Balance:

• Decreased gold bounties by 500. We’re keeping an eye on the in-game economy, and determined that gold was a bit too plentiful.
• You can no longer recharge stored health while using a siege unit. i.e. you must leave the spawn as a non-siege unit to recharge your loadout health pool. This is to counter defensive siege camping.
• Entering a spawn point more than twice in a short period of time will invoke a cooldown. This is to counter cheesing the spawn invulnerability and defensive siege camping.
• Spawn invulnerability will now be removed as soon as you start moving or take an offensive action.
• Siege weapons do not get spawn invulnerability.
• Increased tower/spire projectile speed by 20%. We think they were a little too easy to dodge.
• Increased spawn times slightly (~1s on average). We may need to adjust this further, as it is can be a little difficult to end games at the moment.
• While sacrifice is active, you take 40% increased damage. Sacrifice is still very effective but is now a little easier to counter.
• Spawn flag capture mechanic changed to be ‘king of the hill’ style. Standing in the capture area will push the flag capture bar towards your team.
• Bunker now has a spawn flag on each hill.

Network:

• Tightened maximum lag compensation.
• Disabled simulated proxy interpolation (will instead forward simulate on client instead of interpolating to last known location).
• Added a warning on the FPS interface when your ping exceeds the melee compensated threshold (orange) or ranged compensated threshold (red).

Roles and Abilities:

• Players are now able to choose between 3 roles to help bring their team to victory: Attackers, Defenders, and Special Ops.
• The Commander can specify how many players they would like in each role, but ultimately the decision rests with each player, and the player can change their role at any time.
• Team wide orders (alt-click) are now issued to a particular role and are permanent until cancelled. They also support more detailed commands (up to 3 per role) e.g. your Defenders might be assigned to mine redstone at your expansion, your Attackers to bring siege to their expansion, and your Special Ops to target their workers in their main base.
• Individual direct orders work as previously, with the addition of a new ant trail to make these more noticeable to the player.
• Each role comes with an Ability which is charged by carrying out actions that award Score. These are designed to help you carry out your chosen assignment and their charge persists through death.
• Special Ops Ability "Leaf on the wind": Become one with your surroundings, gaining movement speed, stealth, health regen and protection from splash damage for 10 seconds. Attacking will cancel this effect.
• Defender Ability "Repair Rampage": Damaged structures make you furious! For the next 6 seconds your melee strikes restore enormous amounts of health to buildings.
• Attacker Ability "Bathe in Blood": Fueled by the blood of your enemies, you become enraged for 6 seconds. All damage you deal restores massive amounts of your health and you ignore a large amount of incoming damage.
• We'll be looking closely at feedback on this system and will make changes as needed.

AI Commander:

• Completely reworked version 2.0 of the AI Commander is now active in Standard mode games.
• Players can now vote on the strategy their commander should follow before the match begins.
• The following maps currently have 2 strategies per team: Bunker, Eden, Morning, Snowblind. We plan to add more strategy variety over time to keep things interesting in Standard mode.

AI Players:

• Player bots now interact with the role system.
• Improved defend behaviour so bots will, in order of priority, from most to least: attack, repair, mine in a radius around the target they are defending.
• Bots ignore gadgets for now to fix an exploit.

General:

• Recall: has improved sounds and effects, is now an ability and uses ability activation behaviour, and has an updated icon.
• Abilities are no longer part of the mouse wheel scroll selection (includes Recall).
• Quick Play: now searches in ping brackets (low to high) for the game with the highest player count that your party will fit in.
• New commander order beams.
• New commander order ant trails.
• Increased attenuation for melee impact sfx
• Reduced attenuation for Tempest sfx
• Updated election vote sound
• Updated Rocket Launcher assets.
• Updated Fireball assets.

Fixes:

• Fixed commander sometimes being unable to destroy a building.
• Commander ping wheel is now more reliable.
• Fixed bugs with practice mode settings.
• Fixed sound spam from error overlay.
• Fixed unreliable OOC buff duration.
• Improved reliability of state visual effects.
• Fixed music stopping and restarting.
• Fixed bots sometimes not facing a building when attacking it.
• Ancient arch prop fixed.
• Fixed sensitivity checkbox not saving if you didn't change anything else.
• Dead men don't spot.
• Made kill/death events details more reliable.
• Fixed item limits not being enforced sometimes.
• Fix officer aura decals showing up to enemies.

What are we doing next?:

• Network profiling and improvements.
• Performance profiling and improvements.
• Balance tweaks, the new changes will likely need adjustment.
• Finishing up some more strategies for the AI Commander.
• As always, fixing bugs.