We’re celebrating with a quality-of-life update based on your player feedback that’s intended to address a few of the issues and suggestions that you’ve brought forth to us via the “Voice of the Commander” trackers. Don’t see the update you were hoping for in this week’s release? Fear not, as there is still plenty more to come.
Acoustic Mine balance tweaks
We have heard your feedback loud and clear, and made some balance tweaks to the Acoustic Mines. They now have the following effects:
Stun now affects infantry and vehicles instead of just infantry
Damage debuff now affects all unit types instead of just infantry.
Range debuff now affects all unit types instead of just infantry and vehicles.
Speed debuff now affects infantry as well as vehicles.
Game improvements
And that’s not all, Commander! We made some tweaks to the UI as well! Any “On Impact” effects that have either 0 power or 0 duration at the current level or next level will not show the stat any longer.
The hover tooltip text for On Impact text will now list target types it has no effect against. Taking the Acoustic Mine’s changes above, for example, it now shows which targets its doesn’t have any effect on, if any.
Only air units are immune, as vehicles are now affectedRange reduction now affects all units
Hey Commanders! Our engineers just had a breakthrough on our StingerTurrets, and they can now be made stronger than ever. The Stinger Turret level cap has been increased to Level 18!
To unlock it, purchase the Stinger Turret Blueprints from the ONP Store, research the tech in your Weapons Lab, and then Equip the new Weapon to one of your Turret Platforms!
Hey Commanders! We hope you’re enjoying your Black Friday weekend. To help celebrate, we’re offering 50%-Off a one-time select gold purchase in between November 26th, 2020 to December 3rd, 2020.
Simply login and follow the “Special Offer” prompts to the Gold Menu to take advantage of your offer before the weekend is over. Scoop up that gold while it’s hot!
New Stinger Turret
The Stinger Turret is here, and is now available for deployment to your Turret Platforms.
While unable to hit infantry or vehicles, this long-range FIM-92 Stinger emplacement can make short work of enemy air units!
Level 1 Stinger Turret Stats
To unlock it, purchase the Stinger Turret Blueprints from the ONP Store, research the tech in your Weapons Lab, and then Equip the new Weapon to one of your Turret Platforms!
Armed TOC LRAD Upgrades
And that’s not all, commanders! Our engineers just hit another breakthrough for the Armed TOC LRAD! Turn your Tactical Ops Center defensive machine, with the TOC LRAD now being upgradeable to Level 20!
Purchase the blueprint in the ONP Store during an ONP Event week, activate it from your Warehouse, and then click on your TOC followed by “Change Weapon” similar to how you would if you were arming a turret head to a turret emplacement.
Welcome to Season 20! Going into the new season, all Leaderboards and PvP Points are reset, meaning that it’s a fresh start for YOUR Clan to be the new the dominating Clan of Gundar, and win the Seasonal Clan Tournament Grand Prize of 10,000 Gold for your Clan at the end of the Season in 3 months from now. Does your Clan have what it takes?
Elite Javelin Gunner L1 Unit Equipment
Gundar Arms Industries is rolling out a new set of Unit Equipment for the Elite Javelin Gunner, available this week on the front page of the Event Prizes Store:
Elite Javelin Gunner Laser Sights I – Laser homing technology that increase range by +3%
Elite Javelin GunnerBallistic Armor MK I – Improved armor coating reduces damage taken by -10%
Elite Javelin GunnerAP Ammunition I – The newest grade armor-piercing ammunition increases damage by +7%
Quality of life patrol
And that’s not all, Commanders! Our team has made a few fixes that should make for a smoother gameplay experience.
Achievement names that were overrunning the interface window have been squashed down so they fit.
Upgrading units and technologies have been reorganized to make better use of available interface space. The text should no longer spill off the right side of the screen any more.
Maxed Transmitters can control 11 quarries instead of 10, but the Regional Map would only show you 10. It now scrolls if you hover over the “Quarries” button and use the mousewheel, so you can see all 11 quarries.
Season 19 Tournament winners
Looking for the Season 19 Tournament winners list? Don’t worry. It will be revealed soon. Stay tuned for another Patch Notes coming later today!
From October 8th – October 15th, 2020, rally your Clan and head to the regional map for your chance to be the strongest Clan of Season 19!
Be one of the Top Clans with the most Clan PvP Points to win between 3,000-10,000 Gold, divided evenly among the top 10 members of your clan.
Tournament ends on October 15th, 2020 at 1700 GMT, at which point winners will be announced, prizes awarded, and leaderboards will be reset for the new season. It’s important to note that you should stay in the same Clan through the end of the tournament and for at least one hour afterward, until at least 1800 GMT to ensure your Clan’s prizes are scored correctly.
Season 19 Opens: October 15th, 2020
The new season will begin immediately after the end of the tournament.
Please be reminded that PvP points can only be accumulated on “anti-alt” maps.
Game improvements
And that’s not all, Commanders! TOC 12 bases just became tougher to crack. The limits on the Quadmount, HEL, TOW, and Howitzer turrets have all been raised to 4. To compensate for the higher power requirements, a new generator level is now available.
For a sneak peak at what’s coming up next season in Battlehouse games, check out the Developer Roadmap in last week’s edition of the Battlehouse Dev Blog.
To see where the design team currently stands on various Community suggested features and game improvements, check out the Thunder Run Voice of the Commander Tracker (new tracker coming soon).
The Elite Javelin Gunner L6+ Stat Mod Blueprint is now available in the Event Prizes store, allowing you to upgrade the Elite Javelin Gunner’s Health, Damage, Mine Defense, and Blast Defense stats to Level 6. Unlock the blueprint as part of this week’s ONP Event by spending ONP in the Event Prizes store!
Don’t have the Elite Javelin Gunner yet? Check it out in action here:
Mine updates
And that’s not all, Commander! All mines have had their build times capped at 20 minutes per mine. This will significantly reduce the time it takes to restore your base defenses. For comparison, the Anti-Tank Mine took 180 minutes per mine at max level.
Finally, a brand new mine type will be coming in late October. Stay tuned!
Hey Commanders! Not too long ago, we had our Hot Summer Sale that ran for a few days. The heat apparently messed up with some of our systems, leading to some players having trouble getting their hands on the sweet, sweet deals.
For that reason, we’re bringing it back this week!
For the next three days, we’re offering 50% off gold sale! Simply login and follow the “Special Offer” prompts to the Gold Menu to take advantage of your offer. Scoop up that gold while it’s, well, hot!
Welcome to the 15th 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 and Staff. This week, it’s bh-cameron’s turn:
It’s been a little while since we’ve been able to grace you all with a Dev Blog, as the current Developers Roadmap has temporarily been “on hold” while we continue to press forward and make solid progress on our “Project New Horizons”. Since we don’t have a lot of immediate content projects to talk about right now, the purpose of this particular dev blog entry is going to be to touch on a long standing game issue that has causing a lot of player confusion for some time now (and stirring up a ruckus recently on our Discord server): suspected battalion movement/attack cheats on the regional map.
Players call this suspected cheat many things when they see it happen: “batt skipping”, “batt jumping”, “batt flickering”, “batt speed hacking”, etc. But the one thing all of these instances have in common is that a player who’s trying to attack another player’s battalion on the regional might occasionally see instances of “battalion lag” wherein it can appear as if the batt you’re trying to attack skips ahead by a hex or two, or skips back by several hexes. This often allows the other player the ability to attack your battalion before you can even get to them and get a chance to click “Attack”.
What we want to officially drive home today is the explanation that this type of battalion behavior is 99% of the time NOT a cheat, and is usually just the result of a little bit of client-side browser lag. This situation can occur on the regional map when players use the “halt” command on a battalion before it reaches it’s destination. If the player seeing the “batt skip” is either running on a slow connection, or experiencing any temporary connection hiccups in their browser it, it can result in that player’s browser taking several milliseconds to properly update the map with the halted battalions true location as it’s stored in the game server.
Here’s a more specific breakdown of how it all works:
Player A tells batt A to go from X0,Y0 to X100,Y50.
Server accepts instruction, tells the rest of the world what’s happening.
Player B sees batt A start heading from X0,Y0 to X100,Y50.
Player A tells batt A to “Halt” when it’s at X10, Y10.
In the time it takes for Player A’s “Halt” command to get from Player A to the server to player B, player B’s client keeps animating batt A’s expected progress towards X100,Y50.
Server tells the rest of the world that batt A has stopped at X10, Y10.
Player B’s client has batt A at X20, Y20 when it gets the server message that it actually stopped at X10, Y10. It appears to “skip” to X10, Y10, even though it was never actually at X20, Y20.
All of this being said, it’s simply not a cheat, but rather just a side-effect of how the regional map systems were designed and how they’re currently intended to behave.
As Battlehouse Developer bh-nirgal once said:
“You absolutely, 100% cannot rely on the apparent travel speed of other players on the regional map. The server and the client constantly disagree on where something should be. When the server tells the browser what the actual position should be, a battalion will leap ahead to get to where it’s supposed to be. The regional map is not and never was intended for simultaneous PvP. It’s for moving units around to attack AI bases, quarries, strong points, and parked battalions. The game is designed around Player vs Environment content and Player vs Player-Owned-Environment-Controlled content. The underlying technology just doesn’t support a true head to head game. You can play battalion fights if you want, but you’re going to constantly see things that look like bugs or cheats. The only thing that’s meant to be consistent is your own battalion’s speed.”
bh-nirgal (Battlehouse Dev)
Now that you understand why this isn’t a cheat, you might now asking why we don’t change how the regional map works, or why we don’t update battalion attack rules to make these instances less common. We’ve thought about this a lot, and after several team chats on the topic, all of the potential solutions that we can think up all come with their own suite of side-effects:.
We could remove the Halt command. (“Choose wisely before calling a battalion!”) But does anyone really want to lose their ability to halt a battalion?
We could stop animating battalions, and replace “ghost” battalions at a destination with a generic marker until they’re actually in place, but this would make the regional map less exciting for many.
As we already do in Firestrike: We could add a cooldown similar to FS, wherein a battalion has to undergo a few second long “regrouping” phase before new orders can be given. The current timer in FS is 5s, but we’re open to trying a duration that’s less drastic. As we’ve already heard from many players throughout Battlehouse games over the years though, “regrouping” cool-downs aren’t the answer.
Let us know what you think of these few possible solutions, and feel free to also let us know some ideas of your own over on Discord!
That’s all for now, Commanders. Keep up the good fight! And can we please cut back on the amount of “They’re hacking the regional map!” tickets that our lovely Player Support team has to deal with week to week?
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 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!
Hey Commanders! How are you all doing this summer? It’s really hot, right? You know what else is hot? Our Hot Summer Sale!
For the next three days, we’re offering 50% off gold sale! Simply login and follow the “Special Offer” prompts to the Gold Menu to take advantage of your offer. Scoop up that gold while it’s, well, hot!
New Stat Upgrade Levels
All units with Stat Upgrades can now increase those stat upgrades up to L7. Head over to the store to buy the new L7 Stat blueprints!
Maximum level cap on building stat upgrades for the Weapons Factory and Leader Barracks has been increased from L2 to L3 with Weapons Factory stat upgrades increasing mine crafting speed.
Strike Squadron Upgrades
The Kiowa Strike Squadron is ready to add new members! You can purchase the Kiowa Strike Squadron L6 blueprint in the store, which will allow you to upgrade the Kiowa Strike Squadron Quantity up to L10.
More game improvements
The “Produce” and “SpeedUp” buttons on the Weapon Factory showed different times remaining for Mines or Ambushes being crafted. They now both display the same correct time remaining.
The “Upgrade bar” was showing levels for buildings, units, and technologies that were not currently in the game. The biggest offender was the Level 9Weapon Factory which reported that it enabled the Level 9 Ambush Point Quantity upgrade, despite it not currently being available in the game. The upgrade bar now pays attention to whether or not a level is available to players.
