Iron Harvest Change Log #17

Greetings Harvesters,

today we’re happy to implement many improvements that respond directly to the community’s feedback. This month we’re focusing on gameplay with today’s update largely focusing on infantry and the early game and general improvements regarding responsiveness and gameplay feel.

Improved Response Time

One of the key piece of feedback we received from you is that you wanted faster response times between you issuing orders and the units undertaking them. Thanks, and now we have done just that. Responses time has been roughly halved, so your orders should feel slicker.

Game Core Changes

This involved hundreds of behind the scenes fixes and improvements. All the interesting and relevant changes are listed in “General Changes”.

Importantly, with all of today’s changes it is inevitable that your previous in-mission saved game files will be invalidated. However, your general game progress will be unaffected.

General changes:

• Infantry can now fire at targets that were initially blocked by resource and production buildings, aid stations and bunkers. This should improve combat close to buildings and in bases considerably.
• Smaller mechs can now crash through smaller gate structures.
  
• Mech with indirect weapons (that ignore line of sight) can no longer fire at targets when they disappear into the Fog of War.
• Resolved an issue that could lead to online connection issues after an hour of continuous gameplay.
• Fixed an issue that prevented Wilhelm from aborting his “Lay Waste” ability correctly.
• Improved the animation for Zubov’s “Death from Above” ability.
• “Jagged Peaks” 2v2 minimap updated to correct inaccuracies.
• Fixed an issue whereby weapon systems would not abort their retreat if all paths to base were blocked.
• “Isegrim” cannons no longer twitch and behave oddly while the mech is idle.
• Fixed an issue that prevent the Rusviet Revolution bonus campaign missions from loading properly.
• Fixed an issue preventing mouse scrolling unless cursor placed directly over menu window.
• General volumetric effects improved.
  
• Prevented the strategic positions indicator from appearing at the start of Dominance mode games.
• Prevented Anna, when playing on easy difficulty, in the 1st Polanian Mission “Anna’s Shot” from being able to target and attack the first boy she encounters after he’s been defeated. Who’s the bully now huh?!
• The boys in the 1st Polanian Mission “Anna’s Shot” now correctly become invisible when running into the Fog of War.

Balance changes:

We’ve completed our assessment of the games balance based on your feedback and the recent tournaments. This week largely focuses on the infantry gameplay experience. We’ll then monitor things over the next two weeks and make adjustments and more mech focused changes in the next update.

Headquarter units: The meta of building your Rifleman, Stormtrooper, or Vanguards until a player reach pop cap has stolen much of the attention that other infantry units deserve. Removing them from the HQ puts them in line with the other infantry to choose from when the barracks are built. Therefore:

• Removed Rifleman, Stormtrooper, and Vanguards from being built at the HQ.

Starting squads: To accommodate for the loss and to speed up the very similar first minutes of gameplayer we added another squad to the starting units. Therefore:

• Added one extra Riflemen/Vanguard/Stormtrooper squad to all skirmish and multiplayer maps.

General infantry cost rebalanced: due to their dying so quickly to advanced mechs, infantry can be a sunken cost during the mid and late game. We also want to give players more reason to upgrade their barracks and better reflect the units relative power levels.

Therefore in the basic barracks:

• Riflemen/Stormtrooper/Vanguard cost increased from 200 to 225 Iron.
  
• Grenadiers (all factions) cost increased from 5 to 10 Oil.
• Saxony medic cost decreased from 150 to 100 Iron.
• Rusviet flamethrowers cost decreased from 275 to 225 Iron.
• Polanian machine gunners cost decreased from 300 to 275 Iron.

Therefore, all tier 1 infantry units become cheaper to build in the Advanced Barracks:

• Engineers cost decreased from 150 to 100 Iron.
  
• Riflemen/Stormtrooper/Vanguard cost reduced from 225 to 125 Iron.
• Grenadiers (all factions) cost reduced from 250 to 150 Iron and 10 to 5 Oil.
• Saxony medic cost decreased from 100 to 75 Iron.
• Rusviet flamethrowers cost decreased from 225 to 150 Iron
• Gunner cost decreased from 275 to 175 Iron and 20 to 15 Oil.
.

Anna and Wojtek: Anna’s damage against armoured targets felt too high and Wojtek just wouldn’t die even after Anna was defeated. Therefore:

• Anna’s damage against light armored targets reduced from 30 to 20.
• Wojtek’s HP Reduced HP from 500 to 400.

Lech Kos: with the new abilities, Lech Kos has become a power house that now deservers the reserve cost of 2 coins.

• Riflemen suppression: Rifleman were able to suppress more effective than other quick firing weapons. Reducing this effect should feel more intuitive now:
• Reduced suppression per bullet from 6 to 3.

PZM-9 "Strażnik" (spider mech): the use of this mech was far too flexible for its reserve cost when compared to its Saxony counterpart. Therefore:

• Increase reserve cost from 2 to 3 coins.

PZM-16 "Żółw" (troop transport): Walking and firing is great, but it is still very hard for players come up with counterplay even when prepared. Therefore:

• Reduced HP from 900 to 800.

PZM-24 "Tur" (mega mech): One part of making infantry more viable for the whole match is to reduce the Tur’s ability to wipe them out in one shot. Therefore the Tur’s splash damage against unarmoured & splash radius has been reduced:

• Damage decreased from 80 to 45.
• Splash Radius reduced from 7 to 5.5.

Zubov: Jump time adjusted to better fit the animation:

• Air time increased from 3.19 to 3.6 seconds.

Season 3 Begins

We hope you had fun unlocking all the collectables in Season Two. It ends Thursday at 16:00 CET. Congrats to NOAH, our season 2 winner, and all those who made our competitive scene more lively and interesting this season with tournaments etc. It’s great to see our mech vets helping out newer players in our Discord and subReddit communities.

All ranked players will receive an in-game title reflecting your achievement.

Everyone who ranked gold or higher has now just unlocked the “Wrought Iron” skin for the Rusviet Nagan (Revolver) mech. You should receive it in the next 48 hours. Nagan lie, it looks even sexier in black. Congrats all.

A new season begins with more rewards for you to unlock. Unlock everything and you’ll receive the Fire Truck “Tur” skin seen here on the right.

The ranked race to the top has also begun. Today’s changes means new metas are waiting to be established and so there is everything to play for.

With early gameplay now improved, the mechs are getting ready for a tune up!

In 2 weeks: Revive allied Heroes, reduced Heroes Fog of war reveal and more Gameplay improvements.

Stay up to date as we continue to progress by joining us on:

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