has been increased.
Some unit stats have been slightly changed. The damage of catapults has been lowered from 35 to 32. Mystics now deal 10 instead of 12 ranged damage again to account for their increased usefulness due to auto-casting. The hitpoints of serpent flies have been changed back to 80 from 70 previously.
If you have any feedback or bug reports, feel invited to post about it on the forums (the steam-included ones).
With that said,
Bye for now
Performance improvements
Hello there.
After the recent patch with Inland Sea I felt dissatisfied with how the map performed on my (admittedly outdated) pc. I wrote about it in the patchtext and added a notification text to the map description warning players with weak CPU from playing the map.
However, this has never felt quite right, so I started digging for causes of performance-loss.
A lot of game logic is handled by the Unreal Engine, which is one reason why I have often felt like I couldn't do a lot to significantly improve performance of basic things happening, such as pathfinding, unit movement and other things.
One thing, for example, that I kept noticing was that the engine spent a lot of computation time just checking each frame against the floor units were standing on, even if they were standing on the very map bottom. This has led to investigative work on how to remove this unneeded computation. Eventually I figured that I could just set a value in the configuration of the movement component of units to achieve this. I have also been able to achieve further optimizisations by tweaking other movement settings.
Apart from that game logic responsible for drawing little symbols on the minimap or doing periodic AI player behaviour seemed to lead to significant slowdowns. I went and moved a lot of it from to native c++ code or did some caching where possible and needed. As a result Inland Sea and any other map turned out to run a lot smoother for me.
^ The mini map in a spectator game with four AI players. ^
Unfortunately I did not record exact figures of FPS or frame time to provide you people with a comparison chart, I hope you'll forgive. However, I don't think it hurts to put this update online now and let anyone benefit from the results of my efforts.
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This update contains a second thing: A new, medium-sized map:
Fields and Forests
With this addition there is a total of 12 maps to choose from now.
I hope you like this update.
Take care!
A new map
This update introduces a new map:
Inland Sea
Inland Sea is truly big. It's larger than any of the previous maps, being 33% larger than even the other large maps.
Since Inland Sea is so big, it has got a lot of space in it. You may come across various places where bandits or troglodytes guard over their treasures and you may have a hard time tracking down the obelisks you're looking for.
Speaking of treasures, there is a new addition to this and other maps that may make exploring of the Underworld a more rewarding experience: Dragon hoards. A dragon hoard is a site at which a drake guards over its riches. If you bring enough warriors you may bring down the beast and loot what it assembled on its own.
The maps in which dragon hoards may be found, are: Inland Sea, Island, Virgin Forest and River. Tracking down the dragon hoards may not be easy always as they are situated in the most empty, remote or obscure places.
Inland Sea is also the only other map besides Oasis which includes all existing region types in it. Two players start out in a snowy environment, while there is one player respectively starting out in grassland, forest, swamp or wasteland.
Since there are 6 players and a lot of neutral critters spread over the map, Inland Sea is heavier on the CPU than any of the other maps. Expect things to run a little less smooth most of the time. If you have a somewhat recent CPU, you should be fine.
PS: There has been a nerf to the rockshower spell. Rocks now have an impact damage of 33 rather than 50 before. AI players with geomants currently seem to rule out any other constellations with them.
New settings, controls and AI behavior
It's been a little more than two weeks since the last update. So what have I been up to in the meantime? Not much to be honest.
I've had a small break from game development and just started working on the contents of this patch a few days ago. Nonetheless, I wanted to have this update out relatively quickly, so I could serve the features, which have been asked for on the forums lately.
Now there are two new settings: Game speed and Camera speed.
Game speed does what the name says: Adjust how fast things happen in the game. With a higher game speed, for example, time is accelerated. Units run and work faster, recruitments and construction happen quicker etc. As a drawback, the game needs to compute some things more often, so this might affect how smoothly your game runs.
The setting menu currently allows adjusting the game speed from 0.6x to 1.6x. I have limited it like this, as I cannot really guarantee for the game to operate properly beyond these values (there is a noticable performance impact with higher values). However, you may press ctrl and + or - during a running match to increase or decrease game speed further (currently capped between 0.5x and 2x).
Camera speed is a setting that influences how quickly your view shifts with WASD, arrow buttons and screen scrolling. It also changes the speed of camera rotation and zooming accordingly.
There are two further things included with this patch:
It's now possible to rotate your view with Q and E in addition to pressing the mousewheel and moving your mouse.
AI enemies who are in a team now always pick the same target player when launching their offensives, making them even more dangerous.
On the other hand, if you are in a team with an AI player the AI player may decide to launch an attack on the AI player that you've been attacked by the most, so you may benefit from AI friends more than before.
The choice of target players works in a way that each AI player associates each other enemy player with an aggression value (this value is initially random and mostly larger for human enemy players). An aggression value increases each time the AI player is attacked by a unit or shooting building of an enemy player. The AI player will usually choose to engage with the enemy player itself or its team members have been attacked by the most.
This is all for now. I hope you like this update.
If you have further feedback, don't be afraid to make a post on the steam-included forums or on the discord server.
Bugfixes & AI Improvements
This patch was intended to be a small round of bugfixes for things I have come across in my playtesting, but it turned out to be a bit more involving.
Íncluded Bugfixes:
The target marker for unit abilities has been a bit buggy recently, so it sometimes wouldn't turn green, even though the targeted location was just fine and you could press the left mouse button to let the unit perform its ability. Now it behaves as intended again.
Sometimes, especially on large maps, AI players had difficulties to find a path to the player base they wanted to attack, so they staid passive in their base indefinitely, even though they had enough forces to launch an invasion. This has been fixed by overhauling the way AI players approach offensives.
Instead of trying to reach the enemy base directly, the AI player attack group now approaches the enemy in etappes. After each etappe the group will ensure that all participating members are close together again, before they move onto the next one. After a while they are close enough to safely find a path to the enemy base they want to engage with.
This, of course, has the side effect of enemy groups arriving in a more condensed state at your base, instead of "dripping in" as it often used to be the case.
But this is not all: AI players now utilize unit formations. So you may now encounter AI player unit groups standing in neat square formation at their base or on their way to their target player.
AI players often seemed to have a suicidal desire to let a small amount of units run across the base of enemies in order to reach a nearby underworld entrance for the sake of fighting the hive guards in there. Now they should no longer do this.
AI players should no longer send their workers to resources that are close to bases of other players, unless they have no other choice.
AI players will now grow up a slightly larger army on bigger maps before they launch an attack.
If the AI player had a Master Sorceress, it sometimes happened that, within a combat, the sorceress would fly away from the place of battle for the sake of summoning a phoenix in the bottom-left corner of the map. This should no longer happen, either.
There are even more fixes and improvements to AI player behaviour that are hard to put into words here.
I hope you like this update. Stay tuned.
New Years Update
Hello everyone!
Here comes another batch of changes in Andalia with some, in my view, meaningful gameplay improvements:
First off, units are now capable of automatically starting attacking nearby enemy buildings rather than relying on a manual player command to do so. Still, enemy units are preferred targets over enemy buildings.
Also: If a unit auto-persecutes an enemy unit, it may now decide to switch to attacking a different, closer unit, if it hasn't reached its current target yet. This should make it more difficult to lure units along by pulling out a single unit from a skirmish.
A further useful feature: Now it is possible to set waypoints for a unit by shift + right clicking onto target locations. This also works on the mini map. Early game scouting should be a lot more convenient with this.
The current target location, including any waypoints, of the currently selected unit are now displayed as little crosses on the mini map. The target marker of a recruitment building is likewise now displayed on the mini map and can be additionally set by right clicking on the latter.
Buildings are now more differentiated on the mini map. The main building has gotten a slightly larger, more prominent icon. Wall pieces now have a different icon aswell.
Some glitches have been addressed with units trying to get onto walls, so they should have it easier to get onto the battlements and align themselves on them now.
Catapults, Catapult Lizards and Ogre Stonehurlers can now hit several enemy units at once if these are close nearby.
Shooting building now automatically switch their target if the latter happens to get behind an object that blocks the incoming missiles.
