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Empires of the Undergrowth
Asid:
How To Play As Leafcutters
21 APR @ 7:21PM - MIKE
Only a few days to go now ... get ahead a little by looking at this brief explanation of the leafcutter food mechanics.
Asid:
Leafcutter update V0.2
25 Apr @ 12:37pm - Slug Disco
We're very pleased to announce that our first major update for Empires of the Undergrowth, the Leafcutter Update, is now available for Windows, Mac & Linux! Featuring an all-new rain forest environment with new critters of all sizes, two new levels which will see you face off against fully-fledged colonies, and a new Formicarium Challenge where the dastardly scientists have something special planned for you.
The jungle floor stirs. Ants of all sizes creep out of their holes to harvest the nearby foliage, travelling far and wide to find the choicest leaves. The odds are stacked against these fledgling colonies - you may be tempted to discount creatures that forage for leaves but with huge crushing mandibles on their side, they are not to be underestimated.
Headline Features
New Formicarium Tier Added
• New playable species - The Leafcutters
o Featuring 4 sizes of ant (minims, minors, media and major) which can walk under / over one another
o Major leafcutters are tank units with very high health and come in two forms:
- Stun majors stun targets for 4s and at level 3 will slow them to a crawl for a further 4s
- Taunt majors force targets to attack them for 4s and at level 3 at 50% health will reduce all incoming damage by 80% for 4s
o Unique resource management
- Leafcutters need leaves to cultivate a special fungus which is their only source of food!
- Leaves can be gathered on the surface from various climbable plants
- Once gathered leaves are taken to a leaf drop-off chamber
- Each nursery built spawns a free minim ant (tiny leafcutter)
- The minims take the leaves from the leaf drop-off to nurseries where it is cultivated into fungus that can be spent
- Once fungus is spent, its remains will need to be taken to a refuse chamber where it can safely decompose
- The distance between nurseries, leaf drop off chambers and refuse chambers affects the efficient processing of leaves leading to some careful colony design decisions.
• Two new levels in the rainforests of Ecuador
o Two very different levels with unique challenges and threats with carefully designed difficulty settings to suit you level of play!
o The new environments offer a host of new fauna and flora and have a very different feel to them from previous levels
• A new formicarium challenge - What has the evil scientist got planned this time?
o Do you think you could hate the evil scientist any more? We think you might after you see what he has in store!
• Add the mighty leafcutter major to your formicarium!
o 4 unique upgrade options
- Sharp - This aura causes attackers of the major and any nearby friendly creatures to reflect an amount of damage back to themselves
- Resilient - This aura causes the major and any nearby friendly creatures to take less damage each hit
- Durable - All incoming damage to the major is reduced by a set amount
- Shockproof - Limits damage to the major in any single hit
o 4 improvement upgrades to spend that extra jelly on!
• More than double the enemy creatures!
o Variety is the spice of life and the rainforest is the king of variety! Each of the new creatures comes with its own stats and abilities and will require their own approach to take down
Other changes and improvements
• Creatures sizes mean you can get more to the front line
• Minimap now displays food that can be collected
• Quantity held by all food types is now displayed when showing tile info
• New enemy creatures have made there way into the battle arena and freeplay
• Freeplay setup dialogue changed to use more screen space for options
• Pheromone marker assignment panel now displays the living ants from chambers
Balance changes
• Queens have been given 50% resistance to slow their deaths
• Queen Second Wind invulnerability duration increased to 30s (up from 20)
Asid:
Update 0.2022 - Fixes / Balances for Leafcutter Update + New Demo Level
10 May @ 6:58pm - Mike
Since we launched the update two weeks ago we have received plenty of bug reports and fixed most of them. Additionally we have made a couple of balance changes. We also now have full interface localisation for German, and almost full for Simplified Chinese.
Localisation changes
• Added in interface localisation for both German and Simplified Chinese (Chinese missing some small areas) languages
• Most user interface widgets in the game altered to allow more space for text, or made to stretch to text size
• Corrected a sentence in German translation
Features
• Added the new demo level "The Crucible" into alpha demo levels (see - "Other Modes")
Changes / Improvements
• Accept button is now visible but grey when on the reward selection dialogue
• Tooltip added to the above button whilst disabled
• The army ant progress bar is greyed out when they can no longer advance to another lane later in the day
• Thorns have been disabled for projectile users
• Hotkey for displaying resources has been separated from tile info hotkey (UI elements for these are coming soon) and it now directly affects the option in the options menu rather than being a per-level toggle
• Scoreboard now mentions the difficulty played after the level name
• Large praying mantis snatch ability cool-down increased to 8s (up from 6s)
• Large praying mantis snatch ability healing reduced to 360 (down from 400)
• Reduced creature spawn difficulty on 3.2 insane by 10%
• Slightly raised the decal transparency to make them more visible
• Leafcutter parent node in the tech tree now correctly greys out until the prerequisite is reached
• Formicarium level select will now scroll to where you are once opened
• Fixed an issue with the options dialogue and fullscreen / windowed / windowed fullscreen modes
• Fixed an issue where surface transitions were less visible at night
• Increased damage of level 3 rapid fire wood ants to 3.5 per hit (up from 3)
• Increased damage returned by leafcutter "Sharp" upgrade thorns effect to 65% (up from 50%)
• Added a warning about refuse de-buff to the tiles tooltip
Fixes
• Fixed an issue that would cause an infinite loop when deleting major tiles in the formicarium
• All leafcutter chambers (including speed tiles in leafcutter) now refund leaves when deleted rather than seeds
• Creatures now drop what they are holding when picked up (fixes the floating leaf praying mantis issue)
• Fixed an issue that affects the time at the start of missions
• Army ants no longer gather food if they are heading to attack your queen in 3.2 (fixes the permanent harvesting issue)
• Fixed an issue where refunding tiles before they are built in leafcutter levels could sometimes award no resources back (and still leave you with waste)
• Fixed an issue where constantly reloading formicarium 2 would give you free woodworms
• More of the vine in 3.1 should be harvestable
• Vines not sitting above a tile grid will now show up as harvestable
• Fixed an issue where demo levels would always show victory on defeat
• Fixed a freeplay creature setup issue which could untick all rainforest creatures if all of another type of creature were unticked
• Upgraded leafcutter tiles will now correctly increase in storage to 20 / 30 / 40 (up from 20 / 20 / 20)
• Tile upgrades will now always happen once the tile has been marked for upgrade and will no longer not happen if the upgrade points drop during the upgrade
• Moved an item of foliage in the formicarium so it is no longer overlapping another
• Removed an invisible food item on 2.1 and replaced it with a dead beach tiger beetle
• Switch underground keys will no longer work in freeplay
• Food being processed should no longer show on the minimap or UI overlay
• Speed tile effects will no longer apply before the tile is built
Asid:
Update 0.2023 - Fixes and Languages (couple of minor features)
23 MAY @ 9:35AM - SLUG DISCO
This is mostly a bug fix patch (should be the last before the freeplay update barring game breaking bugs) but also includes the final support for simplified Chinese and a couple of minor features.
As always do let us know if you find any bugs and we will continue to squash them as they come in!
Localisation
• Added the final simplified Chinese interface translations
• Removed the default English setting, allowing those with localised languages to default to their language (German or simplified Chinese)
• Purchase confirm dialogue now fits better with localised languages
• Repositioned some victory / defeat widgets to prevent overlap with subtitles
• Added a couple of missing German translations strings
Fixes
• Level setup dialogue no longer disappears off the bottom of the screen in certain languages with certain options
• Fixed an impenetrable tile visual
• Modified main menu textures so they do not stream (will appear full resolution when they appear)
• Graphical overlay now correctly shows the positive upgrade points coming from speed tiles
• Minor improvement of the positioning of numbers from tile upgrade overlay
• Food will no longer fall through the formicarium on load, and food lost due to falling should be moved to the surface on load
• Fixed an issue where the queen could get stuck doing the flinch animation
• Fixed a crash that could happen when drawing the resource overlay
• Fixed an issue where ants could get stuck inside formicarium plants and objects if fighting near them
• Possible fix for floating de-buff issue (please let us know if this is still occurring)
• Fixed an issue where rainforest creatures could only spawn in freeplay of woodlouse was set to spawn
• AI effects (such as stun or confuse) now force creatures to drop any other creature they are carrying (fixed praying mantises walking around with creatures in front of them)
• If carrying a creature but not using an ability, the creature is now dropped
• Removed food gathering from ants spawned into the formicarium through the post gate level spawner
• Possible fix for an issue where a tile was unbuild-able on after digging it out
• Upon finishing challenge 3 the players queen is restored to full health. If somehow a queen has died and the game has saved that queen will be respawned on load in the formicarium
• All sizes of whip spider capsule sizes reduced a lot (this prevents them spawning on top of objects when dropped into the formicarium but also meant more of them can get into a fight)
• Fixed a bug with pressing a tab after an overlay button
Improvements / changes
• Removed crystals from black ant tiles for minor performance boost
• Added biohazard symbol to tiles affected by refuse tiles in the upgrade overlay along with minus numbers
• Added in UI icons for tile upgrade, creatures and resources overlays to make it clearer they are available
• Army ant major frenzy effect now looks like a red glow rather than a cloud
• Added in an unlocked photo mode accessed through shift + photo mode key (F9 by default) - WARNING: Use of this will allow you to see off the edge of the map, under the floor, ect. We do not plan on changing these areas as they were never meant to be seen so bare this in mind.
• Tile upgrades overlay has seen a significant performance boost (75% reduction in frame rate drop)
• Creature info overlay has seen a moderate performance boost
• Held resources are now loaded held
• Fez hat now has physics
• Removed markers from the minimap on the hungry spider level
• Resources overlay will now not appear in the fog of war in freeplay, additionally some resources cannot be seen through the fog
Asid:
April-May 2019 Newsletter
29 May @ 6:09pm - Mike
It's been just over a month since we unleashed our first major update for Empires of the Undergrowth - the Leafcutter Update - upon the world. We've worked through most of the glitches and balance issues now, and it's been a joy to see you guys have fun with the new additions to the game. Feedback has been almost entirely positive and we're so happy that you guys seem to be enjoying it!
Leafcutter trail from Steam user Jynn
This newsletter will cover some of the issues that have come back in the immediate fallout, go through what we've added since the update in a bit more detail, and discuss what's going to happen in the immediate future.
The Leafcutter Update
As I'm sure the vast majority of you are aware, we released the Leafcutter Update on 25th April. We're pleased with how it went, and we appreciate the feedback you guys have given us that helped us correct some major issues that we didn't catch during our testing period. Chief of these was a crash that occurred when selling certain tiles - that's now been resolved. There have also been some balance changes to certain creatures and spawning amounts. There may still be some ways to go on this and of course we'll continue to monitor feedback.
Leafcutters collecting leaves from Steam user a white wyrm
Read on
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