the last hot summer days have passed, we can feel the autumnal breeze and smell the pumpkin spice in the air. But before we get cozy and play another session of Pioneers of Pagonia, let's look back a great expo summer!

In August, we attended Gamescom Cologne. It was our second Gamescom with Pioneers of Pagonia, and we had an absolute blast! We were part of the Indie Arena Booth in Hall 10.2. again, and had the best time! It was amazing to talk to every single one of you! We thank everyone for stopping by and playing our game.

Booth Crew Day 1Booth Crew Day 2Booth Crew Day 3We also showcased a sneak peek of some work-in-progress features of our upcoming Magic Update, such as the new enemy units called “The Cursed”. It was great to see the excitement on the player's faces, when they send their sorceresses to defeat this new enemy type! Currently, we are working on two more variations of the "Cursed" and can't wait to show them to you.

New enemy type "The Cursed" and their base "Corrupted Oak"At Gamescom, we also met lot of new players who never played Pioneers of Pagonia before. This is always very exciting for us, because of the way they react to the current state of our game. We received and gathered a lot of valuable feedback by our new players, especially regarding the onboarding of our game. We are currently working on some of the feedback, you guys gave us!

This includes:

• Better UX highlights to avoid missing important notifications and updates about new or solved objectives.
  
• Allowing to continue playing while guidance videos are running
  
• Combat encounter execution will get a rework to better meet player expectations.
  
• Direct attack / patrol / focus point handling for a better overview and to avoid unnecessary scrolling
  
• Easier tool management to reduce the need to continuously track current stock.
  
• Enable to split priorities for construction and economy

We hope to make Pioneers of Pagonia as accessible as possible to new players while also providing new challenges for our established Pioneers (a.k.a. our strategic master minds.) :)


One of our highlights at Gamescom was for sure the coziest stamp rally ever! We teamed up with 9 other Indie Studios for a fun little stamp hunt! If the visitors played 5 participating games or more, they received an exclusive sticker sheet. We got to know so many lovely indie devs and absolutely loved to work with all of them! Make sure to check out their games as well. We hope to do this again next year!

IAB Indie DevsWe also had the first ever community meet and greet at Gamescom! The participating community members were having a little chat with Volker, taking lots of photos, grabbing a goodie bag and getting their posters signed. Thanks to everyone, who participated! We will definitely think about more events like this in the future. If you are interested in a community meet-up, please let us know.

Just a week later we attended the next big expo in Seattle, US!
We had a really good time talking to our American players. We also met a lot of people who have never played Pioneers of Pagonia before. Seeing them playing it for the first time, falling in love with the art style and the game in general us really happy. We hope to spread the word about Pioneers of Pagonia in the US even more. Thanks for having us, PAX West!

In between all the travelling and showcasing we have been pretty busy working on the next bigger update, which is coming pretty soon! We are currently working on several quality-of-life-improvements.

Some highlights include:

• Major notification improvements
  
• Persistent top bar configuration
  
• Quick access to road construction mode
  
• Combat luck balancing
  
• Guidance videos.
  
• And more!

You can already playtest the features in our current Open Beta. Let us know what you think on our Discord[discord.gg] channel or the Steam forum. Thank you and have fun testing!

Read the Open Beta Patch Notes here:
https://gtm.you1.cn/storesteam/news/app/2155180/view/4588692479139479347?l=english

As always, thank you so much for following our journey. It truly means a lot to us to meet you guys in person and hear what you guys think about our upcoming Magic Update! The Open Beta for the Magic Update will launch at the end of October. In November we will also publish a brand-new roadmap and reveal more information about our future plans. Stay tuned!

See you in Pagonia!
Your Envision Entertainment-Team

the latest Beta test of our upcoming quality-of-life-update 0.8.0 is out now!

Please tell us what you think on Discord[discord.gg] or in our Open Beta discussion forum on Steam.

Thank you for your support and have fun testing our new features!

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Interface:

• Major notification system improvements including a history
  
• Persistent top bar configuration
  
• Quick access to road construction mode

Gameplay:

• Threatened state to protect civilians
  
• Combat luck balancing

Onboarding:

• The first beginner guidance videos have been added
  
• Many UI enhancements for beginners

Top Bar

• Three different default top bar setups to toggle between
  
• Top bar setups and changes are now persistent between game sessions
  
• Each top bar setup can be reset back to default
  
• The full commodity tooltip including history will now already appear when hovering over a commodity in the top bar drop-down interface. This allows to check all information without the need to enable the commodity for the top bar display.
  
• The numbers in all the drop-down interfaces are now updated while the drop-down is open.
  
• All items of a category can be enabled or disabled with a single click.
  
• The top bar layout is only updated once after the configuration changes of a category are finished to avoid misplaced clicks while configuring the top bar.
  
• Improved the way the top bar distributes the columns between the categories.
  
• The overall amount of hungry miners is now shown in the top bar.
  
• The icons for idle units are now changed to clearly relate them to the unit type they belong to.

Notifications

• A notification history is now available by a toggle button. Any notification since game start is still accessible on request later
  
• New notifications get a brief visual highlight to get more attention
  
• The readability of notification icons and text has been improved by an additional outline
  
• The mouse-over feedback of notifications has been enhanced
  
  • The current notification itself is clearly highlighted
    
  • If there is a location related to the notification, it is highlighted in the minimap
    
  • If there is a related object in the game world, it is highlighted in world view
    
  • Notifications reflect their lifetime with a small progress bar until they fade out and move to the history.
    
  • An additional context tooltip explains the functionality of the mouse buttons clicks on notifications
• When the list of notifications changes because a new notification appears or fades, all clicks on notifications are ignored for a very brief amount of time to avoid that the wrong notification is selected or dismissed

Quick access to road construction mode

• Buildings without a road connection now show an alert flag at their connection point
  
• Clicking on the connection point instantly switches to road construction mode with the building entrance already defined as the first waypoint.

Building construction mode feedback

• If a building cannot be placed at the current position, the reason(s) are displayed directly at the mouse pointer
  
• For farm fields, the terrain type and the plants which grow best on it are displayed directly at the mouse pointer

Other UI topics:

• Target locations can now be set on the minimap as well as in the game world. This is valid for Focus, Attack, Claim and Patrol points.
  
• The nutrition and comfort values of individual meal ingredients are now shown in the meal tooltips of taverns, residences and mines.
  
• All valid ingredients for nutrition and comfort meals are now shown in the meal type tooltips of the tavern.
  
• When toggling between light settings with Ctrl+L, the name of the setting is now shown for a brief time on screen.
  
• The construction menu now shows the name of the category currently chosen.
  
• Hints are shown during the loading screen.
  
• When an enemy camp is selected all units belonging to it are highlighted.
  
• When placing a market stall or tavern table, related buildings are highlighted.
  
• The game language can be changed directly in the pre-game menu via the small globe in the lower right corner.
  
• The icons of building categories and the icons of some buildings in the construction menu have been improved.
  
• When hovering over an objective related to a building type, the corresponding build menu category and building type are highlighted in the construction menu to ensure it is easy to find

Threatened state

• All buildings and landscape piles will now switch to a “threatened” state while hostile enemies are nearby
  
  • A building under “threat” will display that state in the world and in the selection
• While under threat, those buildings and piles will not request carriers to travel to them to deliver or pick up commodities and cancel those already on their way.
  
  • This will also help to avoid civilians sacrificing themselves to werewolves

Combat luck balancing

• The chances of winning or losing a combat fight have been adjusted
  
  • Whenever a combat unit of a player won or lost a fight, the chance of winning or losing the next fight for that player is adjusted accordingly to neutralize luck or bad luck within the span of several consecutive encounters.
    
  • This also means that reloading a game state to run a combat sequence multiple times will not lead to remarkably different results any longer.
• There will be more combat system changes coming with the Magic Update, stay tuned

Other gameplay topics:

• Improved movement of units outside the road network to reduce blocking issues in some busy situations
  
• Optimized road layout around obstacles

• Procedural map generation improvements:
  
  • Lakes are much better integrated into the landscape
    
  • More natural shapes of coastlines and cliffs
    
  • More naturally shaped transition zones between terrain types
• New shadow renderer
  
  • Softer shadows and no more flickering
• Adjusted the brightness of the coal signs placed by the Geologist.
  
• When the game is started on SteamDeck, the default video settings optimized for this platform are selected.
  
• Improved textures of stone deposits
  
• Improved look of grassland vegetation
  
• Audio mixing improvements

• Fixed: Sometimes the Explorer would not take the last Ration after the Explorer building was disabled and re-enabled again.
  
• Fixed: The market stall road connection had a minor visual glitch.
  
• Fixed: Several very rare crashes were fixed.
  
• Fixed: Dead Scavs were vanishing immediately when their base got destroyed. That is no longer the case.
  
• Fixed: Under some very rare circumstances builders were not finishing a construction job.
  
• Fixed: Underground and surface deposits will no longer spawn under water.
  
• Fixed: When a deposit is claimed into the player’s territory while a gathering building was paused, the new deposit would not be harvested sometimes after re-enabling the gatherer. This is fixed now.
  
• Fixed: The construction support grid cells are no longer shown on the territory of other factions.
  
• Fixed: When buildings of a merged faction got demolished, sometimes white spots of unexplored territory remained. This is no longer the case.
  
• Fixed: Very rarely the game got stuck in multiplayer ping mode.
  
• Fixed: Once all 9 nutritious meals were prepared in the tavern, the list of products disappeared.
  
• Fixed: Rarely a Scav claimer got stuck in an endless loop.
  
• Fixed: Some buildings such as the Construction Camp had a comfort meal history shown even though their inhabitants do not consume meals.
  
• Fixed: Improved line break behavior in objective list for objectives with large numbers
  
• Fixed: “Recruit X unit” objectives now only count recruited units.

• Mining deposits spawn on coast cliffs and are sometimes unreachable.
  
• Flags that mark buildings as "threatened" are not waving.
  
• Commodities lying on the ground do not show the "threatened" state.