Iron Harvest DevBlog #38 - May 2021

Operation Eagle Is A Go! Swoop Over Ice And Deserts With This New Faction DLC!
A.I. Has Also Been Improved Among Other Fixes

• News: Operation Eagle, Has Landed!
• News: Templin Institute Lore Video
• News: Usonia Unit Breakdown
• News: Story Trailer
• News: Goodies Giveaways and Streams
• News: Rookie Tournament
• Info: Changelog 22

If you own the main game and buy Operation Eagle, or have the Deluxe edition (not Kickstarter or backers edition), then you’ll unlock:

• The new Usonia Faction with over 20 new units
• The Usonia Campaign (Singleplayer & Coop) with 7 brand new missions and more than 25 minutes of new cinematics
• Three new playable heroes
• New flying units for all factions
• New anti-air defences for all factions
• New multiplayer maps
• New playable allies in the Usonia campaign
• Dozens of new skins & seasons to come

Operation Eagle will also be standalone exclusively on Steam
You’ll find it here on the main Iron Harvest Store Page

This means if you buy Operation Eagle, but not the main game, you can:

• Play the full Usonia Faction Campaign
• Play all the new multiplayer/skirmish/custom matches maps
• Play on the new maps as host of a custom game
• Play Polania campaign missions 1-5 (Tutorial)
• Play multiplayer/skirmishes with Usonia or Polania
• Choose from a selection of multiplayer/skirmish and challenge maps

To play as Usonia on GoG and Epic Games Store, you will need to already own the base Iron Harvest game when you buy Operation Eagle

It is always a pleasure to work with the astute archivists of the Templin institute to add more flavour and lore to the amazing world of 1920+. They’ll be airdropping the latest lore later today (Thursday May 27th) at 21:00 CEST and Streaming an hour later.

Familiarize yourself with the forces of Usonia with this faction reveal video.

As with all things Iron Harvest, Operation Eagle will take you on an expansive story arc where morality is neither black or white. Will Usonia be conquer or oppressor?

As a thank you to our community, we are offering many physical goodies from the Deep Silver Collector’s Edition. These are different to, and available separately from, the backers rewards which will hopefully begin shipping this summer.

Click Here To Enter The Goodies Giveaway!

Join Sir Tobi and The Iron Doctor as they fly high and offer plenty of chances to win physical goodies. Join in the shenanigans here!

We’ll also be celebrating with our crazy friends the Lords Of Gaming on the Iron Lords podcast. We had a ton of laughs last time and we’re sure this time, with the added fun of Usonia, it’ll be a blast ;) Join us here!

While airships are cool, one of the best things about Iron Harvest is the community and the events you organize. The pro and casual competitive scene has evolved and grown a lot since release. It’s continues to be our great pleasure to watch and support this.

Click here to read the rules

With the arrival of Usonia, the multiplayer game has been thrown wide open and so there is everything to play for. We’re looking forward to seeing your strategies adapt.

Click to find the great harvesters of the Community Tournament Discord Channel. GLHF!

Thanks to players feedback, we’ve implemented a ton of changes to improve the game experience when playing against A.I.

• We’ve reworked how the A.I. chooses which units are most effective for the current task or for destroying certain units
• The A.I. is more responsive when they detect hostile forces and groups start building combat strategies immediately
• We’ve revamped the A.I. at all difficulty levels to make them more distinct from each other. In particularly, Easy and Insane are affected the most, with Easy no longer idling for extended durations, while Insane will put up much more of a fight throughout the entire duration of a match
• We’ve tweaked A.I. at all difficulties to use unit abilities where available and applicable
• The A.I. now features an improved decision making in combat situations, resulting in better strategies when to push or to retreat
• Unit A.I. is now prevented from relentlessly chasing retreating enemy units. They will break off pursuit after a brief period if they can't kill their target
• Increased the chance that the A.I. will use small unit groups to quickly conquer objectives
• A.I. now deals with barbwire more intelligently, either cutting or navigating around it
• Reduced the chances that A.I. will all-in rush your base at the start of the game

As a result of all these improvements we’ve had to adjust the main campaign maps to restore their original spirit. This increased the general campaign difficulty which we then reduced again through other means while still keeping the smarter A.I. and enemy behaviours. Therefore, many old campaign maps are now more responsive, dynamic and fun than ever before!

General Changes:

• Fixed a bug so that Gunter can no longer target allies, and himself, with his punch ability
• Fixed an exploit that allowed building multiple HQs in team games
• Tons of smaller fixes and improvements

These changes and improvements regrettably, but unavoidably, mean that in-mission saved games files from before this update are invalidated. We apologize for this inconvience but campaign progression is unaffected.

Balance Changes:

For skirmish/multiplayer, Usonia changes everything. Everyone will be experimenting with them to figure out what works best. As the chaos on the battlefield unfolds, we will be monitoring the game closely, collecting game data and making assessments. It will require time for the dust to settle, but no doubt we will have to modify the games balance once an accurate picture emerges.

Stay up to date and get involved with all things Iron Harvest by joining us on:

Our Official Discord Channel!

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Devs are also streaming on Twitch!