Every unit on the board, redrawn
Almost every piece that stands on the board is a new drawing this week. 594 of them, plus an Act 0 that belongs to Uncle Jim, three clips of your run you can send someone, and a balance desk with nothing left on it.
594 pieces, and not one landed first time
There are 686 unit sprites in the game. 594 were redrawn for this build.
Each one started again from the block-in, drawn against its faction's card, then handed to a reviewer who had never seen it and could only look at the render, never the file. Whatever that reviewer named got fixed, and most pieces went round again after that. Forty of those judgements are written down.
The faults it kept naming were the same short list:
- Parts set next to each other instead of overlapping, so a hand rested against a spear shaft rather than closing on it.
- Legs made of rounded bars with no knee in them, four of them identical.
- Eyes drawn as a circle inside a circle.
- A beak standing beside a head instead of growing out of it.
- Outlines doing the fill's job, so anything thin (horns, tails, two whole faces) collapsed into a black lump.
Some were further off than that. The Carrion Court's vulture was a penguin. The Trojan Horse's head was a rocket nose with a loose triangle balanced on top. The Hellfire pack was a brown smear with eight legs in it. The Instar line was eight drawings of the same crab, and is an actual evolution now.
Left to right, one row per unit. The leftmost cell is the drawing that was in the last build; everything right of it happened since.
On the board, at the size you actually see them:
Every enemy lord has its own sign
The nameplate over an enemy commander was one torn strip of card in forty different tints with a family ornament glued on, which made the whole roster read as one enemy in costumes. Every lord in the catalogue now gets a sign built for it, with its own silhouette, construction and handwriting.
Grix hangs a bitten trophy shield. The Slime Lord's sign is the puddle. Rex Mortifer is a femur with the ledger rule closed over it. The Dread Court sends a black gilt-deckled summons in pale ink. Perihelion keeps its paper orbit ring.
Nothing on the desk is lettered on the desk
A handful of things were still plain text floating on the cutting mat, and once the rest of the game was cut from card they stood out badly.
The note under a relic hover ("Click to see all 9 relics") is on paper now instead of haloed lettering under a forged cartouche. Hovering an event option shows the card or relic it names without a caption above it telling you what the row already told you. The act boss's name on the chart is the nameplate he wears in battle, stood in the band under his feet, rather than a line of UI type between two invented diamonds. The last rounded button on the desk is cut from manila.
The backdrops were washed out, and it was the printing
Four screenshots came in of arenas that looked bleached, and the cause was in the press.
A cut backdrop ships with its sky punched out, and the press worked out its exposure from the average of the whole sheet. It counted the punched hole as black ink, decided a third of the picture was solid black, and cranked the lift up to compensate for a picture that was not there. All 26 cut plates were running between 2.2 and 4.0 times too bright. Everything above the midpoint clipped to white and took the colour with it.
The average measures ink now, and never a hole. Those same plates land between 0.71 and 1.9.
Act 0
The tutorial is an act, and it belongs to Uncle Jim.
You meet him before you see a map. He runs on, says hello, and asks which pack you fancy in his own words rather than by name. The one you pick is handed over on screen, its piece snapped onto your commander's head and its starter flown into the deck, before Sift turns up and throws in the other two. The chart says "Act 0, Jim's Woods" and walks itself onto the first marker, so you are not staring at a road wondering what to press.
Jim's Woods used to reuse the act 1 drawing; it has its own stretch of the Verdant Reach now. Grix has his own landmark at the head of the sheet: a warren gate thrown up out of whatever the horde could drag, in place of the oak he used to borrow. When he falls the act gets a real ending, the same seal and page-tear that act 1 gets on the way to act 2.
Moments of the March
When a run ends, the summary offers three clips of it.
They are picked from what happened: a last stand, a chain reaction, an army at full size, an overkill, the blow that finished a boss, the fight you lost. Each is a real recording, titled, with a share button that puts the clip and a line of text onto your clipboard. Compendium records keep them, so you can reopen a reel from a run you finished days ago.
Losing looks like losing
Your warlord used to fall by folding forward at the waist with his legs left standing bolt upright underneath, and then vanishing. It read as a stumble.
It is six staged beats now: the blow, the stagger, the knee, a half second where he tries to get up and does not, the fall itself turning about the soles like a piece of board going over, and the landing. The camera and the sound go with it. The names that used to be typeset over the last frame of the run are gone, because they captioned something you had just watched happen.
The balance desk is empty
The balance desk had 109 open calls on it. Every one is resolved.
The ones you will feel first are the enemy commander spells that had no answer. Throneflame is gone: burn on a large ring at your crown was six damage no guard caught and no positioning avoided. Vulture's Due counted the whole graveyard, so a long fight armed it forever whatever you did; it stoops on fresh kill now, one knife per unit of yours lost in the last ten seconds, and its telegraph prints the live number. The Roots Reach was a ring at the crown and is now what its name says, one strand down every lane, stopped by the first body it meets.
On your side, Dissolving Rain pours Poison 5 instead of 2, Fan of Knives cuts Bleed 5 across a large area, and Break Ground sweeps a large area and lifts everything in it, including the terrain that was clipped by the edge of your aim and used to survive. An upgraded Brother and Sister Slime fuse into an upgraded Slimebling. Shield Sworn drops its printed armor and keeps Pack Tactics, so there is one armor number on it instead of two arguing.
Smaller things
- Every terrain name is a term you can hover, tinted like the status it behaves as, so a card can say "Creates 1 Smouldering Cinders" and the hover tells you what standing there costs.
- Hovering a unit that is immune to Poison no longer raises a Poison panel explaining a status it cannot take.
- The letter E reaches the Compendium's search box again. The map was claiming that key for the ink eraser and eating it under every overlay, which is why the search box looked broken with a run in progress and fine from the main menu.
- The cut edge has a width, so the knife stops leaving whiskers, and a slot finer than the blade gets board put back in it.
- Redeploy lands as one piece, in the shape it left in.
In the browser and on the phone
Both are on this build, alongside Windows, Mac, Linux and the demo.
The soundtrack is still free to listen to at thepaulbooth.com/cardboard-conquest-jukebox.