The bracket can be accessed via this link.

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Current bracket can be seen here.

The map list for each round will be announced on Friday.

Sign up in the commments!

Jumpjets

Jumpers can now jump onto wreckage, map features and structures. The Jumper will slam into the structure, possibility sustaining damage, and slide down the outside onto the ground. Use at your own risk because your units could slid somewhere inaccessible. On the upside they can just jump out if they are stuck. The jump UI colours have been shuffled around slightly to indicate when a jump command will hit a structure.

The purpose of this change is to fix two annoying limitations. Skuttles should be able to jump onto spire turret and it makes sense to sacrifice one Jack to kill a buried Singularity Reactor. Both of these things are now possible.

Antinukes

Antinukes have been improved with consistent behaviour as well as UI improvements to tell you exactly when your nuke will be intercepted. The switch to this engine version caused antinukes to make a poor attempt at stopping nukes which pass through their coverage. This behaviour is now fixed, antinukes make a very competent attempt to stop nukes passing through their coverage.

The important balance change here is that antinukes block every nuke which will pass over their coverage, not just nukes which will impact within their coverage.

Minor

[Spoiler]

Fixes

[Spoiler]

The image from the newly released map, Incandecence.

Balance

Dagger has its nerf partially reverted because apparently the metagame needed much more time to adjust:

• Cost 90 -> 85

Sniper nerfed in a way which spares mid cost units and makes Hammer look more attractive:

• Reload 15 -> 18

Recluse has a small buff to see if it can regain usefulness:

• Cost 300 -> 280

Moderator has a larger buff because it has always had trouble usefulness. The aim is to see how Jumpbots play with a powerful Moderator:

• Cost 300 -> 240

Firewalker now sprays many small fires over a slightly large area. This causes more intense fire damage at short range and increases its damage against shields. The rediculusness of the change is to see if Firewalker can be useful.
* AoE 256 -> 128
* Projectiles 2 -> 10
* Increased spray angle on projectiles.
* Duration 20 -> 16
* Cost 1200 -> 900

Fixed and slightly buffed gravity guns to compensate for engine changes.

Aircraft non-combat regeneration now activates after a period of not taking any damage (this is consistent with land units). Previously aircraft would have to be landed to regenerate. This is important for Banshee which has Glaive-like quick regen (10 HP/s after 5s); all other aircraft have standard 5 HP/s after 60s regen.

Sea Balance

As we all know, sea balance is quite different to ordinary balance. For this set of changes the aim is to make torpedoes good to use while reducing the scalability of underwater armies poorly due to low range. This is acheived by giving most torpedoes decent damage and a lot less range.

Scallop redesigned as an effective underwater riot:
* Much more able to hit fast things
* AoE 64 -> 100
* Damage 180 -> 360
* Reload 1 -> 2
* Range 430 -> 230
* Sonar Range 300 -> 350

Hunter also redesigned as an effective riot with can outrange Scallops:
* Health 1850 -> 1200
* Damage 96 -> 186
* Impulse significantly reduced.
* Range 340 -> 350
* Reload 1.4 -> 2.2
* Improved tactical AI

Typhoon speed buff (otherwise Hunter beats it):
* Speed 2.5 -> 3.0

Reduced Snake wackiness. Less of a glass cannon and more of a normal unit:
* Health 375 -> 600
* Range 290 -> 210
* Reload 7.5 -> 5.5

Enforcer:
* Cost 900 -> 800

UI

Banisher now has overkill prevention

Replay control improved

• speed buttons show current speed
• there is an optional progress bar
• clicking the progress bar jumps to the selected time

Misc

[Spoiler]

Bugfixes

[Spoiler]

======= Version 1.3.5.1 =======

Version 1.3.5.1 was live for most of May but did not receive a release post at the time. Most of the changes were minor and making pictures is hard. The changelog is included here for completeness

Balance

• Roaches and Ticks are now visible when ejected from a transport mid-air
• Gauss footprint: 2×2 -> 3×3
• Jump cooldown obeys status effects and is preserved through morph
• Submarines taken out of water are targetable by land weapons and receive full damage from them
• Quill now has a nano-arm animation, replacing arbitrary 2s delay before building

=== UI ==

• Added Insert and Delete keybinds for building rotation. They coexist with the previous keybinds, this is to fix the German keyboard problem
• Ravager now skirmed by Slasher Tactical AI
• Added an option for mex circles to show owner colour
• Unit Marker improved: added factories to the mark list and you can now pick which units to mark
• Reorganised the help section of the F10 menu. There’s now a basic ingame wiki here alongside the unit list
• Various improvements to Central Build AI

Misc

[Spoiler]

Bugfixes

[Spoiler]

3. 2. 1. 0. And we have a takeoff! The end of May closes by, which can only mean we are going to have a go at yet another 1v1 tournament. It will be starting on 30th of May, as always at 10 AM UTC. Registration will close on 29th of May, at 23.59 UTC. However due to unavailability of Anarchid the tourney will be hosted by Orfelius.

Tournament format & rules:
– Double elimination
– Random seeding
– First map of each round is predetermined. After the first game, the losing player will suggest two different maps, from which the winner will choose the map for the next game. Maps must originate from 1v1 map pool.
– All winners bracket games will be best of 3 (including finals). All losers bracket games will be best of 1 with the exception of the losers finals (bo3).
– It is possible to substitute for players who don’t show up. If you have signed up, make sure to show up on time. Those who fail to show up will likely be subbed out by 10:30 UTC.
– The players coming first, second and third will receive special unique collectible awards to their player profile, and receive tournament points which will at the year’s end determine the year’s altogether best tournament player.

First maps for each round are as follows:

Round 1
Cooper_Hill_TNM02-V1

Round 2 and losers round 1
Quicksilver

Round 3 and losers round 2
Trojan_Hills_v02

Losers round 3
Hide_and_Seek_v03

Semifinals
wanderlust_V01

Finals
Forgotten_Crossing_v1

Current bracket can be seen here.

Sign up in the comments and good luck to all of the participants!

Current bracket can be seen here.

Sign up in the commments!

Engine

The greatest recent advance has been the permanent adoption of the latest engine version. Nothing is “official” but with week of successful use it does not look like we are going back.

Here is a list of some of the readily visible things that the engine does:

• Desyncs seem to be much rarer and if they do occur the engine devs will care.
• Gunships can crash when they die. Just like planes.
• Pathfinding updates much faster. Earlier units would take a while to notice that a ramp exists and use it in their pathfinding.
• Units don’t get stuck on terrain. In situations where they previously got stuck they now slide off.
• The line of sight view looks a lot nicer.
• Units can be prevented from occasionally firing sideways. It has been applied to Big Bertha, HLT, Grizzly, Penetrator, Annihilator and Starlight.
• Units can be told to ignore the terrain while firing. This is useful when they either have a massive spread or enough deformation to knock down any wall.
• Everything costs exactly how much it says it does. In 91.0 the costs were off by 16/15.
• Units are ‘forgotten’ by enemies much more rapidly when they cloak. In 91.0 a Scythe would be targeted by a Raven or Swift for so long that it looked like the plane was cheating. Now units forget after a few seconds.
• With bombers, queuing anything after an attack ground order does not destroy the attack ground order.
• Heatrays now do their correct distance-reduced damage against shields (previously they always did full damage).
• Transports no longer randomly de-exist their cargo if they die over blocking terrain.

There are many things behind the scenes in the update that make it easier to develop and could lead to more features. For example save games are now possible.

Balance

Not much has been happening in balance recently. The recent tournament went well in terms of unit diversity and the games looked very good. Vehicles were a bit dominant but Veh/Tank/Hover have a history of moving around a very fine balance point.

• Raven change from 10 days ago: Dives is slightly steeper but costs a lot of speed.
• Applied overkill prevention to Slasher.
• Doomsday Machine can now shoot at planes.
• Hacksaw missile turnrate increased slightly.

Defender buff:

• Damage 103.1 -> 104

The recent damage rounding changes resulted in Defender dealing slightly too little damage.

Brawler and Warrior gained 5.5% and 9% extra DPS that was taken from them in the transition between engines.

### Graphics
Now that most people can run the latest engine some possibly problematic features can be re-enabled. Explosion shockwave distortions are now back after a few month of absence. Also:

• Fixed many particle effects (shimmers, plane jets) being invisible for spectators and some players.
• Improved flaming units particle usage.
• Improved Catapult missile effects.

Interface

Here are some recent changes to the interface:

• The minimap has the option to fade on zoomout.
• Camera shake is configurable.
• Metal spots are displayed as white when unclaimed and have the option to show teamcolour.
• Better support for translations (the new engine supports utf8).
• Structure terraform can be activated by holding left mouse button and not moving the cursor for a second while placing a structure (the not moving time is configurable).
• Structures with absolutely no reason to have the Wait command no longer have the Wait command.

Fixes

• Fixed Reef drifting.
• Fixed Geothermal being difficult to target.
• Fixed Tidal Generator hitvolume.
• Fixed set target stipple weirdness.