Keep moving forward!! news - Annex: Conquer The World

I know, last news said beta soon, and i know that was in February. My apologies, but i can assure you that the past 2-3 months have not been spent twiddling my thumbs. The stall with release occurred when it became apparent that my game was incredibly taxing on the system, especially due to large populations. At that point of development one needed a very high end system to run game, and not everyone has a high end system. I decided to postpone release till I could resolve the issue, and between lots of optimization work as well as lots of development from the MegaGlest team, Annex runs much better. During the optimization phase i did spend time experimenting with some visual effects and tech tree changes to improve gameplay and graphics.

First graphics, if you were paying attention to the trickle of screen shots posted in the past month, you can see much more visual effects such as glows, and improved lighting:

There has also been lots of redesigning of older units, as many of them were not up to par with other more visually impressive, others became radically different Grunts are now female, Destroyers are now giant two legged mechs,and MRLS is now a treaded vehicle, to name a few.
There is also the addition of custom mountains for desert and grassy locations.

Gameplay changes have been even more drastic and time consuming than the graphics part. The tech tree is radically different. Instead of relying on tech level upgrades to obtain higher tier units, it now is based on having special structures, a silo and tech lab. The reason I chose to have two instead of just the tech lab (like old C&C games) is that it forces the player to pick a path either anti unit/defensive (tech lab) or anti base/offensive(silo). Its not just as simple as defense vs offense, but its difficult to put into words so you will have to see for yourself. Btw it is possible to have both a tech lab and silo (its actually necessary for your hero/superweapon) but its difficult to obtain till late game. Also the destruction of these facilities means you loose access to the units dependent on them, so sabotage is defiantly a strategy to use here (lab and silo both have relative low hp for there cost for this reason). Also another important change is the addition of a new unit the "Mortar Grunt", cheap and available relatively early in game (just need advanced weapons upgrade) they are your first siege units and are capable of shooting outside the vision range of most units (if another unit scouts for them, much like the MRLS unit). There slow moving "bomb" is ineffective against moving targets so best to force enemies to stay put with a wall of tanks, assuming the your tanks don't kill them first.

New Build trees:

In other news my development computer is no longer functional, so i have to suspend development till I get a new one, but no worries that will be soon.

Thanks for reading and your continued support!