📢 Attention Thunder Run and Days of Valor Commanders:
Welcome to the 8th installment of the Battlehouse Dev Blog, a place where fans of all Battlehouse games can enjoy regular behind the scenes peaks into the minds of Battlehouse Developers. Without further adieu, here’s bh-nirgal:
Thunder Run and Days of Valor Developments
There was a lot of active discussion on Discord over the weekend about our plans to “squash” some of the development time for things in the game. I first mentioned this in the inaugural blog post back in September. Instead of a link, here’s the original text:
- “The third project, slated for an uncertain future date, is a rebalancing of the TOC tiers. This is one of the less-defined plans, and player feedback is highly encouraged. Ideally, I’d like to see the average player base level increase so that the top-tier players have worthwhile opponents to fight and the average player can hold their own. This would involve reducing research and building times for lower building levels and lower tech levels, and would involve reducing prices for older blueprints (or removing them altogether for some lower turret levels).”
Some veteran players expressed concern about the impact on the game, especially if it means that alt accounts can get powered up too quickly.
These are some fair concerns. It probably would be disruptive to significantly lower the time needed to research offensive technologies by too much.
We’re still a ways out from the rebalancing of lower content tiers, but it is probably best to focus on infrastructure, such as building upgrade times and costs, rather than on force projection, such as unit research and build times.
The one category that this probably shouldn’t apply is what we internally call “core units”. These are the units that you do not need a blueprint to unlock: the Rifleman, Mortarman, Javelin Gunner, Sniper, HMMWV, M1064, Stryker, M109 Paladin, M2 Bradley, M1 Abrams, OH-58 Kiowa, AH-1 Cobra, and AH-64 Apache.
These are weaker units, but in some cases they take a significant amount of time and resources to unlock, to the point that only extreme completionists are bothering to do so for achievements. Given the wealth of premium content, we’ll probably need to spend some time making a few these less-used “core units” more accessible to players.
Discord Dev Tracker Recap
It was a busy week in Discord. Here’s the recap of the dev-tracker channel:
- Nirgal kept us updated on work done on the L5 Leaders for TR and DV, and also mentioned that h’d started the next FS content tier.
- Nirgal completed several bugfixes, which included some issues with the new TOC12 weapons, the C-RAM turret, and several AI maps
- We got a sneak peek at some of the in-progress work on the L5 leaders.
- Nirgal reported that the L5 leaders patch was done and being reviewed by the rest of the dev team prior to deployment, and announced the order of work on the next several projects.
Stay up to date every day on what’s being developed on the dev-tracker channel here.
Looking for an update on where the Dev Team currently stands regarding various recent community suggestions? Check out our “Voice of the Commander” trackers here:
Like what you see in this Dev Blog, or have suggestions on things you’d like to see addressed in our “Voice of the Commander” trackers? Let us know over on our Thunder Run Discord Server!