🎇 Athena Crisis Early Access Update
Hello there!
It's been an awesome six weeks since Athena Crisis launched on Steam Early Access! Here is what's new:
User Generated Content
Players of Athena Crisis have created hundreds of interesting PvP and scenario maps and there are now 7 custom campaigns – with many more in the making – that extend single-player playtime by dozens of hours.
Any player who designs a campaign with 7+ maps can design a custom skill as a reward for players who beat their campaign!
New Features
While I spent the past month fixing a lot of bugs, there have also been plenty of new features! We redesigned health bars, added new win conditions, improved the AI, created new skills – added even more units! – and overall took all the feedback to heart to polish the experience. Here are some of the highlights:
- Naval Overhaul & Balancing: Thanks to Flak, and inspired by modern naval strategies, we overhauled all naval units. We also made significant changes to dial in the balancing of the game.
- News Feed: The game now shows a feed of what's happening, and you can spectate any single- and multiplayer game. You can even spectate a friend's game in fog via unique spectator codes.
- Custom Movement Paths: The movement paths of units can now be controlled by players. This is primarily useful to avoid running into opponents in fog.
- Turn Timers: Games can now have timers, ranging from realtime to one day per turn. This ensures games don't become stale.
- Difficulty: Campaigns now have easy, intermediate and hard difficulties. Campaign creators can lock-in a specific difficulty, or leave it up to the player.
- Translations: Athena Crisis is now almost fully translated to German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian and Simplified Chinese.
- Unit Descriptions & Character Stories: Every unit now has a description, and each leader character has a backstory. Some of them are funny, some are sad, and some are just happy to be there. We hope you'll enjoy the lore around the characters!
Steam Reviews & Twitch Streams
We've gotten tons of reviews, feedback and watched many Twitch streams of people playing. If you bought the game on Steam, please consider leaving a review. It's also a great time to tell your friends or favorite streamers about the game – or even better, invite them to play against you!
Speedruns
Christopher Chedeau and Null are partnering to bring speedruns with prizes to Athena Crisis. We are still working on the rules and will share more soon, but many players have already come up with strategies to beat the Prequel Campaign as quickly as possible. Check out player dxdydzd's run which takes just over 6 minutes – Incredible!
What's Next?
The game is becoming more complete, but there are still major new features coming: Invasions, complex programmable effects, replays and more. In the short-term, the focus is on finishing and playtesting the primary campaign.
I'll be at React Conf in Henderson, Nevada in mid-May and in San Francisco afterwards – watch out for some major Athena Crisis news during that time!
If you haven't tried Athena Crisis yet, you can play one map instantly on athenacrisis.com. If you enjoy the game and wish to support its development, please consider buying Athena Crisis directly.