General Development Updates in CS:M
Right folks, we’re well overdue one of these but with so much going on with the test and development in general it’s a little delayed, but buckle in because we’ve got a lot to cover.
All in all, we’re really happy with how things are going in our current test. We typically don’t share internal roadmaps but there’s a few key components that we have on high priority and are actively working on or have recently solved.
Memory Leak (Status — Solved)
Although in general, performance this time around has been much better than previous tests, there was one lingering issue, the memory leak. As of Feb 15th 2023, this issue has been resolved, it’s been around a day since the fix has been implemented and we haven’t seen a single spike when it comes to performance issues.
Other smaller issues such as scouts being stuck finalizing or consumption issues have been linked to our forced server restarts to combat the leak, going forward, these should be far less prevalent, if occurring at all.
City and Battle map visual rework (Status — In progress)
While this update doesn’t directly impact the actual gameplay in CS:M, it is something that we as a team are very keen on implementing. This however isn’t something as simple as replacing older models with new versions as we’ve taken some extra steps to make things feel more realistic.
One of the most common feedbacks received during our mid year testing in 2022 was that players really wanted their buildings to visually change as they were updated, and so, when we redesigned our models, we made sure to implement this feature. Our new buildings now have three different models associated with them that will change once they hit certain levels. Since the castle is so integral to player development and the heart of the city, we added some extra models here as you can see below:
We’ve also added depth to the city map, allowing for hills and rivers which makes it feel much more realistic then our previous flat mono tennis court style:
There’s even more subtle changes such as the land the buildings sit on upgrading over time, going from dirt to proper paved roads and small flowers growing on the grass.
UI Changes (Status — In progress)
This is another key feature of our game that we really want and need to get right. Some of these changes are for no other reason than to make the interface nicer, but there are some menus, that in their current iteration are difficult or unintuitive to navigate (we’re calling you out personally crafting menu!).
It would take a little too long to go through each of these individually, so with that in mind we will showcase a couple of the newer updates. The first is our research tree which although currently is fine in terms of functionality, it wasn’t looking as good as it could do and so our UI designers have given it a much needed face lift.
Going back to perhaps our most guilty offender when it comes to difficulty to use, let’s talk about the Forge. This menu has been completely reworked and now shows key information that was previously omitted, such as rarity, stats and a far more intuitive sorting system.
All in all, we’re very confident that the new UI should make gameplay far easier and eliminate a lot of the unnecessary mystery behind certain functions.
PVP (Status — In progress)
To preface this, we’re happy with PVP right now in terms of how it plays. Having said that, we are aware of the issue with manual PVP and the disconnect from the rest of the game. The main concern here is that the risk/reward is heavily weighted on the risk side in that you stand to lose everything but gain nothing, with the exception of bragging rights, but sadly that won’t pay your POPs.
This is something we’re going to be addressing over time through both short and long term solutions.
One of the solutions we will be bringing in on the sooner side of things is actually rewarding those who place at the top of the in game ladder. We will need to decide on things like prizes and how often each ladder lasts for but you can expect a separate post on that on the horizon. We are looking to make rewards a mix between both prizes with monetary value (NFTs) and exclusive cosmetics.
Another option, as we’ve previously mentioned is to consider bringing in items that can drop at the end of a battle which will help with the development of your city. This would require a lot of care as to not knock the game out of balance but to still make the risk desirable.
I’ll briefly mention automated player raids here too as it comes up quite a bit. These are not balanced yet, putting these into the game was more so to test the mechanic and to make sure it functioned as intended. Through multiple player feedback, we’ve identified some core issues with the mechanic such as it being too oppressive to an unprepared defender, potentially destroying their progress. It’s on our radar though and once we have a solid adjustment plan in place we will follow up with more information.
Hero Ability Update (Status — Completed pending minor changes.)
As mentioned in previous articles, we really wanted to go back and work on our Heroes. There was a clear power imbalance and we wanted to make the abilities more mechanically interesting. We’ve also changed hero ability values to scale with the rarity of the card.
We can probably expect to see some small tweaks with some of the % modifiers. Magnus however will be updated to a new passive.
Bandit Camps (Status — in progress)
We’re aware that the progression to unlock new land to build on is too easy. We are currently reworking this mechanic to be much harder, to the point where players should expect to fail attempts to down these, particularly when it comes to later camps. Right now, beating a camp is an empty feeling as all you have to do is show up. Ideally these camps should be a struggle to defeat, unlocking that land should feel like an achievement.
We’re taking a two pronged approach here. The first part is to greatly buff enemies. At the end of the day, a player is always going to outplay the AI in CS:M and so we need to even the playing field a little bit.
The second part will be the reinforcement mechanic. You will need to partake in multiple battles to capture a single camp, so if you get lucky with a cheesy map layout in your first battle, you won’t win the land from that alone.
There’s a couple of other details we’re going to leave out for now but you should expect this to be a difficult challenge.
In closing
Besides everything mentioned, we’ve also worked on a lot of other aspects of the game such as craftable equipment having unique names and named after actual weapons and armour that existed in the middle ages. There’s a little bit of cross over, but for the most part you will unlock and upgrade to these in the chronological order they were used in the Middle Ages. We’ve also renamed military squads to be clearer and are addressing other localization changes.
If you made it this far, well done! As always if you want to learn more join us on Discord, you can actually play CS:M right now if you apply to our whitelist channel!
