Greetings, orx slayers! The newest update is here — ORX Commander Rework, bug fixes, QoL improvements and more. Don't miss the teaser for the upcoming Advisors below!

ORX Commanders and Curses rework

In the past, ORX Commanders had too many skills and the only way to learn about them was to hover over the Commander in the mission select menu or his icon during said mission. They also felt too punishing if encountered multiple times in a row, making their abilities stronger and even more robust — all of which were instantly active from the very 1st wave of the mission.

Now we're changing things up. Firstly, ORX Commanders no longer have abilities hidden away in their description — from now on they play special cards. Secondly, the cards are played in specific order — getting progressively stronger with each passing wave, so the players have time to prepare their defences.

Lasty, we're removing standard ORX curses from mission rewards and adding some of them to ORX Commanders, which will be added to their deck between each Act, rather than a mission.

In the future we plan to completely overhaul orx balance and make current Curses into passive bonuses scaling with Corruption levels. At least this is our current idea — the final version can turn out to be more interesting!

Interface Improvements

While working on this update, we've used the opportunity to improve the Action Log. We feel like it's a useful feature, but it was taking up too much space on the screen — making anything behind it uninteractable. After this update Action Log will be always minimized by default — showing at most 3 lines of messages, with only the bottom one being clickable. To expand the log simply click the icon left of the line!

We've also improved the presentation of ORX cards played during the mission. Now they appear in an orderly fashion and linger for longer on the screen — so you can actually see what is being played against you and shuffled into your deck! Anf if you're in a hurry or know every card by heart, simply left-click the screen to dismiss the them.

*Shown at 1.5x speed

Hopefully, this makes things more clear and convenient!

Patch Notes

Gameplay

• Changes to ORX targeting to no longer laser focus on Main Building

• Changes to ORX Curses — the deck no longer grows with mission rewards, removed the corruption from the cards. All existing Curses were distributed between the Commanders which are added between Acts.

• ORX Commanders rework — instead of passive effects, ORX Commanders now have their own deck which they’ll play against you. Commander cards grow in strength the more corruption you have. Commanders physically appear only during the last wave.

Interface

• Action Log now correctly implements line breaks in its messages

• Action log is now minimized by default and can be fully open by clicking a button left of the 1st line

• Cards played by ORX are displayed for longer and in orderly fashion. Left-click to dismiss them early.

• Improvements to Sephiroph interface to incorporate more elements on display

• Unplayable cards no longer have the cost display

• Removed the unused tabs from Campaign Results window

Optimisation

• Render optimisation of user interface (Player bar)

• Render optimisations for buffs and poison effects

• Implemented texture atlas for destroyed buildings

• Added some static visual effects to ORX texture atlas (i.e. nimbs)

• Implemented sprite cache

• 2D colliders now constantly update only for the visible moving units

Fixes

• Fixes to multiple critical bugs causing game to freeze

• Fixed the bug causing the Return button to disappear if player opened Pause Menu on Campaign screen

• Fixed the card placement UI sometimes not disappearing upon placing the tile

• Fixed Interest Rate card not working

• Fixed the weather not being paused upon Mission start

• Fixed an issue with Outpost card description

• Fixed the graphics for arrows in Card Inspection window

• Fixed mountains sometimes missing a piece due to adjacent Neutral Bulding

• Fixed ORX Commanders sometimes having a wrong display order in mission preview

• Fixed card tier mentions missing from unit camp descriptions

• Fixed the camera sometimes moving after the directional inputs were no longer physically pressed

• Fixed the font on Sephiroth spreadsheet in Encyclopedia getting smaller or bigger each time you interact with the page

• Fixed some reward options during starting event not giving any cards

• Fixed Spynx dealing damage to units not present on the map (i.e. hitting bosses underground)

Look into the Future — The Advisors

We love the stategies our players come up with, but some of them require getting too many cards to run properly. And even then, sometimes these strategies might have a weakness — be it a type of ORX or simpy being to gold hungry. To improve the situation and give a choice of "specialization" to the players, we came up with the Advisors!

Current plan for the Advisors is to add useful and/or unique cards into the player's deck, as well as serve as a trigger for unique events between the missions. It might not sound like much at first, but we have a lot more rebalancing and changes tying into this — hopefully making ORX even more engaging and fun to play!

Players on the Experimental Branch might've had a glance at the Advisors already. However, the system in its current state wasn't intended to make into Live version due to being very WIP and low on features. We are very thankful to everyone who shared their opinions on the Advisors and will improve them based on the feedback!

Oh, and one more important thing! We're making changes to our workflow and will try to make content updates much more frequent, while also patching the game on a regular basis, rather then compiling big updates.

As always, thank you for supporting ORX and see you in the next update!