Greetings Commanders, FriendlyFixer here!
I have some exciting things to share! For now I’ll keep things brief, but the team is aiming to share updates with you about once a week over the next month. Today’s topics include: the Starfall update, our 2025 roadmap, Cheating and an update on Facebook.
March Release - Starfall
Starfall is the name we are giving our March release and it includes a number of important changes that collectively felt like they deserved celebration. The first thing of note is the addition of a new faction! Enter the Equinox: A former space-faring nation that has fallen on hard times. You’ll start learning about the Equinox in March; Have they come to benefit the sector or take over completely?
There are also some systemic changes coming alongside this new faction. We’re introducing a feature called, Base Weaknesses, a new event titled, Retaliation, and a structural change to unit releases and events.
Base Weaknesses
This feature allows deployed units to gain bonuses by exploiting weaknesses in enemy bases. There are two ways you’ll accomplish this: Unit Tags and Unit Overrides. Units you deploy will gain bonuses by matching Tags to the base’s weakness; the more matching Tags, the stronger the bonus. For example, a base may be weak to Corpus units, Vehicles and Burst Damage. Deploying a Corpus infantry would match one weakness while a Corpus heavy tank with Burst Damage would match all three, gaining a much higher bonus. Unit Overrides are a bit simpler. Deploying the listed unit provides the corresponding bonus. It's important to note that the bonuses apply only to the units that match the Tags, not all units in the battle.
Why, though? One major advantage of this system is that we can balance units much more closely while still allowing them to have situational power. We want new units to feel amazing when going through the story and event missions, but that poses a challenge when taking them into PVP situations. Doing this allows us to ‘tune flat’ in a way that doesn’t escalate unit power in quite the same way as before. The intent is to give you more tools in your toolbox for non-event bases.
Retaliation
Starfall will also introduce a new event - Retaliation! This event centers around Unique Units and will provide an opportunity to really let them shine. Retaliation bases will only allow deploying unique units, but to support these mighty war machines you’ll rely on Spec Ops, Mercenaries and Missiles. You may also discover Vaults to liberate support troops, so keep an eye open!
Retaliation is our replacement for Holdout and in order to keep things familiar we are borrowing the Holdout mission structure. There will be a set of 3 bases that need to be defeated in a specific order. Completing all three grants a set bonus and unlocks the bonus base, an optional, and very difficult challenge. Completing a set of bases grants event XP that will be used to purchase items in the event store.
Units and Events
The last part of Starfall I’ll discuss today is a change to our unit cadence and event structure. Currently we have up to 5(!) units a month. This was a consequence of our old event structure and an attempt to fill out each series of units, but it has gotten a bit out of hand for both players and the developers. With Starfall this will reduce to 3 units a month, with the Hero and Faction Unit remaining the same as they currently are.
This change in cadence is also a shift from what we call ‘seasons’ which used to be 3 months long. Now, we will have 2 month Campaigns that form a part of a multi-month Story Arc. During these campaigns we will have the following events and units:
Month 1
Hero with Skirmish
Faction unit with Main Event
Unique unit with Retaliation
PVP Tech with Sector Breach
Month 2
Hero with Skirmish
Faction unit with Main Event
Unique levels and tech with Retaliation
PVP Unit with Sector Breach
The eagle eye among you will notice that the Unique unit has shifted to Retaliation in that list above. That isn’t strictly true as we will still have Shadow Ops as the primary place to earn parts. The change will be that you’ll earn 7 parts in Shadow Ops and then the last part in the Main Event. This is intended so that you’ll have time to build the unit before the following Retaliation event. If you missed parts then you’ll be able to get them in the Retaliation store.
2025 Roadmap at a glance
We have an exciting 2025 planned with some changes that we really hope you’ll enjoy. Today I’ll share the high level list and talk a bit about the overall goal, but I’ll save the details for later posts.
Coming Soon:
Expand base sizes
PVP event and system updates
Control changes and keybinds
New user onboarding updates
Long Term Campaigns
More Alliance Activities
Updates to the Recon Satellite (Player request)
Saving base layouts (Player request)
Some of the above items you may recognize from our feedback channel on discord and while we weren’t able to get to all of your suggestions, there is a reason for that. We have a rather ambitious goal for this year; getting War Commander on a different platform! Right now War Commander is a web game and with that comes some challenges, the biggest of which are browser compatibility and caching strategies. We don’t really control what is downloaded and when, that’s up to the browser. Web is also a platform that is becoming increasingly hard to find new players. So, we are currently targeting a Steam release and we have chosen roadmap items designed to put the game in a much better place to accomplish that. We’ll share more on this topic as we near development on these features.
Cheating conversation changes, high level
Previously I promised an article on cheating in War Commander and how we have addressed it in the past. That post is still coming, however in the meantime I’d like to focus on what we are doing next.
In the past, cheating and exploits have been banned subjects on all of our official channels. This was true in the old forums and is true in our Discord server. The reasons for this are complicated, but almost all are in order to protect players.
We thought we could protect everyone by simply banning discussion altogether. However, what we have learned is that we also lost an opportunity to learn about ways in which the game is being cheated or exploited and how we can improve. We’ve worked well with some people in private to identify problems and to address them and we’d like to extend that to more players.
In the coming weeks we'll be launching a channel on Discord for players to report information on cheats. This is separate from the way you report a player, and will be strictly for information about the cheat itself. Our intent here is for players who have concerns about specific cheats in the game to be able to communicate safely and anonymously with us while avoiding the toxic conversations that have arisen from them in the past.
Price change on Facebook
On March 1st, 2025, we will be increasing the cost of Gold on the Facebook platform by 30%. Currently the cost of Gold is the same on both the Facebook and KIXEYE platforms, not including exchange rates imposed by the payment providers. What you may not be aware of is that Facebook charges a considerable fee for each transaction on their platform. Combine that with rising server costs and inflation, it makes it difficult to maintain the costs of running the game without raising prices. Unlike many other games, we’ve avoided changing our prices for years, but given the ongoing costs of integration with the Facebook Platform, we’ll be making a change.
So what does this mean for you? It means that only on Facebook, we will be increasing our price of Gold by 30%. On KIXEYE.com, where we don’t have to pay the platform fee we do on Facebook, prices will remain the same. In fact, you actually currently get MORE gold from bundles on KIXEYE than you do on Facebook, along with many other benefits, and no ads. You can still play on Facebook if that’s your preferred method of play, but in order to avoid the price increase, you’ll want to make purchases on KIXEYE.com, where you’ll also get a better deal on your bundles. Signing up to Kixeye.com with your Facebook Account will carry your account over.
Our intent is that nothing about your play experience will be negatively impacted. If you have any issues logging into your account on KIXEYE.com, please submit a ticket to support so they can help you as soon as possible
In Summary
Thanks for sticking with me again! While this was a long one, what is absolutely crazy is that we have even more to say. I look forward to including more information on the 2025 roadmap, the cheating conversation improvements and the details on the upcoming content. We are also looking to engage the community in a much more meaningful way for our summer content, which will be primarily focused on PVP features. To summarize the summary: it has never been a better time to be a player of War Commander. To summarize the summary of the summary: Players are awesome.
FriendlyFixer