🔸 Cantata Newsletter: Patch 0.2.1 Live! Hotseat Multiplayer, bug fixes, and quality of life changes
Hello everyone!
We've been steadily working on Cantata with changes big and small since our Early Access launch, and have been grateful for all the feedback we've received! We've taken a lot of it to heart and are slowly shaping Cantata up to be the best it can be, and are so excited you're all along for the ride! In case you missed the announcement on Steam, we've got a new patch that introduces Hotseat Multiplayer to the game, as well as a wealth of small bugfixes and quality of life enhancements. Additionally, we pushed a major feature change about a month ago that gets rid of supply lines between units (!) and instead makes Regions be the things that are connected.
You can read more about the change (and watch an overview video) below! Onto the newsletter!
Patch Notes
Features
Hotseat Multiplayer! If you want to play multiplayer with someone locally, you can create your own scenario and add another Human player!
Balance
Summoner is now better at summoning than the Talisman
It is no longer free to summon with the Talisman
Talisman is now built by Summoner
They Wait in the Fens as well as units built by the Shepherd can now be summoned
You can now unload Hunger as The People of Sun and Shadow
Bug Fix
Fix issue where The Animator used Alloys for Producing instead of Motherboards
Fix issue where Scatterbirds, Finback, and Octopus cost no Population
Fix issue where Storage Requirement in Projects wasn't reflecting storage amounts available in a region
Fix issue where Mining Icon for tall buildings was way off scale
Fix issue where we were showing the explored enemy display X for units like Scrap and Remains
Fix issue where if you had more Current Population than your Population Limit, you wouldn’t be able to Transform
New Hotkeys / Controls
(Reminder: these are visible in the controls section in the game menu)
You can now temporarily disable tooltips by holding Left Control. Letting go of Control will show tooltips again
You can now cycle through units that have unused attacks with Tab + 1
You can now cycle through units that have unused moves with Tab + 2
You can also “Wait” a unit (it will not show up in your tab cycling) by clicking Z with unit selected. "Waiting" means the unit will be skipped over when tab-cycling units.
Control menu updated to reflect a hotkey for both Unloading and Loading (previously only one was listed)
Quality of Life
On the Unit Tooltip, you will now always see: Control Range (even if 0), Move Range, Vision Range
If you save and exit the game, the game will load with the camera at the last location you were looking at
You will now see every Action a unit has available to it, including Surge Move and Surge Attack, in its tooltip
When using a Heal Project, you will see the new HP of the unit you are going to heal
Unit XP Sliders have a tooltip now that show you your accumulated XP, and how much more XP to get to the next level
Both Move and Attack outlines will turn orange if you will use a Surge
Infrastructure tooltips are much more obvious about whether or not a building / unit will contribute to the Region Infrastructure Limit, and states extremely clearly under which Region Ownership they can be built
Experience Cantata Maps in Full Detail (Tile names now prioritize Detail names if there are Details on the tile. Enjoy looking at much Colony Debris, Wreckage, and Carnage!)
Some very small nit-picky formatting that moonstone suggested
Region Supply Lines
As part of the promise of EA, we are making this game not just for ourselves, but for the community of people playing the game. And we've really listened to you all over the past two months since our initial release. We've heard all your feedback about the game, what's fun, what isn't etc and we've put a lot of that feedback together and started looking at parts of the game that are maybe weird for what we're trying to accomplish. We looked at things that didn't quite work and tried to come up with good solutions for them.
This orbital drop represents the first steps of that — forward into a new version of Cantata that we hope will make the game more fun, tactical, and less fiddly than previous versions. So here's the big change:
We got rid of unit-to-unit supply lines.
You can read more about why, and how, we’ve done this on our forum here. The bottom line is that we felt, and heard, that managing unit supply lines simply wasn’t fun or fulfilling for players and the new change is a holistic solution that allowed us to get what we wanted the player to "feel" with supply lines, but in a way that was represented differently. We still wanted the concept of connections and logistics, but maybe not through specific units. Turns out we already had something right in front of our faces that was perfect for this... Regions.
There's a lot of new in Cantata 0.2. Please keep in mind, that between the new features, concepts and changes, this is still an Early Access title, and the update, while major, is one of many to follow. You may encounter new bugs and unfinished content.
Your old map saves will work, but your ability to configure supply lines for units will be gone. If you want to finish out a map save file before upgrading, we've given you all the ability to toggle the feature on and off in Game Settings in the settings menu (see "Use Region Supply"). This is in here so people have an easy way to play an older version of the game, but it's our intention to remove the flag in the future and make region supply the default.
We are keeping the previous public build accessible on the new legacy branch. This branch will be populated with the latest stable milestone, in this case 0.1.4. You can access the legacy branch by right clicking Cantata in your library, select properties, betas, and in the drop down you'll find the branch. Selecting it will prompt the game to update to the older build.
This is the first step into a newer, better Cantata, so seriously, let us know what you all think in our previously-linked forums or in our Discord community! What should we add or change? What can make it better? Things are definitely going to be rough right now as this is the first pass, with hard coded numbers of supply lines and slots and no major sense of balance yet, but in general we really hope you like these changes, and thank you to everyone for making Cantata the best game it can be!
Tacticon
We're excited to be involved with Tacticon this year!
You can join the festival on Steam, hosted by @FiresquidGames and @HoodedHorseInc. The inhabitants of Shoal are pleased to be on board.
Thanks to all your comments, we've been working hard on adding new features (hello multiplayer!), fixing bugs and so much more.
We'd love to hear more about what you think in our official Cantata Discord.
- Afterschool Games