Age of Axes Patch 1.02 Full Patch Notes

You can get Axes and Acres on Steam here.

This patch contains a number of different things including balance, a few new objectives, and some adjustments to the rank system at higher ranks using the barbarians. (Full patch notes below)

The main things we have focused on for balancing is promoted dice, and cards. We felt that some of the time (more often than we would like) the promoted dice and the cards gained from your buildings (especially the more expensive ones) were often not worth taking the time to gain. To deal with this we have buffed the promoted dice and changed around a number of the cards. Now when you gain/promote a die it will roll into your unused dice pool. This will make promotion of dice stronger, while also allowing you to make interesting plays by promoting a die and then using it elsewhere on the board.

We have made changes to a number of the cards, almost completely re-working the cards attached to the church, marketplace, and town hall as well as smaller adjustments to the basic work card, the lumberyard card, and the theatre card. Now when you gain these cards into your deck they should be valuable tools to help you achieve victory. On a similar note, there will now be an indicator of how many cards remain in your deck and discard pile.

We have also made a few small changes to die faces, buildings and objective values. There will be more things you can undo (hopefully everything people wanted, but more on this below?) You also will no longer lose your movement within a turn, you can gain move, perform any actions, and then keep moving. We have also added some new objectives which relate to the tier 2 and 3 buildings, encouraging the players to build more grandly!

Finally we have made some adjustments to the barbarians at the higher ranks of play. Starting at rank 8 instead of every rank raising the points required to win there will be more or faster spawning barbarians. We had felt that the barbarians weren’t integrated enough into the game, and that they didn’t create enough of a challenge at the later ranks. There will now be more barbarian spawners at different points in the game which will provide an added struggle. This will also help spread out the higher ranks allowing for more differentiation of skill. We feel that non-quantitative changes to the difficulty are important in a ranking system like this, especially at the higher ranks. (More on this in another post)

All in all we hope this patch will keep the game fresh and exciting for all the existing players, help balance all the different strategies to choose from, and keep everyone having fun when playing Axes and Acres!

We have been thinking about adding a full turn undo button, which would be disabled if you roll/reroll any dice during your turn. We would love to hear everyone’s thoughts on this, or on any other changes we have made!

Full Patch Notes:

• FOUNTAIN
  • Gain 3 VP (instead of 2)
• WORK CARD
  • Bottom effect changed to set one die to gather.
• LUMBERYARD CARD
  • Top of card changed to work then change to gather.
  • Bottom of card is save moves (5)

• CHURCH
  • Top of card changed to Gain VP, Spawn Barbarian
  • Bottom changed to Gather + 2
• GUARDHOUSE
  • Reproduce effect now save 5 moves instead of 4
• MARKETPLACE
  • Top of card now gain one food one wood one stone
  • Bottom of card now move 7
• THEATRE
  • Bottom of card now Gain 3 food
• TOWN HALL
  • Top of card now spawn three trees
  • Bottom of card now gain 1VP per 6 stored resources
• WOODSMAN
  • One of the work faces changed to reproduce
• PRIEST
  • One of the crusade faces changed to wild
• OBJECTIVES
  • build road no longer shows up in third round
    • You will have to find a more impressive way to win!
  • removed build building objective
    • We felt that this wasn’t particularly interesting, and was strictly worse than the build roads objective which detracted from overall strategy
  • Build fountain worth 2 points instead of 3 (to reflect change to fountain worth)
  • Have 2 masons now worth 6 points instead of 4
  • Have 2 priests now worth 6 points instead of 4
  • Have 3 farms now worth 6 points instead of 5
  • Added:
    • Build builders hall (Phase 2,3) – 4 points
    • Build lumberyard – 2 points
    • Build town hall (Phase 2,3) – 3 points
    • Have theatre (Phase 2,3) – 4 points
    • marketplace – 4 points
    • church – 4 points

• BARBARIANS
  • rank 10
    • (13 points) – add spawner after phase 1
  • rank 11
    • points + 1
  • rank 12
    • add spawner after phase 1 + 2
  • rank 13
    • points + 1
  • rank 14
    • add spawner at beginning and 1 + 2
  • rank 15
    • points + 1
  • rank 16
    • reduce spawner times by one
  • rank 17+
    • points + 1