Hero’s Hour - v2.6.0 - Great War

 

So, it finally happened! Hero’s Hour version 2.6 is now complete and released. I know it has been almost a year since the last major update. You might even consider this the third Hero’s Hour anniversary release. First anniversary update was v2.0 and steam release - second anniversary was v2.4 and Rogue Realms release - and this third anniversary is v2.6 and the Great War update.

The Great War update brings overhauls, updates and new content to rather a lot of systems. The three major areas of this update are:

Hero classes and rare heroes

Artifacts and artifact sets

Battlefields

Let’s take them one at a time and go over the various major improvements and the ideas behind them.

 

 

Unlockable Heroes

For the longest time now, Hero’s Hour has had a peculiar system where each faction had six heroes per faction - but then, each of those six heroes would have a copy with a different portrait and name, but the exact same skill tree. There have been a lot of suggestions across time to give those extra heroes their own specialty units at least. Well, I’ve gone now and made it so that the extra heroes actually are full heroes on their own. And to make sure they don’t just add too much extra stuff to the game, they’re becoming their own type of hero: Unlockable heroes.

BASE GAME

Replaced 72 alternate heroes with unlockable heroes

Added 8 neutral unlockable heroes

Added 4 unlockable faction heroes belonging to “secret factions”

ROGUE REALMS DLC

Changed what Rogue Realms rogue towns can be chosen when starting a new map, making it so that all 12 towns are now available as starting town

Changed the 12 Rogue Realms heroes that were previously unavailable as starting heroes to now be unlockable heroes

Added 24 unlockable heroes for Rogue Realms

Most hero portraits have been updated with new art by SleepyMage

When a player first starts playing the game, they will only have the main heroes available - but as the player unlocks various achievements throughout the game, they will gain access to more and more unlockable heroes from across the various factions. When picking your starting hero, the available list expands - or you can press a button to see the unavailable options and how to unlock them.

Unlockable heroes are basically like the main heroes - but they have a bit more personality to make playing as them a bit more varied. First off, they have unusual specialty units - that is, units that are not usually part of their faction. Secondly, starting as an unlockable hero changes what units are available in the starting town so that you actually do gain access to their specialty unit. Finally, several of the specialty units for the unlockable heroes are units that are new to v2.7.

 

New Units

As mentioned, the update brings a bunch of new units to the game which are slightly more unique than most other neutral units.

Changed unlockable heroes to specialise in non-faction units

Starting as an unlockable hero allows you to hire their specialty unit in town

Added 29 new units, including:

Houndmaster is a unit that is actually three units: two hound dogs and one hound tamer.

Thornbinder can root enemy units from across the battlefield.

Ebon Paw has nine lives.

Elemental Nexus turns into one one of four variants depending on the element of spells you cast during combat.

Snowbeard calls hail down on enemies across the battlefield.

Goblin Ensign leaves behind a banner when it dies, which will promote another goblin into a goblin ensign after the battle.

Added two new unit groups: Frogs and Ants

A whole new series of ant units drawn by AntRose, author of the Colony, Honey and other mods

Set these new units to be used by the unlockable heroes as specialty units

Another unique thing about unlockable heroes is that they do not usually start with two rank I skills - instead they start with two ranks in a single skill, giving them a head start on (hopefully) a useful strategy.

 

 

 

Hero Classes and Stat Rework

While working on cleaning up the hero system in the game, I also went and cleaned up the even more spaghetti-codey hero class system. Did you know that the first 12 hero classes added to the game had their own unique progressions of how they would gain new stats, while the latter 12 hero classes and the neutral heroes all used copies of the Warden and Archdruid classes? Fun fact, huh.

Anyway, that’s a thing of the past. Each hero class now has its own unique stat gain progression once more - also, there’s even more hero classes - and also also, there’s now more stats.

Added 12 new hero classes for the Rogue Realms heroes

Added Daily Movement as a hero stat

Added Command as a hero stat, which controls how many units can be fielded at a time during combat

Tactics skill now increases Command; Hegemony now decreases Command

Added Proficiency as a hero stat, which creates specialty units for the hero and increases their stats

Mastery now increases Proficiency

Added Entourage as a hero stat, which creates disposable units for secondary heroes

Bodyguards now increases Entourage

Added 10 new small overworld buildings that give permanent stat bonuses to heroes

Added 5 new large overworld buildings that give choices between units, stats, etc.

Changed all Hero Classes to now have unique stat progressions between all 10 stats

Implemented new level-up system which increases 1-3 stats each level, weighing some stats as more valuable than others

Expected stats for a hero class at level 20 is now shown in newly added tooltips

For a long time, I’ve wanted to solve the issue of hero classes never really mattering. While my previous collaborator for hero stats believed that you could tell hero classes apart just by four stats, I never could make it work myself. Thus this new system of ten stats.

It might look like three new stats were added, but really, they’re just reworks of systems already in place. Proficiency is Mastery, but for all heroes - as Entourage is Bodyguards, too. Daily Movement already increased with level-ups, but in an unclear manner. And Command…

Well, for a long time, army reserve limits have been dependant on how many units you had in your army. This pretty much works since it scales automatically throughout the game. But that system was never particularly clear. Command, now, should be more interesting and more clear - you will be able to feel that you’re at an advantage or disadvantage if you have more or less of this stat than your opponent in the late-game. This rework also symbolises moving from the old “can’t field too many units because the game can’t handle it” to the new “can’t field too many units because you need to prioritise strategies” - more on that later, though.

 

 

Hero and Hero Class Modding

For those of you who make mods, the reworks in v2.6 should also vastly increase your abilities when it comes to making mods for heroes. The new modding capabilities are carried by a new mod file syntax, which should be easier and more readable - adding more functionality without making simple mods more complex too.

Some of the new functionality allows things like setting heroes to be of one type of class, another faction, and display a custom, third hero class name, while using the sprite of a fourth class. It is now also more straightforward to pick modded heroes that are aligned with a specific faction from the map selection screen. There are also easier ways to add unit abilities during combat to specific heroes or hero classes.

Finally, there is now support to add any number of heroes in a faction mod, whether it be more or less than six, and to add in pseudo-factions by creating a unit group, setting a hero to use that unit group, and then starting the game as that hero.

Oh - and the Rogue Realms system of having easily editable Skilltrees is now being added as a normal modding feature both for the DLC and for the base game.

 

 

 

Artifacts Rework, and New Artifact Sets

I set up to completely overhaul the artifacts system, with two big issues that I wanted to fix. One is about how difficult it is to collect a single artifact set - it seemed easier, actually, to get duplicate artifacts than to collect a set. The other issue was about how a lot of artifacts gave +1 to some random skill, which meant that with ten artifact slots, you might end up with a hero with an extremely bloated skills page.

Removed 130 artifacts from the game (all non-set artifacts)

Added 217 new artifacts

Added 24 new artifact set bonuses, all of which give a minor bonus starting at two pieces and increasing with additional pieces

Implemented a new system where all artifacts are kept track off, minimising duplicates

Implemented a system where artifacts in the same map realm get generated with higher chance of being of the same set as other artifacts in the same realm

Fixed various issues preventing Delirium avatars from getting use of artifacts and artifact sets

Added various new artifact bonuses:

Firepower, Waterpower, Earthpower and Airpower improving spells of a specific type

Skeletal Strike creates skeletons when your hero hits enemies

Terror terrifies enemy units hit by your hero

Grizzly Guard creates grizzlies guarding the hero at the start of combat

Elemental Guard creates elementals guarding the hero at the start of combat

Shadowbetrayal creates shadowy clones of enemy units during combat

Improved UI for artifact tooltips, showing colours and icons for the artifact sets.

 

 

The new artifact system not only brings a lot of new and more varied artifacts, each of which is tied into a set with common aesthetics, but also brings a lot more variety into the artifacts available. There are still some artifacts which give +1 to a skill, but most of them now give some of these more minor and less bloated bonuses instead. Their unique effects are now more often relegated to the new artifact set bonuses.

The previous artifact sets had a small set selection of artifacts, meaning it was hard to collect enough for a set bonus - and if you did make a set, it would give a huge, often game-winning bonus. These new artifact set bonuses will be granted earlier, both because artifacts from the same set are more common, and because you only need two artifacts for the bonus to start - but the bonuses are more minor. For instance, there’s a set bonus giving daily gold income, one which casts lightning spells during combat, and one that gives a tier 7 unit each week. They will, however, scale if you have more set pieces, and they do start to become really strong at 4 or 5 pieces of the same set.

Some of the new artifact bonuses are currently being watched for feedback - I am likely to phase some of them out as time passes. As for the artifact set bonuses, I don’t currently foresee any of them being balance issues, but it’s likely that some will need buffs. That’s the thing - this is a huge rework of a core system of the game - and I’m excited to see how people find it, and how it’ll evolve in future updates.

 

 

 

Battlefield Rework

One of the most common suggestions has been to improve the battlefields to add in interesting terrain features. This has not really been possible earlier due to the simplistic pathfinding of units. Units would move towards the closest enemy, and would just get pushed around any obstacles - this only worked if the obstacles were small and round (thus obstacles worked as they did previously). The largest change, code-wise, is that unit pathing during combat has been completely reworked to now take into account:

Obstacles blocking the path

Speed difference of various types of terrain

Number of friendly units already going that way

The new system should more efficiently have units spread out and seek out enemies, no matter what obstacles exist.

The new system also opens up the door to a lot of new mechanics dealing with battlefield obstacles. For now, there’s just a rather simple implementation, but this is likely to be expanded later on, such as having spells that create or remove obstacles from the battlefield, or having combat encounters with walls that are not just the current, well-known siege type of thing.

Joining us in v2.6, however, there’s already a lot of new terrain-specific combat obstacles that are being added. Most battles won’t change too much, to avoid the core gameplay of auto-battles not becoming too complex, but there are a lot of new avenues of strategy and decision-making for those players who want to maximise their armies:

Water that slows down unit movement, especially for small units

Mud that slows down unit movement, especially for large units

Flowers which increase healing effects

Crystals which buff magical units

Lava terrain which damages units walking across or landing on it

Cacti which damage units landing on it

Ice which is slippery to walk on

Various units get various immunities to the above effects. For instance, aquatic units are not slowed down in water, and demons are not damaged by lava - and there’s a new series of ant units which use their carapace to become immune to all terrain effects.

 

 

Battlefield Optimisations

While I am happy to tout the new abilities of the pathfinding system, both what it allows adding now and what it allows adding later, the ACTUAL reason I spent all this time reworking the system was because I realised that the old pathfinding took way too much computation time. And that a new system could exist which barely would not become more slow the more units were in play during combat.

The old system calculated pathing for every unit. Mind you, it was rather optimised and fast - every unit did not have to check the position of all enemy units - but still, it was a unit-based pathing system and thus scaled poorly. The new system instead calculates pathing for all units at once. Or said in a different way: Instead of calculating pathing for each unit, it calculates pathing for each tile on the battlefield.

We’ve gone from pathing being the thing costing most processing time during large battles to it now being one of the more minor things. Anyway, after spending all that time building tools to calculate how much processing time is spent on various processes, I was also able to figure out a series of other things that took a lot of processing time during combat. Things such as drawing the coloured shading beneath units, drawing the spellbook and other UI, etc. A lot of this has been optimised now. So not only does combat scale better when there’s a lot of units - it’s also just faster overall.

The graph shown above was just a single step in the large process of finding and fixing processing time sinks - I wish I had a final tally of how faster combat is now, but unfortunately I don’t. The only thing I can say is that it’s really satisfying to now play large combat scenarios on 2x speed and still get around 55-60 fps. I hope everyone else with their various high- or low-spec setups achieve as large a performance improvement as I do - because for my PC, it is vast.

For optimisations from here on out, that’s a more complex issue. One of the largest remaining time sinks is the upkeep of drawing and moving the units each frame.

Anyway, the game is meant to now both allow more units during combat via the new Command stat, as well as actually being able to handle those extra units.

 

 

 

Updated Graphics

A lot of new units are getting updated unit animations in v2.6. This is the result of a long process of Hero’s Hour slowly getting better and better art - and now, it felt like it was time to return to some of the oldest art in the game. This process has been spearheaded by KraftKraken, but also joined by AntRose and DeadSaracen. While their styles are slightly different, I’m proud of the way they each evolve the Hero’s Hour art style.

In total 65 base game units have had their art updated, and 2 Rogue Realms units have had their art updated.

Talking about Rogue Realms, the Rogue Realms rogue towns have also had their graphics updated. Buildings have been moved around to be more tidy, and most rogue unit dwellings have had their graphics overhauled or reworked entirely.

Better UI and misc. other changes

Many UI elements have been updated with new art, making them look and feel better to use. There also various minor improvements, such as being able to close the Level-up window of a hero for later.

Dragonking skill has had a rework, which makes it so that you get dragons earlier if you stay at Rank I. Before, the skill was entirely useless unless you put several points into it. Additionally, you can now choose whether you want to get a single large dragon or several smaller dragons when it triggers, and the dragons themselves become larger with higher ranks.

There are three new music tracks for the overworld.

Unit modding can now use the new modding format, and if you choose to use the new format, new things can be set for the unit, such as whether it can be generated by random effects (making it easier to create technical units for other units’ abilities).

 

The Future

As everyone has noticed, the pace of updates for the game has slowed down. This might just be how things are now that we’re a couple of years past the game’s release. I don’t plan to stop working on the game, neither for the base game or the Rogue Realms DLC - but I must be honest, there were times during v2.6 development that I was close to giving up.

This update has become way too large and I was unable to carry it on my shoulders. I aim to learn from this and from here on out, start working on smaller updates again. Just a single systems rework per update, let’s say. Maybe this means faster updates. I cannot tell the future.

I am, however, already working on v2.7, and I expect a public beta to be up on steam within the next month. But how long between the first pre-release and full release, only time can tell.

Anyway, here’s a cheers to Hero’s Hour 3rd anniversary, and a cheers to everyone still playing and enjoying the game, as well as the wonderful community and the artists who put so much beautiful stuff into the game.