It's October and the start of Spring down here in New Zealand, so obviously it's time for another TU2 build update.
Some excellent additions this last month.
Behemoth and (allied) Titans have been reworked.
Behemoths can turn up during both offensive and defensive fortress battles in zone 3 and 4. Titans can be summmoned as a powerup by the player. Animations have been improved for both types.
Behemoths no longer shoot a beam (which wasn't working well).
Instead they now shoot ground shaking bolts with a wide area of effect (in addition to their stomp attack). These bolts are deadly so either get away and/or make sure to have armor collected for protection. There is a warning to watch for in that the Behemoth will stop and it's eye will begin to glow red.
As in TU1, Behemoth's are tough and if they reach your fortress walls they can destroy them with stomp attacks. Behemoths can be brought down by dropping mines in their path or by calling in a Titan. A Titan will quickly hammer a Behemoth into submission (again, watch out for the resultant blastwall).
Speaking of Titans, these are now very effective against fortresses.
Note that if the fortress has powerstations attached - meaning the walls are shielded - Titan hammerstrikes will cause a blowback destroying the powerstations one by one. When these are all gone, the fortress will be breached.
Powerups: nukes are now working.
A nuke, although expensive, is the last word in subjugating the enemy.
It will just flatten an enemy fortress, including any attached powerstations and make finishing the level much easier.
Just avoid the blast wall as it'll shut your tank down for awhile.
Other improvements:
Pathfinding improvements for tanks.
Doesn't entirely resolve tanks bunching up - particularly during heavy fortress defence battles.
But tanks should now actively avoid head-on collisions and 'give way' when necessary.
Less tanks clipping through each other as well.
Anti-aliasing has been reduced to level 4 just for this release.
Previous builds had max AA as the default and this ate up framerates unnecessarily.
Other code optimisations should see framerate improvements in big battles (although further optimisation is needed as slow down in big battles is still an issue).
Rocks, minable rocks (as they're called), will now respawn over time.
This means less frustration looking for armor shards as a battle moves on.
Armor shards and minable rocks are also visible on the radar now.
Speaking of radar: tanks will no longer show a red range circle - just a line indicating turret direction and range. Only fixed turrets such as beam turrets will show a red range circle.
This makes it much easier to see when your tank is coming in range of a fixed turret.
This is particularly important when dealing with deadly beam turrets.
Things left to do:
Balancing, bug fixing, marketing.
Hardpoint networks between hubs need another pass as there's some bugs with connections still showing red when they've been isolated.
More optimisation is needed before final release, particularly when loading/spawning new explosions for the first time. An example is the noticeable pause when spawning an armor shard + explosion + physics based fragments from a mineable rock.
Onwards to the finish line...