Ancient Warfare 2 Devblog 15

Posted on 31 December 2016 by Jannik

Custom battle improvements, performance improvements, more building parts, traps, animal riding, new units and more...

The custom battle editor is still the main game mode, so I decided to improve it.

As you can see in the video, the loading of battles will now be async and visible
Destroying units will now run async to, which allows better and safer destruction of objects
If you destroy a tower, the units from it will now be placed on the terrain instead of staying in the air
Deleted trees will now regrow, if the tower/building, which was hiding the tree will be deleted
Christmas trees sometimes showed their christmas balls even when the tree was deleted
Heavy performance increase if you are changing the unit amount slider
- It will now run totally smooth
Improved Hwacha and Elephant performance in editor

There is a new biome ready for the next update: The forest!

In the next week I want to add another biome, either swamp or mountain

Finally you can do it! Start a battle with a horse or elephant and run down your enemies.

If you lose your animal, just shoot down a rider to use his animal in a battle.

It's recommended to use distance weapons, because melee weapons are useless on animals.

Until now, the unit behaviour was really delayed and the more units were in a battle, the higher was the needed time to update the unit targets.

I heavily optimized all of that to improve that, and the result is extremly good.

The algorithm can now handle 300-500 units without any delay, which results in a much better experience.

This was also necessary to be prepared for the AI performance update.

I finished some new building parts and traps for the next update, too. Here is the list:

Here is the list of new units(horses):

However, there are a few units left for next week!

In addition to the new horses, I did some balancing changes to them.

Unarmed horses will now move a bit faster than than the armed ones.
The armed horses will have the same speed as the unarmed horses before the next update.
Horses will now have 210 health, instead of 100, but they will be killed with one hit by sharp weapons.
The armored horses will give a great alternative to use stronger horses with great protection against sharp weapons.

And there are some other balancing changes, too.

Hwachas will now need 30 seconds +- 5 to reload(before 60 seconds)
I increased the bow damage by 25%
- This change is just for the player, the AI is not affected!
- The bow should now be a much more interesting weapon, since you can kill an enemy with 2 hits.

Get ready for larger battles!

You can now place many units on walls and towers, which will use a low level AI mode to use nearly no time on the cpu.

This allows to create large siege battles with walls full of archers.

I analyzed the performance and I found out the main problem for the fps issues in large battles.

Since I know what is causing the problems, I will work hard to find a solution before the next update.