Warlords: Under Siege
Androsystem Idle
Those of you who know us a little closer are aware that we're a team of hobbyists working from our bedrooms, living rooms and basements (depending on who has their PC set up where). Although work on Warlords Under Siege is going very well, it's now mostly being taken care of by Komisarek and Gothim. While all this is going on, Kiwi has taken on a side project to create his dream game - one that’s so simple, you can play it with just one hand, leaving the other free for whatever else you need to do!
We'd be honoured if you checked out Androsystem Idle - an incremental idle clicker game set in the far reaches of our universe, in the far, far future!
The game is currently off at 10%, but we made it super cheap anyway. No DLCs or microtransactions too, because those suck! :)
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2961920/Androsystem_Idle/
0.97 - Merewood
Content
- Added new map: Merewood, along with new achievements
- Added new enemy race: Barbarians (look at GamePedia for details)
- Added new cards: Plunder (I, II, III)
- Added new sounds for most units, added charge sounds for some units
- Added post processing to the main menu
Bug fixes
- Pylon no longer damages units when the game is paused
- Pylon no longer damages units which are under ground
- Enemy damage dealt to player units is now displayed in red colour
- Fixed a rare bug when the game wouldn't end in victory because an enemy unit did not die properly
- Mud should now place itself correctly aligned with the ground
We're now moving onto the technical aspect of close combat and unit movement, because at the moment it sucks. We should have something nice for you soon on that front. As always we're taking in suggestions and hope to hear feedback on this update and the new map.
Remember that if you've already beaten most of the game and nightmare modes, the base map might not prove challenging. I'm sure that once you reach some of the Nightmare modes you'll have a challenge though!
Lands Untamed - Update Preview
First, a couple of screenies. Please remember this is a heavy WIP.
One of the things that we think we've done well with WuS since Oasis update came out is map variety. Personally I like challenges that force me to rethink my deck and present an unusual hurdle to jump over.
Not unlike Oasis, you'll be very short on resources here. There is not a single resource node, so you might end up feeling some pressure here. Caravans will arrive from the back of the fort, safe from enemy incursions. You'll be able to utilise the Market building here, or go for a new approach...
I'll preface further discussion with the disclosure that the numbers you see on the card are not final and subject to change :)
Plunder works in a similar way to Philosopher's stone. Every time a melee unit kills an enemy, you receive some resources. By enemy unit we of course mean a single soldier, not an entire squad. You can rack up the resources quite quickly, providing your archers don't do most of the work!
But, but, but... who are we fighting?
Barbarians are joining the fight! You'll be facing off a variety of infantry (both light and heavy) as well as archers and cavalry. Here's a small visual preview of your enemies. Note: don't be mislead by the blue colour - it's just our debug tool :)
We're also working on a bunch of other stuff - for example all units received brand new audio, including much needed charge sounds.
That's all for now, and see you in the next one!
0.96a Hotfix
- Missile units will now attack correctly when offscreen (thanks to NF_Crenos for spotting and reporting that!)
Fates of Magic - 0.96
Changes
- Complete UI revamp
- Added Mage Tower (3 new cards). Spells appear on the left side of the screen and can be cast by clicking on them. Spells have a cooldown and can be upgraded in the building. Three spells are available at the moment.
New sounds for goblins and swordsmen (more to follow on this front) - Upgraded Engine and renderer version, should help improve performance on some systems but may cause unforeseen issues. Please report them if you encounter any. Also we encourage you to update your graphics drivers.
- Optimisation improvements
- Pathfinding improvements
- The end screen will now show when leaving the battle manually, giving you the gold you earned (before you'd not get anything unless town hall was destroyed)
- Guard mode is now a lot more restrictive, units will not chase after enemies unless ordered to do so. Exception is that melee units will go over to other melee units that are attacking them.
Fixes
- Active cards from the previous game (such as Town Bombard) will not carry over to the next game (thanks to "AncAinu")
- Heroes with large speed bonuses will no longer glide around the map
- Enemies should no longer slide around as much. They will still slide a bit, but it's a feature, not a bug ;)
- Fixed the discord button
- Changed the way player units are killed in chaos mode, should help prevent crashes
Closest to do list
- Some buildings do not have collapse animations (will just go underground)
- New sounds for all units
- Unique click sounds for buildings (mage guild has one already!)
- Fix the swamp spell appearing very light on some maps
Fates of Magic - Preview
Since we've been keeping you bored for ages, let me kick things off with some pictures first.
New UI
It's never been a secret that WuS uses AI generated art (and we still do in place of static 2D images). Saying that, we have now had enough money to hire an artist to redesign the GUI for us, where I'm sure you'll agree he did a tremendous job!
The entire UI has been overhauled - both in main menu, and in battle. We've added tooltips that explain all sorts of things that were missing, and everything should be a bit more clear.
Here's a comparison shot with old UI (although you can also see new post processing and weather effects there!)
New building: Mage Guild
Mage guild is a new type of building, which traditionally has three tiers. The guild periodically generates a resource (mana) which can be spent on casting spells. Naturally you have to research those first (in a similar way to how we research blacksmith upgrades).
The update will come with three different spells:
- Pylon - a magic stone which zaps enemies around it
- Swamp - slows enemies traversing through
- Rock wall - imprisons a unit inside it
Each of these naturally has a duration and a mana cost. You'll find yourself casting often. The cool thing is there's no limit to how many spells you can cast in one area. You're only limited by cooldown and the amount of mana you currently have in store.
Here's a little image of the Pylons just hanging around!
Spells are currently not upgradable in any way as far as endless upgrades are concerned, with the exception of Pylons (they benefit from the tower upgrade). This will be looked at and balanced out in the future when more spells are available.
We hope to expand the idea of the Mage Guild by introducing "Schools of Magic". These would be spell sets (such as life, death, fire etc.) that you can take, which would very much change how you play. We're undecided on how to proceed with this, but we'd like to avoid further card purchases in the shop. Instead some kind of reward based progression would be nice - we're still thinking!
Other changes
We introduced some fixes, but the update notes will only contain the biggest changes. The biggest QoL update is that you can now quit the battle manually and receive the gold for time spent in game. Right now, if you quit the game manually (without the enemies destroying your Town Hall) you'll not be rewarded. This lead to a lot of frustration from players that didn't know about this, and faced a massive and challenging grind, which in turn translated into some negative reviews on Steam as well! It's getting fixed now!
We upgraded the Unity Engine version as well to allow for some further optimisation improvements. New sounds for Goblins and Swordsmen were added, and more are to follow. We've optimised things here and there, but there's still more work to do on that front.
Lots of little issues were eliminated (like Anwen sliding like crazy when she's on speed boost), some pathfinding issues and such things... Buildings can also have unique sounds now, which adds some immersion, but only the Mage Guild currently has one.
The Future
Aside from ironing out the current issues, Schools of Magic (which will be a big update by itself when it all comes together) and long awaited mod support we do not have many plans to expand the content further until 1.0 hits. We hope there's plenty to do as is but we're still very much open to feedback and ideas. You can expect Fates of Magic update to hit soon...ish. I'm not going to give a precise date because it needs a little bit more work and testing, but we do plan to release it this month.
Other things
Now, I do risk being a little bit crass here, but hey ho, that's the gamedev life. Those of you who have gotten to know us a little bit closer will know that we're a small team of hobbyists working on these games in our spare time, trying to "hit it off" so that we can make bigger titles in the future. We've been working on another game, called Warlords Battle Simulator, which will be released as a full title (not EA) sometime this year. The demo will be available to play by the time Steam Next Fest hits this summer. In fact, it will be available as soon as Valve approves the current built we sent off this week!
I do understand that some of you may find it a little bit concerning we're working on more than one game simultaneously but please remember we do our best to be efficient. When coding work on Warlords was stuck because it needed full UI implementation, I moved onto WBS while Gothim chipped away at the GUI. When design work on WUS was finished, Kiwi was writing the design doc for WBS and so on... We simply try to be as efficient as possible, so there is minimal impact on quality and time spent between updates. Although I do admit this was a long one!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2594290/Warlords_Battle_Simulator/
When we had a spare moment, we also worked on something a little bit more fun and casual. The demo for Balling Up is available now. We made it simply for fun, to take a break from the top down view of strategy games. Please try it out, and let us know what you think (although there's a high chance you will rage quit!).
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2593440/Balling_Up/
That's all we have for you for today. I hope you're looking forward to the next update, and see you on the battlefield!
Kommissar
Warlords Under Siege -- Lunar New Year Sale
Warlords Under Siege is now participating in the Lunar New Year Sale 2024 with a 35% discount. Hope you can enjoy our game!
0.9f1 Update
- Restarting the game will no longer overwrite building destruction and corpse persistence setting
- Charge bonus will no longer apply when charging at buildings (units such as trolls still keep it though!)
- Cards such as 'Bombard' are now cleared properly on mission start
- Game should no longer crash when certain building slots are missing lock visuals
0.9f Update
0.9f
The beta goes out to the world! Please remember that if anything is wrong, report a bug on our discord or e-mail. Please scroll down to the bottom to see the bug report guide. You can also roll back to the previous version of the game in the beta section (game properties, accessible by right clicking on the game), "Previous valid patch" branch.
- Features:
- Mounted and some heavy infantry units are now able to charge, stunning troops with 'Small' keyword
- Added 'Brace' keyword (on spears and pikes) which negates the charge, and harms the charging unit instead
- Added building destruction physics (toggle in options if your performance suffers)e
- Added 1/2 speed setting (can also help with performance)
- Added waypoints for recruitment buildings (set with right mouse button when building is selected)
- Added alphabetical card sorting in deck builder (top left corner)
- Added corpse persistence option. EXPERIMENTAL, not optimised! Make sure your PC can handle it. Will be optimised in the future.
- Players are now required to have lower
- tier cards in their deck before they can add higher
- tier cards (so you can't add Card II or III if you don't have Card I etc...)
- Improvements:
- Units will no longer ignore and reset movement orders when about to attack
- Clicking on a building slot will no longer close automatically when playing on higher speeds
- Pressing the unit group key twice in quick succession will take you to random unit from that group
- Hero panel now has gold colour rather than blue to distinguish them easier
- Flags flash and bob up and down now! Wooow! (DLC material really, but you get it for free! jk)
- Building slots are highlighted when hovering over them
- Resource production circle is now blue for better visibility (also has a nice border!)
- Post processing also affects the UI now, some bits and bobs were given a small overhaul
- Bone catapult now has a more spooky sound when firing!
- Better visual cursor indicators
- When holding left shift, we can now correctly add more units to selection group by clicking on them, or by dragging a selection box
- Fixes:
- Optimised and improved pathfinding
- Optimised unit decision making logic
- Optimised UI performance (was bottle
- necking bad!)
- Eliminated various memory leaks related to pathfinding (and therefore crashes)
- Moved missile logic into Unity Jobs for performance. Experimental but no crashes reported so far. If you get crashes, send us logs!
- Removing card filters in deck builder no longer randomly sets the card indexes
- Modded maps now correctly load endless modes if they have it
- Hero portrait should now display correct HP values at all times
- Selecting Merlin in deck builder will now play one of his voice lines
- Garrisoned units will now leave the wall on the correct side
- When a building is in process of destruction, it's no longer possible to click it
- Fixed various typos in English and Polish
- Units no longer dancing around opponents when trying to attack
- Removed one of the broken Wrath of the Desert skins
- Visuals and Sounds:
- Fixed post processing!
- Toned down certain textures
- Replaced loading screens
- Iron Mountains keep received some visual love (sun direction, fog etc...)
- Bad weather no longer removes most of the shadows (doesn't look as flat)
- Fixed LOD for pine trees
- New firing sounds and particles for Demolishers
- Things that got worse:
- Added lots of Spaghetti code. I'm not happy when Somebody toucha my Spaghet!
Bug report guide:
When posting, please describe the bug or issue. If you are able to reproduce it, please post the steps outlining how to do so.
You can also attach logs to your message - it can help us find the potential problem. You can find logs in:
SystemDrive:\Users\YourUser\AppData\LocalLow\RedKar Limited\Warlords_ Under Siege. The folder is hidden. If you do not see it, type %appdata% in the Windows search bar and hit Enter. This will take you to Roaming, where you should navigate back up by one directory.
Logs are Player and Player-prev. You can also attach your save file if you wish.
Major Update: Enchanted Realm
But it's all better now :)
Now, let's get to the JUIIICEEE!
We've overhauled post processing, weather, textures and some models. Our amazing graphic designer, Hussh took a look at the game and said "Ya know what, the colours don't work together...". Along with Gothim, our programmer they sat down, re-toned the textures and applied some awesome post processing.
But then that wasn't enough! We all decided that the weather events weren't quite up to scratch. They often felt "flat" and dull. You couldn't tell that it was foggy, or sunny, or rainy. It was just, well, crap most of the time. But no more! Each weather event got a visual overhaul, and this is what we got now!
You know what else sucked? Buildings and how they were just sinking down when destroyed. So we threw all that out and added building destruction physics! If your machine can't quite handle it, or you'd prefer to play without it, you can simply turn it off in the options.
Another fun thing is Corpse Persistence. It's now a game option which you can set to your liking. Generally you can have corpses disappear instantly (good for performance), after some seconds, all the way to... never (very bad for performance)! This option is experimental and will be improved upon in the future. Corpses always work on their original timer for now, so if you set them to never, and then to instant, those ones from earlier will remain... I'd advise to play around with it if you're curious, but don't be too upset if your PC chugs ːgoldensmileː We'll work on this some more in the future. ːWH3_claspː. Also I hate ːwinter2019angryyulː emojis ːsteamhappyː in text ːambitionː.
The amount of stupid things in the code was insane. This is mostly my personal fault, and although I'd love to blame someone else, Gothim's code is quite pretty and nice, whereas mine is like a tangled ball of wire. In fact, he chastised me recently for adding in game logic code to his UI code. I'm treating this section of the article as a self-help piece of reflective writing, and a punishment at the same time. Think of it as a programmer's equivalent of medieval flagellation, just without the religious undertones.
Anyway, we improved a lot of things. AI has been rewritten and for now it is behaving a bit weird, but we'll iterate on what we have in the coming weeks. Most importantly your units will now finally listen to orders given, and should be a little bit smarter. What's more is we have removed huge performance bottlenecks, because my code written beforehand which has been here since the release of Citizens: Far Lands, did not accommodate for such a large number of units on the battlefield. Imagine that every missile unit would loop through every other unit in existence, check distance between itself and it, and then find the one closest? That was bad. I feel bad.
Would you believe that we have FINALLY added the REVOLUTIONARY DLC-LIKE CONTENT... Waypoints for recruitment buildings! /s
For the grandpas and grandmas among you, we've also added 1/2 speed! This could potentially also help performance if it chugs at some point. Maybe.
There's actually a bit more here and there, so here's the full changelog.
- Features:
- Added building destruction physics (toggle in options if your performance suffers)
- Added 1/2 speed setting (can also help with performance)
- Added waypoints for recruitment buildings (set with right mouse button when building is selected)
- Added alphabetical card sorting in deck builder (top left corner)
- Added corpse persistence option. EXPERIMENTAL, not optimised! Make sure your PC can handle it. Will be optimised in the future.
- Players are now required to have lower-tier cards in their deck before they can add higher-tier cards (so you can't add Card II or III if you don't have Card I etc...)
- Improvements:
- Units will no longer ignore and reset movement orders when about to attack
- Clicking on a building slot will no longer close automatically when playing on higher speeds
- Pressing the unit group key twice in quick succession will take you to random unit from that group
- Hero panel now has gold colour rather than blue to distinguish them easier
- Flags flash and bob up and down now! Wooow! (DLC material really, but you get it for free!)
- Building slots are highlighted when hovering over them
- Resource production circle is now blue for better visibility (also has a nice border!)
- Post processing also affects the UI now, some bits and bobs were given a small overhaul
- Bone catapult now has a more spooky sound when firing!
- Better visual cursor indicators
- When holding left shift, we can now correctly add more units to selection group by clicking on them, or by dragging a selection box
- Fixes:
- Optimised and improved pathfinding
- Optimised unit decision making logic
- Optimised UI performance (was bottle-necking bad!)
- Eliminated various memory leaks related to pathfinding (and therefore crashes)
- Moved missile logic into Unity Jobs for performance. Experimental but no crashes reported so far. If you get crashes, send us logs!
- Removing card filters in deck builder no longer randomly sets the card indexes
- Modded maps now correctly load endless modes if they have it
- Hero portrait should now display correct HP values at all times
- Selecting Merlin in deck builder will now play one of his voice lines
- When a building is in process of destruction, it's no longer possible to click it
- Fixed various typos in English and Polish
- Visuals:
- Fixed post processing!
- Toned down certain textures
- Replaced loading screens
- Iron Mountains keep received some visual love (sun direction, fog etc...)
- Bad weather no longer removes most of the shadows (doesn't look as flat)
- Fixed LOD for pine trees
- Things that got worse:
- Added lots of Spaghetti code. I'm not happy when Somebody toucha my Spaghet!
Shoutout to the following:
- szczurkowski for showcasing our games to the Polish community and providing initial and fundamental feedback without which our games would not be here today. Twitch here (Polish)
- Big Kyle for awesome and passionate feedback!
- lewi030 for making some mods!
- Asha Marie for sticking around the community and providing us with good feedback!
- TacticalFriedRice_ for calling us funny names in anger, but actually providing awesome feedback. You can check out his Twitch here
- pharaohsyris for letting us know about crashes, and helping us find the reasons for them!
Actually, right now! Simply go to the library, select the game by right clicking on it, then go to betas... and select the public beta! We aim to release the patch after some more thorough testing, and we're hoping you guys can provide lots of feedback! We aim for sometime next week.
