The Landmark objectives will spawn tomorrow. In anticipation, we've rewritten the objective spawning script to be more consistent. You also get to play with delayed sieges and reinforcements (to help your sleep) and some combat balance changes.
Objective changes
Objectives will now spawn in an area a set distance from the center. This was previously a square around the map, which made the corner objectives awkwardly positioned. The center of the map will see an objective in each quadrant, but what comes where will be randomly determined.
Map with an indication of where objectives will spawn
Objectives now also spawn with a consistently diverse set of defenders, instead of having a single unit type a lot of the time. After testing, we've found that increasing the total army size to 9-10k for Landmarks makes them a nice challenge.
Delayed sieges and reinforcements
They're finally here, delayed sieges and reinforcements. You can now send out your army on an attack plan or to defend without needing an alarm.
Form for adding a delay to a movement
How does it work? When sending your units as Reinforce or Siege, you can set a delay in hours and minutes. If you want to time precisely, you still have to do the seconds manually.
If you send more than 3 siege attacks from a village on the same target in a single second, the server will spread them out so they can be sniped.
Conquest changes
Conquering the opponent and getting a nicely developed town in return is a lot of fun. However, we find that it's too strong in its current form. It takes a lot more effort to build a city than to conquer it, so we're changing things up a bit. With the addition of delayed attacks, this will only worsen the issue.
Screenshot of the new warning that a Town Hall level 10 is needed to conquer
- Loyalty has been increased from village tier * 100 to village tier * 150. That means a Village goes up to 150 loyalty, a Town to 300 and a City to 450. Loyalty generation is not affected.
- A Town Hall level 10 is now required on arrival to lower loyalty.
Unit balance
We've heard the constructive criticism about offensive troops, so we're bringing down the baseline cost per attack a little across the board. In return, we're making offensive units even worse at defending.
Changed unit stats. Green means an increase of stats or cost decrease) red indicates a reduction of stats.
- Reduce swordsman cost and defensive stats. Slightly more expensive than archer/horseman for attack power, but much better attack/food.
- Slightly modify archer stats and a small discount (-10 iron). Bring it on par with new horseman cost/attack.
- Reduce cav archer melee defense slightly, and range defense more. Also slightly reduced its stone and iron cost. It has a comparable cost/def while bringing it on par with the cataphract in terms of cost/attack. It also should counter itself less as a defender.
- Slightly increase horseman attack, reduce horseman defensive stats, and slightly reduce its wood cost
- Slightly reduce lancer attack to mirror the defensive rebalance of other cavalry.
- Increase knight attack, reduce defensive stats, reduce its cost. This places is between the archer/horseman/swordsman and cavalry archer/cataphract in terms of cost/attack.
- Slightly increase cataphract attack, reduce defensive stats.
Bugs squashed
- The wall is now added to the link when simulating a report
- Culture and science projects now reference the correct research again for a cost decrease
- Finally fixed the issue behind the village dropdown breaking on Firefox when a timer was active on the same page.
Hope to see you in game! Play Aether Kingdoms now!