This update brings a new multiplayer mode, a big performance pass for huge swarms and a few fixes. You may need to restart your Steam client if the download is not immediately available.
New mode: War
- New mode in Rooms: War. One map, one extractor for each player. Buy insects with gold and send them at your opponent while you defend your own extractor. Whoever takes down the other extractor wins. Same upgrade tree for both, no biomass, and four maps made for it.
- The room host picks which insects are in the shop, up to 5 types, from the ones they have already met in the campaign.
- Ranked War: Find match pairs you with someone close to your ELO. A win raises it, a loss lowers it, and leaving in the middle counts as a loss. Ranks go from Larva to Queen, with a Steam leaderboard.
- Your opponent's towers stay hidden until the fight starts, and each extractor has its owner's color (blue is yours, red is theirs).
Performance
- Huge swarms in narrow passages are much lighter on the CPU. When dozens of insects pile up in the same spot, the game pushes them apart as a crowd instead of one pair at a time. In Stage 18 with 14 thousand insects, the simulation step went from 12 to 6 ms.
- Big swarms stutter less: the game stopped creating a new block of memory every frame to move the insects.
- Laptops with two graphics cards now ask Windows for the dedicated one.
- The frame limit now defaults to 120. On 144 and 240 Hz monitors the game was drawing far more frames than the swarm needs. You can still pick No limit in Settings > Video.
- Each fight writes one line to the game log with the average FPS, the peak insect count and the graphics card, so lag reports come with numbers.
Fixes and balance
- New launch option --janela: opens the game in windowed mode. If the game opens but your clicks land on the desktop, add it in Steam > Hivetide > Properties > Launch Options, and attach the game log when you report it. Thanks to emailonthefly for the report.
- World 2 mortar is 20% weaker. On its own it held more than a well-built mix of towers, and the game is about picking the mix.