What’s New

Stormgate — The Stormgate Community Update

The Stormgate Community Update

The Stormgate Community Update is here and is available to play on our Public Test Realm.

This update is the result of a collaboration between members of Frost Giant and a passionate community of Stormgate fans over the last few months. You’ll have new units, upgrades and abilities at your disposal to play competitively on 30 new maps, along with lots of quality of life improvements and bug fixes.

Our goal with the PTR is to create a place where we can iterate more rapidly and battle test new ideas before pushing it to the main Stormgate client. We welcome your input and feedback in this process. Here's how you can switch to the PTR:

To read more about this community collab, check out the blog post here: https://playstormgate.com/news/presenting-the-stormgate-community-update

Features Overview

  • 2v2 matchmaking is here – with a dedicated leaderboard.

  • A total of 30 new community maps are added. A mix of 1v1 and 2v2 – all battle tested and include Stormgates.

  • 4 new playable units have been added to fill out Celestial and Infernal factions:

  • Dominari – An Infernal Tier 3 spellcaster.

  • Incarnate – A massive Infernal Tier 3 melee fighter.

  • Carnivex – A Celestial Tier 2 front-line tank with stealth.

  • Navi – A Celestial Tier 3 spellcaster.

  • The full data, trigger and map editor is unlocked.

  • To access: open the editor, look to the top left and control+click the Yeti 10 times. That's really how you unlock it.

  • Art and visual effects updates, including new weather/lighting presets and battle legibility improvements.

  • A big change to sound effects concurrency, volume mixing and announcer line priority.

Audio

  • Increased sound effects concurrency and tuned concurrency behavior across the board to make battles feel fuller and more reliably connect sound to the visuals.

  • Previously in Stormgate, we favored the side of lower concurrency for a lot of unit sounds like attacks, deaths, abilities and so on. It’s a balance, because when 50 exos are firing, you don't want to hear all 50 gunshots every second they fire, or it's just terribly grating and poor for performance. But on the flipside, some concurrency values were just set too low so there would be situations where only 1 or 2 death sounds could play at a time, with many poor souls dying in silence. Or in the case of specific units like the Argent and Hedgehog, their attack and impact sounds were set very low.

  • Beyond just concurrency numbers, concurrency behavior was tuned for each sound to choose between behavior like preventing new sounds altogether, or interrupting the oldest or most distant sound effect so no new sound effect in that category goes unplayed.

  • Even the way these sound concurrencies are set up hierarchically can create problems as well. For example, the Weaver has a footsteps sound that plays as it walks. But it was sharing concurrency with Weaver attacks and its Lash ability sounds, so it really 'stepped on' a lot of its sounds. Hopefully you enjoy the improvements, and we welcome more feedback in this area.

  • Reverberation has been added to sounds and voices for a more immersive feel.

  • Established an Announcer line priority sorting to fix inconsistencies in playback.

  • Announcer lines are the voice lines that play during alerts for things like "Our base is under attack" and "We need more supply". These are all set to a concurrency of 1 to prevent overlapping voices. Previously however, if another announcer line was supposed to play around the same time, it would prevent every other announcement from playing until the first one was finished, with no queue, resulting in missed critical alerts like “Our forces are under attack!” Now, higher priority announcements will interrupt each other in this order:

  • Highest: Main map objectives, Stormgates, base & units under attack.

  • High: Hero died/resurrected. priority on player, then ally, then enemy.

  • Medium: Ally alerts.

  • Low: Capture points, construction finished, research complete.

  • Lowest: Production, supply, celestial power and resource requirements.

  • Sound effect volume adjustments have been made across the board. Most notably unit death VO screams have been increased in volume and are now louder than their “Splat” type sounds that also usually plays when a unit dies. This is great for added carnage and unit personality.

  • Exo and Guardsman attack sounds have new sounds and increased sample variety.

  • Servo attack SFX has been updated.

Art

  • We completed an animation blending pass throughout the game to make transitions between walking, idle, attack, abilities smoother and to better fit the unit’s persona.

  • New lighting and weather presents added: Light Snow, Heavy Snow, Light Rain, Heavy Rain, Infernal ash.

  • Environmental wetness and wind effects have been enhanced. Most assets, including units, structures, doodads and terrain will look wet when rainy weather is active.

  • We completed a team color pass on all units for saturation and luminance consistency, as well as improved readability which is especially helpful in team games.

  • Various unit material updates are made to better distinguish them and help readability. There is more work to be done in this area.

  • Minor structure size unification to better fit their footprints. In general, research structures and Vanguard production structures are slightly larger. All footprint sizes remain unchanged.

  • Ragdoll death gravity increased so bodies are less floaty.

  • Vector’s temporal reflection has unique hologram art.

  • Archangel

  • faster animation attack speed Faster swing, slower backswing.

  • Increase meteor slam get-up animation speed.

  • Imp

  • Increased in size by 15%, with a faster walk cycle.

  • Textures updated with a brighter eye glow.

  • A new animation is added while morphing to an enflamed Imp.

  • Blood Tree - removed team color on the leaves so they’re always bloody.

  • The Hexen now wears a mask.

  • Hellborne reduced in size by -15%.

  • Argent increased in size by +10%.

  • Vector

  • reduced in size by -15%.

  • Updated attack recoil animation and visual effects.

  • Added 4 large, destroyed/weathered neutral structure doodads for mapmakers.

  • Added white blood trees as randomized destructible trees.

  • Improved concealment grass art so it’s less tiled, more natural, is available in several colors and have proper effects when destroyed

  • Vector’s temporal reflection has unique hologram art.

  • Gaunt upgrade icons changed from green to orange

  • Pandora & Navi portrait and button icon updated.

Visual effects

  • FX updates for the many new units and abilities.

  • Improved Dark Prophecy visibility.

  • Improved Miasma visibility on and off shroud.

  • Improved Nanoswarm visibility

  • Hedgehog armor shred debuff visual added.

  • Hedgehog missile visibility increased to easier show how many are loaded.

  • Graven Sticky bomb warning is now always red.

  • Graven Sticky bomb adds goop onto structures with its upgrade.

  • Graven sonic disruption ability has updated visual effects.

  • Arcship gets a visual indicator when it has a collection array available.

  • Seraphim Condemnation visual effects added.

  • Adjusted Seraphim’s weapon socket location.

  • Archangel - Visual effects added for Reprieve and Aether Slash

  • Incarnate attack and ability FX revisited for clarity and power. Its basic claw attack now punctures the ground.

  • Weaver Mistborne assault FX added

  • Hellspawn resurgence cooldown FX updated.

Gameplay

  • New Units:

  • Dominari

  • Incarnate

  • Carnivex

  • Navi

  • Many new maps, made by the community, have been added to the game.

  • 1vs1 matchmaking now includes 10 maps.

  • 2vs2 matchmaking now includes 8 maps.

  • More maps are available to play in the custom games list, as well as in Skirmish mode.

  • Two new neutral structures added:

  • Manashrine: Like a Wellspring, but restores energy.

  • Voidheart Shrine: Like a Wellspring, but restores health & energy.

  • Adjusted selection volumes to be more precise:

  • Scanner, Carnivex, (Tails no longer selectable)

  • Archangel, Navi (Wings no longer selectable). Archangel previously had a large invisible selection area when grounded and the wings were hidden, but still selectable.

  • Many other structures including: Collection Array, Shrines, Shroudstone, Twilight Spire, Conclave, Ascension Chamber, Ritual Chamber.

  • We altered the unit size, inner & outer radius of many units. This is for several reasons:

  • Outer radius values standardized across the game so there are fewer size categories, resulting in more efficient pathfinding.

  • Outer radius values tuned to reduce unit overlap and improve readability.

  • Inner radius values reduced, allowing more units to fit through light forest.

  • Cloaked units no longer interact with shroud, and don’t give away their location to enemies this way. However, cloaked units will still rustle some small grasses, so keep an eye out!

  • The Gaunt now fires a unique projectile when Infernal curse will be applied. Requires its attack upgrade and firing from Shroud for this to appear.

Performance

  • Unit animation and mesh performance optimizations were made to reduce the CPU cost of each unit, where most of the bottleneck lives during large army scenarios.

  • Stormgate triggers optimized for better performance. This should reduce some hitching.

Design & Balance

The balance and design updates in this community update are targeted towards 1v1 and 2v2 competitive modes. These changes do not yet impact campaign or co-op. With your feedback, we want to test and harden things first before merging these into the other modes.

The goal with these design changes has been to deepen your choices and strategy, by offering faction-wide units, ability and upgrade improvements, better quality of life, and bug fixes.

General

  • All HQs start with 1 worker charge and max out at 3

  • All factions begin with 50 Luminite

  • Lower first stormgate timing from 3:30 minutes to 3:00 minutes

  • Stormgates now have the capability of randomly spawning in variable numbers as set by the map designer. For our 1v1 ladder maps, only 1 will spawn at a time, and for our 2v2 ladder maps, up to 2 will spawn.

  • Unit inner and outer radii updated across the board. Units now fit into one of 7 size categories:

  • Tiny (Inner: 0.375, Outer: 0.45)

  • Small (Inner: 0.375, Outer: 0.6

  • Medium (Inner: 0.375, Outer: 0.8)

  • Large (Inner: 0.8, Outer: 1)

  • Extra Large (Inner: 0.8, Outer: 1.3)

  • XXL (Inner: 0.8, Outer: 1.6)

  • Gigantic (Inner: 1, Outer: 2)

  • Neutral destructible buildings HP increased from 500 to 2000

  • Rich Luminite Mines modified to be 1.5x the value of regular luminite

  • Celestial Collection Arrays on Rich Luminite Mines now have a x1.5 luminite mining rate.

  • Therium Rework

  • Therium now shows 8/8 workers as the optimal amount to sustainably mine from the therium generator without exhausting therium nodes. 4/8 workers is approximately the number to sustainably mine enriched therium without exhausting enriched therium nodes.

  • Unenriched Therium Node gather rate made longer: from 1.2 to 2

  • Enriched Therium Node gather rate made longer: from 0.5 to 1

  • Therium Generator starting node count increased from 5 to 30

  • Gather amount for Enriched Therium reduced from 1.667 to 1.0

  • Unenriched Therium generation rate made faster: from 8s to 5s

  • Enriched Therium enrichment rate made faster: from 8s to 5s

  • Imp cargo capacity increased from 7 to 10

  • Servo cargo capacity increased from 7 to 10

  • Prism cargo capacity decreased from 7 to 2

  • Prism gather period multiplier increased from 1.20 to 1.25

  • Therium is revealed at game start to help with building placement

Vanguard

  • Servo

  • Charge cooldown decreased from 24 to 18

  • Hp reduced from 110 to 95

  • Movement speed increased from 3.5 to 4

  • Attack swing time from 0.5 to 0.25

  • Fix bug with build speed increases from Veterancy (Frost Giant fix)

  • Servo Overcharge

  • Decrease armor provided from 50 armor to 25 armor

  • Range indicator now matches the ability radius.

  • Construction speed bonus decreased from 50% to 25%

  • Upgrade construction speed bonus remains at 100%

  • Baseline movement speed bonus removed.

  • Overcharge upgrade now grants 50% movement speed.

  • Command Post, Central Command, High Command

  • Lower supply provided from 15 to 10

  • Central Command

  • Cost increased from 100/100 to 200/100

  • Build time increased from 30 to 50

  • High Command

  • Cost increased from 200/150 to 300/200

  • Energy regeneration set to 1

  • Solar Habitat

  • Solar Charge can boost charge cooldowns by 25% (for allied inf production)

  • Can no longer target HQs

  • Rampart

  • Reinforce redesigned to prevent healing effects from making the shield functionally invulnerable

  • Grants a 500 HP shield to a unit that lasts 10 seconds or a 1000 HP shield to a structure that lasts 20 seconds. This shield blocks 90% of incoming damage.

  • Sentry Post

  • Build time increased from 45 seconds to 60 seconds

  • Flak Cannon

  • Damage increased from 22 to 22 (+4 heavy)

  • Repair-o-matic

  • No longer heals unit inside

  • Med Station

  • No longer heals unit inside

  • Biokinetics Lab

  • build time reduced from 50 seconds to 30 seconds

  • Machine Lab

  • Build time reduced from 50 seconds to 30 seconds

  • Lancer

  • Attack damage increased from 12 (+3 light, +3 structure) to 15

  • Research Kinetic Redirection research time decreased from 90 seconds to 60 seconds

  • Research Mitigative Guard reworked:

  • 100/100, 60 second research time

  • All damage to the lancer is reduced by 2. Lancers gains 3 stacks of Reactive Plates.

  • Reactive Plates: When the Lancer is hit by an attack dealing more than 30 damage, one Reactive Plate is consumed. The Lancer only takes 25% of the damage exceeding 30.

  • A Reactive Plate regenerates every 60 seconds.

  • Scout

  • Build time decreased from 18 to 15

  • Attack Damage increased from 5 (+3 light) to 5 (+5 light)

  • Research Run Down (previously Pounce) is now the first upgrade for Scout and requires a Biokinetics Lab (t1)

  • Research Run Down cost decreased to 50/50

  • Research Vorillium Claws now requires Research Run Down and a High Command

  • Run Down (renamed pounce) rework:

  • Impact bonus damage removed

  • Slows target by 30% for 3 seconds

  • Cooldown decreased from 30 seconds to 20 seconds

  • No longer triggers Pounce when attacking a stormgate

  • Vorillium Claws damage bonus increased from +8 light damage (total: 5 (+11 light)) to +5 (+4 light) damage (total: 10 (+10 light))

  • Exo

  • Attack damage increased from 13 (+2 heavy) to 13 (+3 heavy)

  • Medtech

  • Requires Biokinetics Lab instead of Central Command.

  • Medtech Adapt Training Requires a Central Command.

  • Offensive nanoswarm no longer aggros units affected

  • Nanoswarm heal per second reduced from 20 to 15

  • Nanoswarm damage per second reduced from 10 to 7

  • Nanoswarm energy cost is lowered from 40 to 30

  • Medpatch and Nanoswarm no longer autocast on warping in units

  • Graven

  • Cost increased from 125/75 to 125/125

  • Sticky Bomb rework:

  • Sticky Bomb is now a skillshot

  • Sticky Bomb attaches to a unit if it lands on it

  • Sticky Bomb can damage buildings

  • Sticky Bomb can stack on a target

  • When a unit with an attached Sticky Bomb is destroyed, all attached Sticky Bombs immediately explode.

  • Sticky Bomb no longer deletes other Sticky Bombs when it explodes

  • cast range increased from 6 to 7

  • Target sort added to sticky bomb stick to prioritize enemy targets before friendly target

  • Infiltrate removed

  • Mass Infiltrate upgrade removed

  • New ability: Sonic Disruption

  • 40 energy

  • This unit deploys a drone to a targeted area in the air that deals 10 (+5 light) damage and reduces the attack speed of nearby air units in a 3 range radius by 50% for 5 seconds. Drone lasts 2 seconds.

  • Cast range of 7

  • New upgrade: Research Sabotage

  • Biokinetics Lab. Requires High Command.

  • Sticky Bomb deals +50 damage to structures

  • Sticky bomb now disables structures damaged by it for 20 seconds.

  • Increase the energy regen rate of the Graven by .25/second

  • New upgrade: Research Phase Jumper

  • Biokinetics Lab. Requires Research Sabotage

  • Gain a second charge of Phase Shift

  • Increase the energy regen rate of the Graven by .25/second

  • Hedgehog

  • Hp decreased from 230 to 200

  • Changed weapon arc to match model better.

  • New Upgrade: Armor Shredding Missiles

  • Researched from Machine Lab

  • Requires a High Command and Transonic Boosters complete

  • 100/100

  • 60 sec build time

  • Causes attacks to apply 3 stacks of Armor Shred Missiles. Each stack is -1 armor. Th

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