War for Athelay 1.0 Release

Hello everyone!

We’re happy to officially release War for Athelay out of Early Access and into the full release. For those who are new, War for Athelay is a turn-based strategy game where you send units into procedurally generated arenas to fight enemy units. To view more information, check out the project description page. 

For people who are returning, this final release is our biggest update to date. We have story content, a new chapter, balance changes, among other items we think help fill out the game.

New Enhancements

We’ve added a little bit of a story to help explain why you and your units are fighting. Now before you start a run and after you finish a run you’ll get a short description on what’s going on. With this story update we’ve also unlocked the 4th chapter of the game. Chapter 4 brings with it a new map, and 2 new bosses that you’ll be able to take on. On top of all of that, there is now a final boss arena in the game that you’ll only encounter when you meet certain conditions.

We’ve added a settings menu to the game. Below are the settings we currently have: 

• Keyboard Movement Speed
• Screen Edge Movement Speed
• Mouse Panning Movement Speed
• Keyboard Zoom Speed
• Scroll Wheel Zoom Speed
• Screen Edge Scrolling
• Scroll Inside Window Only
• Global Volume
• Music Volume
• Sound Effect Volume
• Graphics Quality
• Leave City Warning
• Upload Analytics

We have made multiple changes to hopefully make the experience of playing feel smoother and more complete. There are now transitions when changing scenes to make the flow from one location to the next feel less abrupt. Music now plays throughout the game, and attacks now have sound effects as well (the volume of both of which can be modified in the settings menu as explained above).

Minor Enhancements and Balance Changes

• Cities now have names to make them feel more unique.
• A new special tile, the turret, has been introduced where you can fire from 3-6 tiles away.
• Towns are now spawned more frequently.
• Rare items are now more common, and the rarity of some specific items has been altered.
• Events at the end of an arena should now show the unit list so you can determine if you want an outcome to affect a specific unit.
• Events are also now more frequent.
• A new desert tile has been added.
• Happiness will now increase to above 20 in an arena, but will be restricted to 20 when leaving an arena. This was done so if you have traits that boost happiness during an arena, they aren’t invalidated by the end of an arena lowering the unit’s happiness.
• Enemy stats and numbers have been altered for balance reasons.
• AI will only use one stun move per round to avoid stunning multiple of your units.
• Some items have new icons.
• When selecting to start a new game when you have a previous save, it will warn you before you accidentally overwrite your save.

Abilities and Traits

Healer, Hacker, Jet, Lancer, and Saber all have new special abilities while Jet, Hacker, Sniper, Healer, and Assassin have new traits. Assassin’s pickpocket has also been modified to have a rare chance of giving an item. 11 new general traits have also been added.

Events

In this last release, we have added 13 new events to the game. We hope these will add a little more variety to runs!

Bug Fixes

• Selecting enemy units to view their details no longer shows the previous ally unit special abilities.
• Drone scanner now works with the hover window.
• Active ability text sometimes being cut off was fixed.
• Fixed several issues causing Lancer’s Stand Ground to not work on some units.
• The unit hover panel should no longer sometimes appear during an enemy turn.
• Some of the slowdown that could happen in chapter 3 and onward should be resolved.
• The Skip to Boss event and item should now work chapters 2 and above.
• The unit list has been fixed for units with longer names when they’re at the training ground.
• AI healers should now start moving to the player units if they’re out of attack range and there’s no other AI units.
• Fixed an issue regarding hover cards appearing off the side of the screen on larger resolutions.
• Reinforcement fighters no longer gain experience and level up.
• AI fighters no longer receive general traits on level ups.
• Units being stunned at the beginning of the turn when they weren’t actually stunned should now be resolved.
• The tile hover appearing during the aggro phase of the player turn should be resolved.
• Field medic now appropriately only adds 5% health back to the player units instead of 50%.
• Using special abilities like stand ground where you have to click at the unit’s current location should no longer require you to alternate between selecting the unit and the tile itself.