The Cosmonarch's Compass - March, Week 4 news - Cosmonarchy mod for StarCraft

As Cosmonarchy continues to receive content, improvements, and fixes, it's only proper that we start chronicling our progress - and what better format than weekly installments?

That's what The Cosmonarch's Compass is, and it kicks off right here, right now! We've released the initial version of The Initiate, the Protoss tutorial. We've made improvements to the Fraud Launcher. We've upgraded our audiovisuals, and we're considering what's next for game balance. Read on, Cosmonarch!

At long last, we've released The Initiate. This singleplayer experience intends to bring fresh-faced Cosmonarchs up to speed with the expansive techtree and unorthodox scaling pattern of Protoss, and poses a challenge in the form of an aggressive adversary.

The player's contingent is led by Terimanok, a rising Initiate of the Allasara Pillar. This youthful Protoss is advised by Furen - a venerable leader of the Divine Primacy, and a close associate of Inirix, the traitorous Justicar who has mysteriously and unexpectedly betrayed his brethren.

In spite of the turncoat Justicar's shocking actions, the youthful Terimanok - counselled by the stern Furen - must defeat the hostile contingent before the traitor's motivations can be interrogated. It will hardly be an easy task if Inirix is allowed to fortify his war camp.

Players seldom come across tutorial content which challenges their fundamentals, particularly in the RTS genre. An encounter with introductory missions that teaches them a thing or two, and passes muster in-universe, is doubly rare. It is our intent to provide high-quality experiences in all manners, and call upon those interested in our worlds to hone their skills and see these stories through.

This is but a taste of what you can expect from singleplayer content within Cosmonarchy's rewritten setting. If you take up the mantle of command in The Initiate, leave us feedback (here, or on Discord) - and don't forget to check out the Terran tutorial, Further Notice, if you haven't tried it!

Fraud Launcher 2.1 has arrived, courtesy of project co-developer Veeq7! It includes the following changes:

• Improved internal code quality and robustness
• Added formalized failure handling for all build steps
• Added HTTP fallback for HTTPS (fixes issues with some Windows 7 setups)
• Added Current version option
• Added root repository handling, centralizing maps and editor files in one location
• Added new menu bar with useful links and configs

Fraud Launcher 2.2 will, among other things, feature automatic updates, removing the need for manual downloading and future-proofing the software. If you have suggestions for additional features or quality-of-life improvements, let us know!

As part of our continued efforts to make Cosmonarchy more approachable, we have taken many efforts to improve our audiovisuals. The most exciting changes are always when we achieve new bespoke models and render them into spritesheets, but some low-hanging fruit has been left unplucked for far too long!

Chief among them are the birth animations for our myriad Zerg strains with placeholder graphics. Lead designer Pr0nogo has muscled through a large number of them over the past two weeks, with the most recent ones including the Ghitorokor, Axitrilisk, Cherbrathalor, and Okrimnilisk. More to come!

Some units sourced from the Protoss Lattice have had overlap with the Accantor - a monstrously-powerful crowd control crawler - in their death sounds. New SFX has been sourced for the Idol, while the Golem has been equipped with a less noisy placeholder. The Exemplar and Patriarch now have weapon impact SFX, and the Empyrean also sports a custom death sound, all in the name of a less confusing auditory experience.

Lastly, the Vilgoleth now emits a placeholder greenish-yellow overlay when its passive procs, adding a more obvious read for when corpses are consumed and turned into Rilirokors. This should help new arrivals more immediately understand what's happening in bloody battles.

Cosmonarchy is a very information-dense game, and improving its many reads is a task of huge importance. It's impossible to overstate how valuable it will be to make continued progress down this road, and we're happy to improve it, day by day!

Over on our Discord server, a recent discussion about the Architect sparked furor - but it also posed the question: is this mid-game staple of the Protoss arsenal too unapproachable to be fun? A potential solution would be to remove the Architect's ability to strike air targets, opening up combat drops as a ground-based solution to the menacing artillery unit. Time will decide our chosen path...

The Ecclesiast and the Matrix have received slight buffs to their passive ability's proc range, in order to better synergize with and against melee combatants. It's unlikely for this change to make significant impact in the developing metagame, but with any luck, the specialist ranger and the supportive tower will feel more justified in players' minds.

Our broad philosophy on balancing is simply this: we never want to make knee-jerk changes reactively. We aim to efficiently gather data on a proposed problem, in order to be sure that it is, in fact, a problem. Once we're certain of that, it's time to consider what kinds of adjustments would yield the best results for overall game health.

We believe this is by far and away the best solution for game balance, precisely because it takes time. Even small changes have a lot of thought put into them, and we'll share our considerations in more detail next time around!

As we wrap up this inaugural installment of The Cosmonarch's Compass, let's go over some expectations for the first week of April!

Project contributor DarkenedFantasies has made impressive inroads towards a visual update for cloaking, which includes a much faster update rate for the cloak effect, and a fade for the cloaking unit's shadow. It's highly likely that this feature will be deployed over the course of the next week!

Other audiovisual goals include more Zerg birth animations and more varied sound effects for deaths and weapons. There's also plenty to do regarding ability reads, so we'll see what can be done in that department, as well.

Over on the content side, the Zerg tutorial - Autophagy - is next in line for development. Lead designer Pr0nogo is back to work at his part-time, and spends a good amount of his free time managing the ongoing qualifiers into Cosmonarchy's next big event, Acropolis #1, so it's unlikely that the mission will be ready for play by the end of next week. We'll log his progress on the work, nonetheless!

We glossed over a number of valuable code improvements and bugfixes in this week's roundup, but there will be more time spent on technical subjects next week, as progress is being made on the all-important iscript extender. Once achieved, this will allow work to continue on factional units, and the most exciting goal of them all - the fourth race.

Daily match casts have continued this week, and will continue to continue next week - all on Pr0nogo's youtube channel! If you're curious about Cosmonarchy 1v1, have a look at some of the recent commentaries:

• Hamster vs Neblime - PvZ on Germination
• jakulangski vs Tacocake - ZvZ on Derelict
• The Shambler vs Hupsaiya - TvP on Germination