Long time no see! It's time for an update and it's a pretty big one with lots of changes across the board. We're calling this 'beta' because it has all the content in we want for the game and what's left is balances, fixes and polish. This update will go live today.

It's not an excuse, but the reason the updates have stopped is because of our small team, I was the one doing updates. At the start of the year I got really really ill and spent a good half of the year dealing with it, including numerous trips to the hospital and an unpleasant procedure.

Despite this work did not stop on the game at all. But we don't like to put out updates with half finished work and loads of my work went half touched. Now that I'm back we've been busting the past few months to bring all of the year's work together into an update. All I can do is apologise for the lack of updates and poor communication at this point, and hope you can forgive me.

Okay so, on to the update!

Campaign 04's remaining missions have been released, this is 4-2, 4-3 and 4-4. This campaign culminates in the epic Battle of Changping which set the State of Qin up for total dominance over the rest of the Warring States of China.
This large map has you battling over a 4-way crossing of rivers interlocked with bridges. Suited for 4 players, but can be played with 2 as well.

This medium map promotes a game of cat and mouse with numerous bridges, forests and hills to gain an advantage over your opponent, prepare ambushes and launch a counter attack after throwing back their attack.

We have done a pass over all multiplayer maps and their modes for balance. Siege levels now have clear capture points within the forts to end the battle as well as much larger deploy areas around the forts giving the attacker more choice, and less time is spent running up to the walls on the larger maps.

Every single mission has been tweaked, reworked, balanced and adjusted to feel a steady progression of unit availability, difficulty and flow. Some missions have had major adjustments done to get this to work better (for example 2-1 with new ambush mechanics from the AI).

AI can now use Special Attacks! Previously they did Reinforce but that was about it. Be careful though, because they can really mess you up now with clever AOE attacks and displacements when you weren't expecting it before. This is a small change on the list, but probably one of the biggest impacts to the game when playing against AI.

We have also done some significant overhauls of the AI that make them much more aware of tactically important tiles and how to manipulate Special Attacks to their advantage. For example, if you're standing on a capture point the AI will now use displacement attacks to push you off of it.
We have added a cheaper and smaller ranged special attack, Salvo. This hits all enemies in a direct line, but you have to make sure they line up! Use this when Arrow Eclipse is just too much.

This attack is also available on lower tier units, where Arrow Eclipse is not.

There have been a few fundamental improvements to combat as we balanced every aspect of the game.

This is a big one. We've introduced Line of Sight to ranged attacks. Not all buildings block it, but the obvious ones do. This primarily came about as we felt it was weird that defending a castle meant having archers on the ground behind the walls, trading shots with archers outside the walls.

Now walls and towers will block Line of Sight and force you to rethink your approach, defending or attacking.
Morale was behaving a bit incoherently. We had a lot of hidden mechanics like if you were low health, you could take multiple morale hits at the same time. This made it feel like you could break really easy for no reason when this 'rolled' against you. Additionally ranged attacks were too good at causing morale tests and breaking enemy units, which goes against how we feel combat should work.

We've removed these spikes and made it totally transparent. Now you cannot cause morale tests with ranged attacks unless a unit is significantly low strength already. We've also reduced the impact of the Under Fire debuff and introduced some new ones to compensate.

Now we have added the Flanked and Charged/Cavalry Charged debuff that happens when (as you can guess) you Flank or Charge a unit. This puts a one-turn but significant Leadership debuff on the unit. This also makes it feel more plausible that you're flanking and crashing cavalry into a unit, causing real terror.
These new debuffs plus the removal of multiple morale level losses in one have really smoothed out the way morale is lost in fights and should feel far more predictable. It also rewards good tactical behaviour more directly.

Unit costs have been totally redone across the board and now much more closely represent their power. If a unit costs more, in general, it should be better barring specific tactical situations.

We have also done a major pass on unit values to ensure each type of unit at each tier had a purpose and style, as well as making sure the tiers battling each other were well balanced.

We have done a pass balancing the cost of special attacks, their damage and how quickly you earn Tactics Points. There should be a steady feeling of always being able to spend tactics points and not being forced to conserve them.

You now gain a small amount of Tactics Points per turn. We have also added numerous additional tactics points sources:

• Destroyed an Enemy Unit
  
• Attacked a Broken Unit
  
• Defended a Narrow Gap (low combat width tile)
  
• Defended an Outpost
  
• Defended on a Hill
  
• Capturing an Enemy Outpost
  
• Attacking a Charged Unit
  
• Attacking a Flanked Unit

Reinforce has been tweaked to now only give 25% of your maximum strength, but the cost has been reduced to compensate. This should stop it being the unstoppable tanking action and also make it so you can spread the value of your Tactics Points across your army.
Previously, you could use the Rally action to try to raise the Morale of a unit that wasn't broken, but this actually used the Leadership stat and had a chance of failure, just like a Rally. This felt unfair to waste an entire unit's turn on, so now we have split it into a new action that replaces Rally when a unit is not broken. Raise Morale always succeeds and always raises your morale a level.
Charging is fun and as part of the balancing we have made it much cheaper to do.

Unused/Leftover Deploy Points are now converted to starting Tactics Points at the beginning of a mission. So you no longer feel sad that you just couldn't quite spend those 50 remaining points.

We have been fixing minor things across the game in terms of HUD, UI and input. Here are a few of them:

Previously, the default action of a unit could execute with Right-Click (move, attack) but when you selected an action directly you had to finish with Left-Click. In the end this felt unneccessary and clunky so we've changed it to all be Right-Click for consistency.

You can now select units by clicking on their flag. The tooltips used to work on the flags as well, so why not selecting? Done!

When deploying it now keeps your previous selection so if you want 3 Light Archers just keep clicking on the map to keep deploying them.

The Options menu now has tooltips explaining what the unclear options do specifically.
This is a favourite of mine...you can now toggle the speed of animations between 1x and 2x speed. You can even set it to always be 2x in the options! The toggle is Spacebar by default, but is of course rebindable in the options.
You can not set the maximum number of characters in a unit for performance. We know many of you play on lower end machines or laptops with very hot CPUs when running a game, and this is for you. Along with strict frame limiting options and the ability to limit the number of characters in a unit, the game should be quite playable on a low-end machine.

A ton of optimisation work has gone on to reduce frame spikes and overall cost of frames. One example is when lots of units moved at once in a cutscene there was some serious hit to the performance. A big rewrite of our underlying coroutine usage here has wiped this specific spike totally out.

More bug fixes than we can even count have gone into this, but I love mentioning it. It's the silent work that doesn't make for a good headline or update note, but really improves the quality of the game as a whole.

We've added 4 new Multiplayer/Battle Maps (2 small, 2 medium). There is an additional large map coming next week, but we didn't want to delay the update.

Two sides battle to claim the island for their own. Positioning will be crucial to overcoming your enemy.

Two armies fight with only a small river seperating them. Control of the only two bridges will be the key to success.

Two armies face each other head on along this winding path. Position ranged units carefully along the banks and out of reach from melee attacks

Two scouting parties discover a clearing amidst the stone forest. Use the paths to travel quickly around the sides or venture into the forests near the center

This update includes numerous bug fixes (especially related to AI) and additional gameplay balancing.

Smaller update content-wise but with a lot of bug fixes.

We've added an in-game guide to explain some of the key concepts of gameplay. You can access it with the ? button in the top right by the minimap.

It covers a variety of topics which you can view in an index. If you can think of any topics we're missing, do e-mail us and we will take it into account.

The text for each entry isn't too wordy. We've tried to keep it concise but clear with images to reinforce it. The images are mostly placeholder as we intend a beauty pass in the next update, but we wanted to get the text out there for people to comment on.

A big part of this update is behind the scenes. One of the changes is to the font rendering. A big gripe in Unity3D games is their loading times, and a lot of this is down to the font handling. We did a big pass to optimise our font usage for loading, which has cut fresh game loading times down by about 30% on our test cases.

We've added Steam invites allowing you to invite friends directly to your game lobby to play. They work in-game and out of game (causing it to launch and join the lobby).

We have ongoing balance changes going into updates from now on. Siege weapons have been adjusted heavily to do a lot more damage, which fits with their new ammunition system.

There has also been a pass on deploy costs, which will impact Singleplayer levels, but we will adjust them in subsequent updates.

We've fixed almost a hundred bugs for this update. Our internal bug list is shrinking rapidly for release.

The next update is a lot closer than you'd come to expect from us. We will be doubling the number of available Multiplayer maps, releasing Chapter 4 and bringing a whole host of balance changes very soon.

New update rolling out as this message is posted. I had hoped to get Chapter 4 in the update but we found an issue at the last minute with the missions and rather than postpone the update any further I wanted to get it out - since it included a ton of bug fixes.

Sometimes you really want to move your unit a very specific way, but the pathing is forcing you down a specific route. Now you can use waypoints (hold shift + right click) to define the path you take. Avoid that scary forest you *know* has an ambush waiting.
The previous unit flags had some needless information and we're very clear. We've cleaned them up and also made them change size depending on your zoom level (which is adjustable in the options under Flag Zoom Threshold).

Unit information is now more direct and clear and it should be easier to identify units while zoomed out.

A commonly requested feature - we've added a framerate limiter to the options. If you're running on a low spec laptop this lets you slow the game down and keep it from blasting your battery or boosting your CPU and melting your poor legs.

We've done some really thorough cleaning of the special attack code and fixed tons of softlocks and special case oddities (eg charging along roads not giving a speed benefit). Along with this we added a few features to some of the specials. One example is the Heavy Thrust attacks - when the tile you're attempting to push them into is occupied, it instead damages both units (if an enemy).
The tile highlight code got a serious rework and testing done - the result should be really clear and consistent highlighting for Zone of Control, limits, enemies and so forth.

When siegeing you can now capture gates and towers, making an entire assault via siege tower possible. This also takes over their auto-firing and they will turn on their former owners.

Along with this - we've cleaned up the tower shooting phase (lovingly called the Upkeep Phase) and the towers now shoot more like archers with continuous fire.

We've hammered out more bugs than I care to recall. There should be no more soft-locks in the game and if one happens, there is now code to recover it and continue the game.

Additionally we've updated our error reporting system to always catch the first error and not spam with any additional errors.

A lot of you (one user in particular) has been quizing us about our final release. Obviously we've blown way past our original plans but we keep wanting to polish the game as much as we can. The project has grown quite large for our team size - so our estimates have been a bit poor.

Despite that, we're now approaching what we see as a releasable game. We have more bug fixing to do, a lot of balance and AI tweaking and localisation. Our release plan depends on getting Chapter 4 out so we can get the final text localised by a third-party. From that point we will nail down an actual release date.

Going forward from here we will probably be doing regular updates with minor fixes and stability improvements (as well as Chapter 4 asap).

We will also be taking the game off Early Access sale in the near future. It doesn't mean the game will be "Out of Early Access" just simply not purchaseable. We don't need any new Early Access users at this point to help out with feedback and testing, and we'd like to have some time off sale to prepare for the final release version. So if you want to get it at the lower EA price now is the last chance.

Hey everyone! It's been a while since our last update. The reason for this is primarily because we were doing a big overhaul of the combat system, which required poking everything in the game in terms of art, animation, code and design. With just four of us, you can imagine that takes a while. Thanks for your patience!

For combat we had a couple major issues we wanted to address. The first was clarity. We really wanted it to be clear how your choices of terrain and positioning impacted combat. For this to work, we had to expand on the combat system a bit, adding some depth that actually simplified interaction.

Combat Engagement
All units now have a concept called engaged. If two units that aren't engaged fight in melee combat, they become engaged to each other. This means that while the engage is active, they can only target each other. This represents the idea that the units are actively fighting each other in a battle line.

You can break engage by moving away, but your movement is limited and if you don't cover the retreat, you can easily be re-engaged.

Engaged Units and Flanking
Flanking as a concept is now when you attack an already engaged unit (and you are not engaged). This unit is occupied battling their engage target, so you truly are flanking them when you attack. An engaged unit you attack also cannot attack back, making the choices of flanking and engaging a part of the tactical decision making.

Special Actions and Engage
Each action indicates in the tooltip how it interacts with engagement. Some actions function like standard melee attacks and begin an engage, while others will give you the ability to displace units and break engagements, allowing you to free up the previously engaged unit (ie Archers) so they can escape or pick new targets.

Combat Width
Another new concept for clarify of combat is "Combat Width". So that terrain and positioning decisions could have a larger impact on combat outcomes, we now calculate a combat width for a tile where combat occurs. The tile considered is always the tile being attacked.

Combat Width represents the literal width of a front line, so that chokepoints can be represented as more easily defended areas. As standard, the width is always 100% and various terrain factors reduce it. Width will reduce the total number of men in a unit that can fight, making it harder to dislodge defenders.

Additionally the path to a target is considered in width calculations, meaning if you're defending a narrow gap in a wall, or a single land bridge between water, you have reduced width. Information on the width is shown in the tooltip at all times.

Since we expanded on the core combat systems, we found that the Special Actions we had weren't giving enough choice. So we added about twice as many specials that interact with the core combat in interesting ways.

One of these new actions is a Flaming Arrow attack, which leaves tiles burning for 3 turns forcing units to avoid them, or take damage. Both the Archers and Horse Archers have this attack.

Another is the Charge attack, which is now applied across all melee capable units. You can also see here the new Action tooltips, with a lot more info and clarity of interaction.

Additionally all actions now have a damage multiplier to the basic attack. Previously actions did no more or less than a normal attack, and only their function made them special. Now there is more variation in their value (some weaker, some stronger).

We really wanted siege weapons to feel impactful, but they also have to balance with the fact they can sit and fire indefinitely from range. To solve this, we've added an Ammo system to the Ballista and Catapult. For now, Archers and Crossbowmen have unlimited ammo, but we may find in future it offers a good balance option for them.

There is a new action that lets you reload a siege weapon at the cost of tactics points.

One confusing aspect of the previous combat was the idea of height. Our terrain has built in height, but it didn't make it clear if you were "on a hill" or not. We tried to go for a more general terrain approach, but with tiles it gets confusing. Now, a tile is either a Hill or not and you can see how it's rendered in game in the screenshot.

Additionally we've clarified the terrain on the tooltip for each tile. Whether it's forest, road, hill or water you can see the terrain type and the impact it has on speed and combat width.

With the update to Unity 5.3 and the new lighting system, we really wanted to take advantage of it some more, so we've added night maps to the game. In the story mode, there are numerous maps specifically set at night which fit the narrative.

We've also added the option to play any Battle or Multiplayer map in Day or Night.

While we liked having an animated background, we felt like the original main menu background looked a bit like a tablet game. Since we already have this great looking game, we decided use that!

We did a big pass on the tooltips in game to make them prettier on the eye, and clearer on information. Less to say, more to show.

New Grapple Attack
Trait Tooltips
More Detailed Unit and Terrain Tooltips
We made some minor changes to the HUD to simplify access to information. There is no longer a combat window, and instead you have a second Unit panel on the right, which shows the current unit under the mouse. This panel updates with combat specific traits if you are about to engage a target.

Additionally the end turn has been moved to the top left turn frame.
With all of these new features and mechanics going in, balance will have taken a dive. We wanted to get the features out there for feedback, while we continue ongoing balancing ourselves. Action costs, action damage and what units have actions are all subject to change.

We've done some heavy optimisation on textures this build, which should help people on lower end integrated cards. If you've had trouble loading the game before, let us know how it goes.

We've recompiled our Lua library with a new runtime. There seemed to be issues with Steam and the VC2015 runtime which has caused a few people this error. Let us know after this update if it's still happening.

Our last update was just before Christmas, so this update is a bigger one. There have been a lot of behind the scenes changes (Unity 5 the biggest among them) but also a lot of new useful stuff for players.

They've been very commonly requested, and we were always going to do them, but it was never a huge priority at the start when we had a lot of a game to finish. Now as we're approaching our end goals we've managed to get them in.

A few achievements are disabled (namely Rank related achievements) since these scores aren't finalised.

No PC game is complete without custom keybindings. This also helps our players with international keyboards where the default setup doesn't work well for them. We may adjust the default before final release and I'd also like to look into predefined defaults for specific international keyboards.

We've done a pass on all capture-able buildings to ensure they had clear ownership flags.
We've exposed more options for quality settings in Video to help with lower end machines. Additionally we've added numerous reset options at the bottom of the General tab.

Included is the option to unlock all missions. This does not grant any achievements and is simply to allow you to bypass the progression blocks to play any mission you like. You still need to beat the levels for achievements!

We've updated Warring States to use Unity 5.3. Up to this point we've been on 4.6, which is quite old by now. We get a lot of gains with this move that directly benefit the game (eg performance). Another benefit of 5.3 is the new lighting system which has allowed us to do a nice pass on the post-process effects in the game.

Here is a side-by-side example of 4.6 and 5.3 with the lighting changes.

Besides improvements to what you see, the new lighting gives us more options for future. So look forward to some new stuff :)

We've been slow getting final missions in, as we keep jumping back to fixes or gameplay improvements, but they are slowly coming! Up next is Mission 3-1, the missing initial mission for the invasion of Chu chapter.

Besides these updates, we've added numerous little fixes and changes.

• Added more sound effects across numerous game actions.
  
• Added Steam name to faction names when in MP game.
  
• Campaign progress is now saved properly.
  
• Added portrait for Rally action.
  
• Changed Game Icon to look less like upcoming Total War game ;)
  
• Added more prominent flags to MP capture-able forts.
  
• Changed unit outline renderer to much better system, now with transitions on enable/disable. (Also looks better on siege weapons)
  
• Added confirmation menus on various buttons.
  
• Added loading screen quotes.
  
• Fixed texture seams throughout various maps.
  
• Fixed some walls without end pieces.
  
• Fixed effects on Stone and Wood Tower firing.
  
• Fixed particles on buildings.
  
• Added grey button for non-purchasable units.
  
• Fixed some units missing faction colours.
  
• Fixed Special action banner sequences having alpha issues.
  
• Fixed collision on bridges.
  
• Improved animation transitions significantly, speeding up numerous in-game actions.
  
• Fixed unit selection sound played when removing deployed units.
  
• Fixed music being played as a 3D sound.
  
• Fixed siege towers remaining highlighted after deploy.
  
• Fixed various spelling mistakes.
  
• Fixed Reinforcement ignoring No Anims option.
  
• Fixed special banners appearing multiple times.
  
• Fixed Spearman special icon always being 'on'.
  
• Fixed hidden units being briefly selectable in forests.
  
• Fixed deploying on walls showing multiple options.
  
• Fixed buildings ignoring No Anims option.
  
• Fixed save menu not working if you typed in an option.
  
• Improved save menu performance significantly.
  
• Improved usability of save menu to work more as expected.
  
• Fixed error in Minimap panel.
  
• Fixed randomised mountain heights.
  
• Fixed loading save files where Siege Towers had already been deployed.
  
• Updated Steamworks library version.
  
• Fixed alignment in deploy message.
  
• Fixed Cavalry charge occasionally getting stuck on hills.
  
• Fixed siege tower showing multiple options on deploy.
  
• Added colour to Start Turn text.
  
• Fixed bugs related to cavalry moving over bridges.
  
• Fixed soft-lock related to bridges.
  
• Improved performance significantly on levels with a lot of units.
  
• Fixed bug in MP related to pausing while the other player deploys.
  
• Improved MP game creation to default to valid game settings.

Time for another update! Lots of little things have gone into this update along with a bunch of bug fixes.

We've added a morale indicator to the floating unit info, which corresponds in color to the morale level on the unit panel. This gives you morale info of numerous units at a glance.
We've gone through and made sure the Team and Steam Player names were communicated well throughout the multiplayer screens. In game there is a HUD element indicating players, as well as an improved game results screen.
Multiplayer games exited the same as single player. This was rather poor, and we always intended a more complete results screen.
We've finished all of the mission intro maps and even updated the originals to bring them all up to the same standard.

• Multiplayer Results Screens (local and online)
  
• Multiplayer names and roles indicated in game
  
• Updated Singleplayer Results Screen
  
• Updated Singleplayer Game Over Screen
  
• Added Morale indicator to floating unit info
  
• Improved readability of combat text
  
• Added all mission briefing maps
  
• Updated existing mission briefing maps
  
• Added mission rank indicators
  
• Increased timeout for loading into a multiplayer game
  
• Fixed issue with loading saved games
  
• Fixed bugs that appear when playing a campaign mission after a battle mission
  
• Fixed various issues with the HUD radar/map
  
• Fixed errors in the objective panel on the HUD
  
• Fixed unassigned flags in Capture the Flag Battles
  
• Fixed floating combat text causing mouse clicks to block
  
• Fixed a soft lock that occurred when a unit retreated while another action blocks its path
  
• Fixed a bug related to the change of Windows locale preventing the game from launching
  
• Fixed issues with fog of war updating when a unit dies or is removed from deployment
  
• Fixed the representation of supplies on the HUD map
  
• Fixed supply buildings not having an icon or name when selected
  
• Fixed Tower and Gate height collision
  
• Fixed Unit spread on Tower and Gate
  
• Fixed Team Frame to fit multiple elements

Now that we've got a lot of stability fixes and UI improvements in, we're going to be focusing again on content. If all goes to plan, the next update will be a big batch of campaign missions.

Hey everyone! This week we have had quite a few bug fixes go in, but also a couple cool features. In the past we've slipped bug fixes in with occasional ninja updates during the week, but we've been prompted by a few asking what are in these updates. We don't really want to post a Steam announcement for that, so instead we'll keep the forum post updated with any additions.

To be honest, this hasn't been a very requested feature. Despite that, we really feel it helps on the larger maps and it looks pretty too! You can zoom for more detail, scroll the map, drag the camera view. It also shows objective icons on specific maps such as Capture the Flag or Campaign marker objectives.
All controllable buildings in game now have flags identifying the owner. Previously you had to rely on tooltips or selection to make it clear. This informs the player better, and just looks cooler!
Since the HUD and UI update, we've been upgrading the quality of icons to match the new style. Here you can see them in action, including a new icon to make Horse units more readable.
Towers on walls behaved a little tricky in that they allowed access to the walls, but you couldn't occupy them. We've reworked the code a fair bit to make them actually work properly. This fixes an awkward situation where you could block the top of the tower access, but no melee unit could engage you. We have some visual improvements to come for this, but mechanically it's there.

This week we're adding the previously mentioned Multiplayer modes that were in development and held up by our front-end update. Along with these modes includes new maps and we've expanded the number of players up to 4.

We've added a few different modes and options to play besides the original battle. There was a lack of win conditions previously, or limits which meant you could find yourself in a stand-off where neither side wanted to advance. You can still have this if you want, but now you can break this up with the following options:

• Attacker VS Defender - The defender wins if he holds out for a specific amount of turns, while the attacker wins if the defender is defeated or routed from the map. In this mode, you can specific the deployment points of each team independently.
  
• Capture of the Flag - Capturable flag points are scattered around the map to be taken and held. You may set the number of flags to be taken, requiring either the whole map worth, or only some to win.
  
• Turn Limits - You can specify turn limits for your game, to create a sense of urgency between players or allowing one player in the lead to go on the defensive and hold out for victory.
  
• Siege Maps - Attacker VS Defender has the option to have siege battles, adding a map specific fortress to be fought over.

Since we've added up to 4-players now for multiplayer; we felt it was prudent to include teams. This makes the primary ally and opponent based on your team number, rather than faction. You can have any combination of teams 4-players allows. Only Attacker vs Defender is limited to 2 teams for obvious reasons.

4-Player can be best played on larger maps, so we've added a larger desert-tiled map to give you more room for battles.
We've updated the unit display on the HUD to make quick-glance info more readable and changed the stat values and traits panel entirely optional. Whatever state you leave these panels in will be saved, so no need to keep re-opening them if you like to see them. We have further work to come on the Combat Window element.