The Iron Blessings update is finally here! Improved tutorial, user interface updates and multiple new mechanics to spice up your fight against ORX.

Last time we teased the parts of the Iron Blessings update. You can read it for more details, but we’ll highlight some of the more notable additions and changes.

First up is inclusion of the Tutorial campaign. It can be found in the main menu, and has a selection of pre-seeded levels and cards for you to, hopefully, get a better understanding of the game. Or to get back into slaying ORX!

Next up is the titular Blessings! Now, when you increase a building or unit’s stats above a certain threshold, you will get a selection of corresponding Blessings to pick one from. These provide substantial boosts to other characteristics and will prove very useful in not-so-favorable matchups against ORX. We’ll make the thresholds clearly visible in the reworked info window, coming in the next update!

The last new addition is the Neighbour effects system. Now, when you place some of the buildings or units, they will get a hefty boost to their stats or production, if there are specific “neighbours” present nearby. Keep an eye out for conditions listed on such cards!

• Tutorial rework. New, dedicated tutorial campaign is accessible via the main menu;
  
• Introduced Blessings system. Level up unit or building’s stats to get a corresponding blessing. You get a Blessing at 10/50/100 of each individual stat;
  
• Introduced Blessings for ORX. Now they also get Blessings which improve their stats;
  
• Introduced Neighbor Effects for numerous cards. You can find the conditions for triggering the effect in the card descriptions;
  
• Fields and similar gold-producing buildings now generate gold unlimited amount of times, but have a long cooldown;
  
• Added new “:Castle Heart”-type buildings: Arcane Cell (DEX sharing), Medic Altar (VIT sharing) and reworked Voidwalker Guild into Ardent Coliseum (STR sharing);
  
• Boreal Nomads giants now generate gold upon finding a Miracle;
  
• Boreal Nomads rune circles can now be activated even with one relic placed;
  
• Holiday power for Boreal Nomads is now a percent based stat;
  
• Raised the base Gold Cap to 100 coins
  
• Introduced a new Faction-inherent Artefact for Dune Reavers. Every gold coin which goes beyond the Gold Cap permanently increases the amount of health for all units and buildings in the mission;
  
• After being thrown up, units get staggered upon landing;
  
• Added a “Skip reward” card to all reward selection windows, which lowers corruption by 5 when chosen instead of rewards;
  
• Introduced Weak castle parts. They are infinite, but have weaker stats and are non-upgradeable;
  
• Changed normal castle parts to have charges;
  
• Lessened the amount of rune slots available on castle parts and in their upgrades.

• Updated level generation algorithm and added Act-specific map generation presets;
  
• Updated Global Map generation algorithm. Now map nodes are more organically distributed to avoid clustering;
  
• Changed Global Map progression. In order to explore the map you need to clear Combat nodes. This also applies to event and shop nodes — in order to unlock them, you need to clear the adjacent Combat mission.
  
• Added Advisor selection node to the Global map, which always generates near the first Combat mission.

• Implemented a conventional save system. Now the game saves progress into a dedicated file instead of making a registry entry. NOTE: Steam Cloud saves are not implemented at this time and will be added in the future;

• Updated all Shops with new visuals;
  
• Updated numerous icons for better clarity and readability;
  
• Updated health bar visuals for all units and buildings;
  
• Updated visuals for the sub-missions list;
  
• Choices in the event windows now show the exact rewards and their drop rates;
  
• Updated font size and style settings to be language dependant;
  
• Improved font visual clarity for event windows.

• Made numerous changes and improvements to the level generation algorithm, effect interactions and VFX rendering

• Fixed numerous issues related to ORX placement inside the mission preview window
  
• Fixed a bug where a notification bubble would be shown on the Encyclopedia even if all of the new entries were checked out by the player.

Thanks for tuning in! See you in the next post.

Johnbell and Critical Reflex

[discord.gg]

What do neighbours, blessings and new horizons have in common? No, it’s not about Christmas — it’s about our upcoming update Iron Blessings! As always, don't forget that you can click on the headers to listen the songs they reference.

Just like we’ve discussed in our previous devlog, ORX is going to get new features in the upcoming update. However, we’ve focused them around existing systems. Some of them should help with randomness and adaptability, while others just make the game feel more fun and fresh.


First up are the basics, of course. Even though we’ve tried to cover every important mechanic with the tutorial windows — through the years this system started to show it’s cracks. The tutorials are bound to certain triggers as to not overwhelm the player with information. However, this also means, that the tutorials might come in later than the player would need them. And, in general, there were just too many windows. With even more on the horizon. As such, we’re introducing a proper tutorial campaign, with guided scenarios, decks and a new, more organic type of tutorial hints.


Now let’s get to the foundation. Or should we say the tiles? Regardless, we’ve completely rewrote map generation in ORX. Now, instead one single 32x32 landscape, the game generates chunks. Right now this means that we can experiment with the map’s shape. When you start a new campaign, you will see that maps in Act I not only vary wildly in size depending on the mission’s difficulty — but also notice that the maps in later acts have unique shapes too.

In the future, there will be two more new features taking advantage of chunk generation. First one is the Memory Zone, which we’ve talked about in our recent devlog. The second one — unique sub-biomes. We’re still thinking how sub-biomes could affect gameplay, so initially they might be there just to enhance the scenery.


We felt like there wasn’t enough initiative for the player to strategize how they build their Kingdom. Of course, we’ve had auras in the game. But then it hit us: “What if aura, but reverse?”. What? Well yes, it’s pretty much how the system works internally. We call it “Neighbour effects” — it provides a building or a unit you’re currently placing with hefty bonuses, when there are other specific buildings or units are present in their vicinity. Let us demonstrate.

As you can see, when the Militia is placed near farms or villages, they get a bonus to their Strength. Which might come in very handy, considering the next feature.


In ORX you are deliberately limited in your tools due to randomness of rewards and your deck’s shuffle. However, we wouldn’t want the players to become hard stuck. You should be able to progress the game even if you don’t have the exact cards for one specific case. To help this, we’re introducing the Blessings — passive abilities granted after raising one of your core attributes to a certain amount. You get to pick one of the three random blessings each time. For now they provide simple, but substantial stat bonuses. For example, if you level up Strength a couple times with the Rune of Embers, you can pick a blessing which would give you a flat damage boost, extra damage against armor or defence ignore.

In the future, we plan to add more gameplay-changing Blessings for the Legendary tier, and maybe introduce some trade-offs to all of them. This way you will specialize into a specific role instead of eating all the pies at once.


We continue working on the various user interfaces for ORX. In the upcoming update we are going to update the health bars, greatly improve the clarity and design of the information window, plus redesign a bunch of icons. You know what they say: “Great design is invisible”. And we hope that after all the work is done, you won’t have to fight both the ORX and the UI at the same time.

We’ve also updated some of the ORX types to be bulkier and larger in size. Specifically ORX Tanks, Mega ORX and Trebuchet ORX. The idea is they should look heavier to communicate the amount of defences they have. And, coincidentally, the amount of threat they pose. Of course, this doesn’t mean we don’t have bran new ORX in production. But those are coming later.

This covers most of the stuff coming in Iron Blessings early next year. Of course, we didn’t cover the balancing changes and some smaller things — but those will be included in the patch notes.

As always, thank you for your support, and for tuning in to read this devlog. Wishing you happy Holidays and a stellar New Year. Next time, after the upcoming update, we will bring an updated Roadmap and more teasers for the future features.

Johnbell and Critical Reflex

[discord.gg]

Long time no see, esteemed ORX-slayers!

We apologise for the silence, but we’re here to break it today. And this devlog is going to be out of character — to demonstrate our drive and motivation, we’d like to be honest and open with you. But first, let’s take a…

When we first started working on ORX, it was about a single faction — the Rune Guardians, — and a simple mix of RTS, roguelikes and Carcassonne. Well, not that simple, to be honest. But the game was much simpler overall. And the initial demos for ORX showed that a lot of you liked this concept. You’ve shown quite the support back then.

However, our ambitions grew and we wanted to introduce 3 more factions and make gameplay for each of them feel unique. During this entire time, one of our influences was Gemcraft. A tower defence game, which is pretty number heavy.

Then we’ve released into Early Access with the 2nd faction — which, obviously, didn’t get as much time in the oven as Rune Guardians. To cut the story short — we saw from your feedback, that the game lacked an endgame goal or the long-term pull. Simply having another faction to unlock wasn’t nearly enough. Especially, since not everyone enjoyed its playstyle focused around units.

We took this very seriously. And, as the time would show, a bit too seriously. We’ve began to pile up systems upon systems, while discussing and iterating on even more systems internally.

The result? Well, you’ve voiced it better than we could, again. “The game just doesn’t feel like those early demos anymore!”. It got lost in the sauce (ORX?). There was just too much thrown at the player right off the start. And figuring out how to play efficiently seemed like an impossible task.

All the while the veterans would easily break the game, since the balance wasn’t great either. And we were busy looking at them, trying to match their ingenuity with even more new systems. Classic mistake…

Well, now that you know the history, and we took one more look at it — time to discuss what comes next.

Firstly, we would like to go back and restore what made ORX appealing in the first place. We will retain major systems that we’ve added throughout Early Access, but going to make them feel more organic. Basically, make the game feel whole again. This means changing the balance in all its forms and restoring the initial flow of the game, but also tuning and simplifying the new systems.

This is not all, however! We will also greatly limit the amount of systems thrown at the player at the start of the game. Both inside a run and during your entire time with ORX. Instead, we will introduce them gradually — to match your growing knowledge of the game and up the challenge on a nice curve.

Secondly, we’ve decided to cut on some of the promised content from the Roadmap. Some of those promises sound cool even now, like the Throne Room and meta-progression. Others, however, would feel tacked on. So we’ve decided to not work on them altogether. This won’t affect technical stuff like performance optimization and proper Steam Deck support, of course. An updated Roadmap is coming soon!

Finally, it’s time we’ve added a proper tutorial. Well paced, engaging and accessible. With reduced amount of pop-up, text-heavy windows. Instead having more on-the-map hints — somewhat similar to how tutorial works in games like Star Craft 2. Note, that the upcoming update will have just the very basis of this system. Tutorial is much more work, than might appear at first, and we would like to get it right this time.


Of course, we wouldn’t just say “we’re going back” and call it a day. New content and fresh gameplay ideas will still be added to the game. We’ve already mentioned the tutorial and balancing changes, so here we’d like to focus on other transformative changes that are coming soon.

• Memory zone — through the years, and thanks to your and our internal feedback, we’ve come to realize that starting each mission from scratch gets tedious really fast. To solve this, we’d like to try adding a Memory zone around the player’s main building. Any buildings placed in that zone will carry over to the next mission. Resetting only in the 1st mission of each new Act. And to make it more balanced, we’d like to also make more cards Fragile — meaning they completely expire from your hand after you burn all of their charges. Which should also help with deck bloating from gathering all the cards throughout the missions. Keep in mind, however, that this system might not make it into the game if it turns out to not be as much fun in reality.

WIP concept of Memory Zone. Subject to change.

• Tower rework — right now the towers might look too alike. Most of them lob some sort of projectile, which has different behaviour only after it hits an enemy. We’d like to change this and make every tower feel unique. Be it by turning Electric towers into giant Tesla machines, making Poison towers expel clouds of noxious gas or something else entirely. We hope that this not only going to help with different tower combinations, but also improve clarity of effects in a heated battle.

Mockup with finalized animations. The effects are yet to be implemented into the game.

• New win conditions — one of the key components in replayability is, of course, the variety of mission types. We have the Endless mission in the works for some time, but we’re still figuring out how to make it rewarding enough, without making other missions feel meaningless in comparison. But we’d also like to introduce new win conditions to regular missions as well. Stuff like city defence, Helm’s Deep style wave survival or, maybe, even an exploration style mission to find something on the map.

Even rougher mockup of a new mission type. Very heavy WIP, most definitely will change before release.

• Audio effects rework and improvements — good sound greatly enhances the game and even replayability. And right now the constantly repeating thud of arrows might feel annoying after some time. While we can’t really show you anything right now, we pledge to make the rain of arrows sound like a true hailstorm, put some oomph into blasts and maybe even make ORX sound more chaotically aggressive.

There are also more ideas focused around elevating what we currently have in ORX. Without adding too much of new systems. However, those are just in discussion phase currently, so we don’t want to bring them up just yet. Once those make it into production — we’ll cover every one of them!

Hopefully, now you can better see our train of thought while developing ORX. And our undying volition to improve the game. All of this is possible only to every single one of you. And we’re thankful for every player who chose to support us. Be it by providing feedback or simply playing the game. You are what makes the games whole, and the reason for us to keep moving forward.

Stay tuned for the update overview post this December, and for the updated Roadmap and more devlogs coming next year.

From the entirety of Johnbell and Critical Reflex,
THANK YOU!
[discord.gg]

Gameplay & balance
•ORX Gunner now appears as a Commander in Acts 3-4
•ORX Commanders' appearance logic reworked: 3 specific Commanders appear only in Acts 1-2; other 3 empowered Commanders appear only in Acts 3-4;
•Adjusted ORX Commanders to be generally more dangerous.
•Increased the difficulty curve of later missions in Act 3 and all missions in Act 4 (aka added hard waves that ramp up ORX count faster)
•Reduced width of resilient ORX for better pathfinding
•Increase durability of earlier Act bosses
•Fixed the incorrect Tier 2 stats for Razor Tower (Rune Guardians card)
•Fixed an error that caused Boreal Nomads to receive wrong card rewards
•Updated behavior and locale of Oasis (Dune Reavers card)
•ORX tanks rescaled to have less defense and damage in early acts, same later.

Localization
•Updated RU and JP locals
•Added attribute tooltips for multiple language locales
•Added Journey events for multiple language locales
•Added tooltips about Spirits with previously missing descriptions

Bug Fixes
•Fixed an issue that caused the final wave to not spawn in certain missions
•Fixed an issue that didn’t grant victory after defeating the final wave during certain conditions
•Fixed yet another instance of cards getting stuck on the screen
•Fixed an issue that displayed the message about the wave start multiple times in a row
•Fixed an issue that kept displaying the exclamation mark after check new unlocks at encyclopedia
•Minor UI fixes

gl hf

-final boss (act 4) adjusted to correctly trigger player loss condition
-final boss now moves 1 tile per round in second phase. total 9 rounds needed to reach player loss condition.
-dune reaver and boreal missions adjusted to exclude castle and military camp quests specific to rune guardians
-RG pooling adjusted lives count
-ORX sniper and besieger damage STR scaling reduced

-instakill runes dictates and artifacts adjusted to work correctly with multistrike attribute
-sharpshooter damage buff from STR reduced
-blast tower damage scaling from STR and max range reduced, accuracy increased
-blacksmith and lumberjack auras scaling reduced

Royal greetings, kings and queens!

Sound the horns — the long-awaited major update ‘Phoenix Rising’ is finally here! Join us for a lengthy preview of the changes and the patch notes!

Gaze upon the trailer and see if you can spot everything the update has to offer. And then come back to learn the details!
Our first stop is the biggest change in ORX since its inception — specialisations! Fierce, Resilient and Cunning — the three pillars of the new system. In short, it’s as if Rock-Paper-Scissors went a bit extra and had a lot of explosions.

All offensive buildings and units now fall into one of these specialisations:

• Fierce — all about that brute force, and they can break through the most resilient defences. However, that can be too primitive for the cunning rogues;
  
• Resilient — focus on survival tactics and building mass, and won’t even shrug under anything, but the most fierce attacks. Although, when faced with fierce e;
  
• Cunning — they’re the ones who outsmart the fierce, but dim-witted brutes.

This doesn’t mean that you are forced to play Fierce buffs only on Fierce units, however. Just like always, it’s a good idea to play something Fierce to grant more damage, or Resilient to buff survivability. However, these buffs would prove most useful when played on units\castles of the matching specialisation.

This is because we’ve also made major changes to how the stats and scaling work in the game. Now there are 3 major attributes — Strength (STR), Vitality (VIT) and Dexterity (DEX). Each attribute serves as a parent category for the already existing stats like health, damage, defence etc. And instead of raising one specific stat, you now buff the attributes, which, in turn, buff everything related to them. You will also find that most of the buffs and attacks now show a scaling formula — while we don’t expect you to constantly calculate everything, it shows which major attribute you should raise to increase the potency of the effect.

All of this might sound complicated, but trust us — when you follow the Rock-Paper-Scissors rules, and keep a healthy diversity of cards, this system feels natural to play! And don't worry, we did our best to smooth out the difficulty curve, so you can have a fair chance at learning the new systems. Of course, this still would be the case if not for a slew of smaller additions supporting this change, so let’s talk about those next.

First of all, now ORX keep pouring from the portals throughout the entire night. However, the day will break regardless if you kill them or not! You still need to kill all of the ORX that spawned that night in order to complete a wave, of course. But this definitely raises the stakes, as now you can easily get overwhelmed if you don’t lay your cards right!

Secondly, missions now vary in map size. Depending on their difficulty, they can be tiny, normal or gigantic. Now you can’t just sit back and let your castles dunk on weak ORX, because you’ve had an entire map to build your uber-castle. When you have less real estate, you start to think how to make the most out of it. You’re also incentivized to build smaller castles, as the giant ones get a penalty to their stats depending on their size.

Thirdly, we’ve introduced Spirits — useful buffs that spawn randomly on unoccupied tiles at the start of the mission. Collected by placing a tile over them, they grant a number of useful buffs, ranging from extra gold to a free tile placement, and more. We hope that they’ll make each mission more exciting on a basic “cool to think about placing tiles” level, and also help you kickstart your defences!

Finally, you have less to worry about when you’ve just begun your adventure. We’ve added “normal” villages, which substitute the elemental ones until you’re ready. There are fewer villages in the missions, and they’re placed closer to the centre of the map. And you can take them back, if you defeat all of the ORX guarding them during the day! The ORX themselves are much simpler in normal missions too, and you will face a great challenge only if you’re looking for it in the Elite missions.

There are now also only upgrade vaults present in the missions, so you have more chances to upgrade your cards, while not getting too many cards that might clog your deck. Aaaand, you also have two Campsites in each act, which provide another opportunity to remove an unneeded card.

However, the main reason why you shouldn’t be afraid to experiment and dip your toes into tough missions is, of course, the almighty Revive button. When you lose all of your Main Buildings, a new button will greet you on the defeat screen. By paying a price in accumulating extra corruption, you will get another chance at fighting ORX — keeping all of the stuff you’ve built!

And honestly, there is SO much more to this update, that we could spend a whole day talking about them. Just to name a few, without extra details:

• Updated UI and card designs
  
• Various stat changes
  
• Updates in-game logic
  
• Branching event choices
  
• Plethora of new additions to the Global Map

[/b] (Go read our previous devlog for a preview on that!)

Brand new cards and updated effects

[/b][/list]
But we think the best way to experience Phoenix Rising is to see, play and feel it yourself. So go play it! It’s available! Probably even already installed, while you were reading this.

And absolutely let us know what you think about the changes and what you’d suggest next. Tell us here, in the comments, post on the Steam Discussions, write to us on our official Discords. Don’t just keep it to yourself!
[discord.gg]

• Added Global Campaign Map
  
• Added major attributes — Strength (STR), Vitality (VIT), Dexterity (DEX)
  
  • Spread all of the existing and new stats to fit under STR, VIT and DEX
    
  • Introduced Haste stat — it affects either the length or the cooldown for all abilities
• Introduced active abilities to the game. Now most effects come from active abilities.
  
  • Changed basic attacks into active abilities. This doesn’t affect them visually or otherwise, but it does change how they’re considered by the game
    
  • Added scaling off of major stats to almost all abilities
• Changed the night and day cycle to be static and closely follow the timer
  
  • Added a button to force start the next night
• Slight changes to how armor and defence work
  
• Small rework of stealth and reveal mechanics
  
• Introduced branching events. Now some of the event have multiple choices and change their narrative according to player choice
  
  • Introduced ambushes. You can be forced into a mission with unique modifiers as a result of specific choices in some events
• Introduced Spirits — useful buffs that spawn randomly on unoccupied tiles at the start of the mission.
  
  • Discount Spirit — refunds the cost of the tile placed to get the Spirit
    
  • Gold Spirit — generates +10 delayed gold when picked up
    
  • Hand Spirit — adds +1 card slot to your hand
    
  • Mason Spirit — the card played to place a tile here doesn’t lose a charge
    
  • Initiative Spirit — adds +1 to your Initiative (redraw charges)
    
  • Future Spirit — allows to make a single-use copy of any card in your deck. This copy expires at the end of the mission
    
  • Necromancy Spirit — allows to pick a card from the discard pile, restore all of it’s charges and place it on top of the draw pile
• Introduced building and unit gold buy-out for instant restoration
  
• Changed unlock condition for card slots in shops — they now require Dark Crowns
  
  • Introduced Dark Crowns — special currency used for unlocking card slots in shops. You can get them from Elite missions
• Boss encounters at end of act now drop unique artifacts.
  
  • Essence of Ferocity — +15 strength until dawn
    
  • Essence of Resilience — +1 card capacity to your hand until Night
    
  • Essence of Cunningness — +1 passive gold rate until Night
• Added Neutral Villages — villages without any special element.
  
• Introduced Village reclaim — kill all of the guarding ORX during the day to dispel Dead Soil around the camp, and then reclaim the village by placing a tile adjacent to it.
  
• Mission wave count and difficulty rescaled depending on map size.
  
• ORX now prioritise the closest village to the player.

• Changed Rune Guardian starting relic to allow the Main Building heal 1 object at a time
  
• Introduced Structural Integrity debuff — castles start accumulating stat penalties once they become larger than 12 tiles
  
• Changed Rune Guardian starter deck
  
• General cost of cards from levelling up rescaled
  
• All castle parts now provide STR, VIT, DEX stats that increase from levelling up a castle part.
  
• Added new random artefact ‘Super Monolith’ which increases structural integrity of the castles
  
• Separated all Warrior upgrades into their own separate categories: Militia line tuned to Fierce to work with better with STR attribute, Spearmen line tuned to Resilient to work better with VIT attribute.
  
• Reworked Spearmen and gave them the ability to walk
  
• Reworked Farmlands and the Village to grant gold on placement and then every 90 seconds
  
• Reworked Voidwalker to grant STR buff
  
• Added Razor Tower — shoots arrows and reflects damage. Scales with VIT
  
• Added Healing Tower — fires a continuous healing beam a target at the closest target in range

• Added starter relic that increases health of all friendly units and buildings for every gold coin earned over maximum gold capacity.
  
• Introduced ability inheritance for units spawned from a house with said ability
  
• Introduced 3 new Housing types
  
  • Fierce — +10 STR and armor shred
    
  • Resilient — +10 VIT and armor
    
  • Cunning — +10 DEX and multihit chance
• Dictates now grant abilities
  
• Most dictates reworked to interact correctly with STR, VIT, DEX
  
• Palace now additionally increases amount of warriors in all current camps
  
• All cairns reworked to interact correctly with STR, VIT, DEX
  
• Reworked bonuses from carpets and gardens in relation to bazaars and caravans. In short - bonuses are more impactful.

• When a Boreal picks up a treasure, it generates 7/15/25 delayed gold (depending on treasure tier)
  
• Boreal warrior is now Resilient spec. Lots of defense and base armor that scales well with VIT. Weapons now give opportunity to scale into more damage or more knockback and defense.
  
• Boreal archer is now Cunning spec. Weapons now give opportunity to scale into more AoE damage with increased multistrike or into a corrosive hard hitting arbalest.
  
• Boreal mage is now Fierce spec. Weapons now give opportunity to scale into a devastating chain hit staff that pierces all defenses or into a wand that generates a fast hitting ray that works well against solo enemies.
  
• Added special fence with stealth reveal ability
  
• Added a contract with stealth reveal ability
  
• Contracts, bastions, holidays and runic circles now grant abilities

• ORX now spawn in smaller waves at start of the mission, but ramp up significantly closer to the end. 'THE END IS NEAR'-style.
  
• New ORX type — Zeppelin. Flying ORX with considerable firepower
  
• Changed ORX with torch to be a skin for the ORX Warrior, instead of being a separate ORX type
  
• New ORX Commander — Cannoneer. A formidable foe, piloting a very crude robot
  
• Implemented patrolling AI for ORX guarding the village
  
• Distributed all ORX into the three specialisations — Fierce, Resilient and Cunning
  
• Elemental Villages now attract elemental ORX from the start of the Night

• Global UI visuals and UX rework:
  
  • In-mission UI
    
  • Global Map
    
  • Events
    
  • Tooltips
    
  • Tutorials
    
  • Menus
    
  • Fonts
    
  • Cards
• Added visual indicators for the villages and if they’re targeted by the ORX that Night
  
• Added visual indicators for Big Ben and ORXmas Toys events
  
• Added Day and Night indicator and clock
  
• Added a multitude of hover tooltips for a lot of elements
  
• Added hover tooltips for the stats listed in the unit\building info window
  
• Added gold cost tooltip near the cursor when repositioning a military camp
  
• You can no longer reposition units when viewing their info window
  
• On Alt+Tabbing the game will be set to mute and become paused

• Introduced attack animation synchronisation
  
• Final Boss now spreads Dead Soil under it
  
• Small improvements to explosion visuals
  
• Added light beams to the victory\defeat screen
  
• Added armor damage VFX to Towers
  
• Added selection highlights to Towers
  
• Vastly improved visuals for laser beams

• Fixed Low Graphics option not auto-activating for older hardware
  
• Fixed damage display for Laser Tower
  
• Fixed random wave indicators appearing at the end of the current mission
  
• Fixed Wizurbv totems receiving more than 1 damage per attack
  
• Fixed wrong cards getting highlighted when hovering over an empty tile

DISCLAIMER
While bug fixes section might look underwhelming, this doesn’t mean that we didn’t fix much. On the contrary! However, since this update features a lot of major changes, it also made bugs from the previous systems almost nonexistent — as the systems themselves became obsolete.

We do expect that new bugs can arise, however. So please, don’t forget to report them using our Google.Form, messaging us over at Discord or posting on Steam Discussions
Report a bug[forms.gle]

Congrats! You’ve reached the end of this post! We’ll use this opportunity to once again thank you for your support, and encourage you to share more of your ideas and opinions about the game. Because at the end of the day, ORX is made for you!

This major update is also the first in a giant effort to transform ORX into the best version of itself. Stay tuned for more previews and devlogs detailing the upcoming changes. But first of all, we’re going to re-evaluate our release timeframe — expect an update on our Roadmap soon!

May the Aurus guide your hand, queens and kings! Until next time!

[discord.gg]

Greetings, exalted orx-slayers!

The upcoming major update "Legacy of Kings" (name pending) is not too far from being finished! It's now feature complete (which means we won't be adding any more big features) and we're busy polishing and balancing it.

While you wait, though, you might want to have a little appetizer for things to come — which we're more than happy to provide!

"What sort of magick is this?!" Not magick, but Spirits — they occupy a tile, and if you were to build on top of it, you will reap the Spirit's powerful bonuses. These range from an extra card slot for your hand to, our favorite, making the tile you've just placed cost 0 gold! We hope that they'll make the map more 'tactile' and provide extra initiative to expand your Kingdom's premises!

"What sort of unholy Necromancy is this?!!" Hold off your accusations, good sirs and madams! This one's a good kind of resurrection! The one to help you overcome a wall, instead of crumbling under the crushing weight of defeat. As we make the game more and more complex, introduce new devious ambushes, branching event choices and, frankly, a little bit of chain jerking — you might find yourself losing a mission or two. Well, now this just doesn't mean that you'll be forced to abandon your run. Because we believe in you, and sometimes all you need is just a 2nd chance! At a fair price, of course.

However, this is just a tip of the proverbial iceberg in terms of just how much we've included in this update. Don't worry, the core gameplay loop of fending off ORX and getting more powerful remains intact. We just added dimensions to it! Hopefully, you now see why we didn't release these changes as separate, smaller updates. It just wouldn't make sense nor feel coherent. We employ you to bear the wait juuust a little longer, as we aim to release this update in about 20 or so days!

And while you wait,

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2679070/IRONHIVE/

Here's what you can expect from the demo:

• Rebuild your home. Elevate housing, utility, social, production, and defense buildings. Beware – a big city requires a lot of resources, and if you can’t provide them, your colony will lose Stability, which will lead to rapid collapse.
  
• Deal with tough choices. Use the cards you’ve been dealt wisely. Each turn represents a season you’ve survived, and while you have Stability, there’s still hope. If it reaches zero, it’s over for you.
  
• Explore the Wasteland. Send out expeditions in search of vital resources, technologies and various items. But remember: the sweeter the reward – the higher the risk.
  
• Take On the Harsh World’s Challenges. The decisions you make will directly impact your city. All the narrative events are interconnected, creating a different story for each of your colonies.

See you in the next post! For now, don't forget to follow us on socials and join our cozy Discord server!

[discord.gg]

Greetings, esteemed rulers and orx-terminators!

The work on the next update is in full force — and while we work on proper devlog, we’d like to share an update preview to break up the silence in the meantime!

First of all, it’s the end of June, which means… Steam Summer Sale is here!! And, of course, ORX is part of it too — don’t miss your chance to grab the game with -30% off!

And looking at what's next... you really should consider grabbing the game now! Look, we don’t want to overhype the next update, but it is shaping up to be the biggest one yet — with considerable changes in a lot of aspects! And to back our words, here’s an assorted list of things to look forward to!

This is going to be the first considerable change you’ll notice — old, cramped up act window is gone, making space for a grandiose and scenic global map! You can go through as many regions as you’d like before fighting a boss, and the transition between the Acts happens seamlessly on the same map! There is more to this, however, so you should definitely read more about it in our last devlog.
Artistic rendition. NOT actual gameplay.

After we’ve added the Global Map, it became apparent that the old event structure just doesn’t feel engaging enough to be a region on the map. So we’ve improved and extended our event system to include branching stories, multiple choices and… ambushes!!
The main meat of the update — global rebalance, which took us months to implement! Everything now has new attributes, which govern previously existing stats. And based on the value of those attributes, all combatants — both player and ORX, — now follow one of three archetypes. Which interact between each other similar to widely known “rock-paper-scissors” rules. We’ll talk about this in detail in our upcoming devlog, so stay tuned!
We’ve reworked a lot of screens and interfaces, and ALL of the cards! And you’d be surprised how much freshness all of this brings. Seeing is believing with this one, so you’ll experience it fully only when you get your hands on the update. That being said, here’s a small preview!
Constant ORX flow, updated economy, restoration mechanics, village overtake and patrolling ORX, new castle building variables, neutral villages, new elite ORX types and more stuff we’re probably forgetting or can’t name just yet!
Artistic rendition. NOT actual gameplay.

And on that note, we're back to working on the update again! As promised, we'll publish the next devlog, detailing the gameplay changes, pretty soon. And then you'll get a chance to try out the update yourself on the Experimental Branch! Until then, cheers!

For now, don't forget to follow us on socials and join our cozy Discord server!

[discord.gg]