Wow, already reached the second month of the year. Time passes really fast, so here we go with a new update for Elemental War.

Highlights:

As usual we have some version highlights we want to present you besides the full changelog. Besides a status update on the multiplayer progress, we have the following for you.

Achievements

This update contains the first 10 achievements. We added some that are not too hard to achieve, but others will really hard to reach. We hope you enjoy them. There will be more in future updates, but they have no top priority at the moment.

Balancing

This update's big balancing change affects all towers with status changes. Each of these towers now has a maximum of targets that can get the status. This maximum counts per tower type, so e.g. all Stun towers together can only Stun x enemies at once. This change it meant to stop players from permanently slow/stop all enemies and be able to stay alive forever in Survival and Hero Mode. The limits aren't too low to affect normal games though. If you still encounter issues with that, please let us know.

Multiplayer

Multiplayer made good progress too. We're now able to load multiple fields (one for each team) and synchronize tower building and most tower abilities. Still a lot to do though, see below for details.

Full changelog:

Enhancements:

• added the first 10 achievements
• added new input setting to configure whether mouse shall be locked to window or not
• inventory position now is stored/restored
• Money tower can be rotated now
• cooldown for some towers is now visible in tower info screen
• utilization now is visible in tower info screen
• added and improved some monster sounds
• added new quest
• quest for Water of Life now shows the progress
• with multiselect when towers have different target or status modes it is marked now and changing it will properly reset to default mode first

Balancing:

• towers with status changes now have a maximum number of enemies they can give their status at once

Fixes:

• fixed pooling of monster minimap markers
• fixed bug displaying wrong background texture for the path preview when opening level select menu after tutorial menu
• fixed sound of Rage tower not being hearable
• fixed bug that caused input menu being invisible when opening it ingame
• upgrade of Money tower doesn't change its orientation anymore
• fixed bug that could delete monster camera when a monster was selected when finishing the game
• added missing special event icon
• Shadow Golem now doesn't show a level anymore in its name
• hovering of Gas Bubble and Frozen Treasure works now
• projectile of Black Hole tower is visible now
• highlighted Black Hole looks a little better now
• fixed bug that caused towers with multiple targets not always to attack their maximum amount of possible targets
• it's not possible anymore to sell towers multiple times using multiselect
• fixed null pointer access when Ritual Site is removed while Shadow Golem is on the map
• fixed small performance problem with Sun towers
• fixed problem when loading a saved game
• Tab to jump between input fields works again
• damage of Arcane Shield Generator works better now
• slightly improved CPU performance
• monsters caught by Griffon now drop gold
• fixed bug that caused player to get too less gold for monsters respawned by Hydra ability
• fixed English tooltip for Root Nexus
• fixed rotation of Elf Archer projectile
• the first monsters in Survival Mode don't spawn at once anymore

What's next?

As mentioned in the highlights, the multiplayer made good progress. Until the next update we're going to synchronize also monsters, tower upgrades and some other minor stuff. When that's done we should have a working base and we just need to improve, test and fix a lot.

While testing today's update I found some interesting CPU activities in the profiler. Most of them are related to the UI, which is updated way too often (or too much is updated too often). I'll try to reduce these updates to save CPU time and so increase the framerate. There are also some small improvements already contained in this update, but I don't think that they'll have a noticable effect.

As there was the wish to support saving and loading of randomly generated maps we're going to add support for that in the next update. In the first step you will be able to save, load and play maps and have an official leaderboard for each of them. You also can share them with each other by sending the level file to someone else, but there'll be better ways for that in future updates. You can also modify the paths in the level files afterwards, if you like. Some kind of level editor will follow in the future, too, so you can see how your path will look like as the format is very simple.

We hope you enjoy the new update and are looking forward to get your feedback, either here in the discussions or in our Discord at https://discord.gg/bwnuXq9.