📢 Attention Thunder Run and Days of Valor Commanders:
Welcome to the 7th 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. Last week, bh-nirgal provided some updates on current projects he’s working on for MF, WSE, TR, and DV and this week he’s diving deeper into some of the juicy details surrounding his TR and DV developments. So without further adieu, here’s bh-nirgal:
Thunder Run and Days of Valor Developments
The ability to move buildings while they are “busy” has been added to the engine. Both Thunder Run and Days of Valor players can move upgrading, crafting, or repairing buildings now. The next engine quality of life change will be to enable accessing building stats while the building is “busy”. This will take slightly longer, since it will affect more portions of the engine.
Many players have requested that Unit Equipment be broken up by unit type. A working prototype of this was developed over the weekend, and is being fine-tuned before release to Days of Valor and then Thunder Run.
Days of Valor and Thunder Run players may notice that Unit Blueprints and Elite Unit Blueprints are now split into Infantry, Vehicles, and Aircraft sub-sections. This will make it a little easier to get to some of the blueprints.
The Level 5 leaders, along with the alternative leader update system, is well underway. This will mostly affect how players buy leaders and how players upgrade leaders. The new L5 leaders will be stronger versions of the existing L4 leaders and will not introduce any new mechanics other than how you upgrade to get them.
Buying leaders: Right now, the store entries for each leader checks if you have any level of the leader, and whether you can still upgrade the leader. If so, it lets you buy another leader. Since we’re changing the crafting system, the main listing for leaders will let you buy a leader if you don’t have any level of the leader.
Old system: 1x L3 leader, 1x L2 leader = can buy another L1 leader
New system: 1x L3 leader = cannot buy another leader
Upgrading leaders: The upgrade menu in the Leader Barracks now has three “recipes” for upgrading each leader to each level from 2 through 4.
- There’s a legacy recipe that you’ll never see. This will keep any upgrades in process when we deploy the patch from disappearing.
- There’s a “merge” recipe, which normally doesn’t show. This works the same way as you’re used to. If you have two leaders of the same level, this recipe will show up so you can upgrade them. If you only have one leader, it won’t show up.
- There’s a “promote” recipe, which displays if the “merge” recipe doesn’t display. The engine seamlessly switches between the two. A “promotion” recipe requires a leader and “Promotion Orders”, an item you can acquire in the store. There are four levels of Promotion Order. A promotion order is more expensive than a leader, but the Hardware cost and time required to Promote is significantly less than combining multiple leaders.
The upgrade times and costs have been changed. To determine the new costs and times, I added the upgrade time and upgrade cost for each level, divided it by the number of recipes, and rounded it down. This means that individual leaders might take longer and cost more, but taken as a whole L2, L3, and L4 all take less time and cost less.
To try to bring some balance the greater number of upgrades required under the old system, it takes twice as long to do a promotion upgrade as a merge upgrade. Bear in mind, you have to craft L1 to L2 four times and L2 to L3 twice to get to L4, so there is a time savings in the L1 to L2 stage.
Buying Promotion Orders: The Promotion Order items will appear before the Alpha Team in the leaders section of the store. If you don’t like the new system, you’re in luck! The old store listings will be in a sub-section of the Promotion Order. You can still buy all 8 level 1 leaders required to upgrade a leader to L4, or you can buy the 1 leader and 4 Promotion Orders required to upgrade. It’s your choice.
L5 Leaders only support the new Promotion Order method of upgrading. You will not be combining two L4 Leaders.
Looking for an update on where the Dev Team currently stands regarding various recent community suggestions? Check out our new “Voice of the Commander” tracker here: Thunder Run Voice of the Commander: Declassified.
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!