1.8.0 client release

Hello NI community,

In this update we are taking massive steps to improve the NI economy and trading experience, adding many quality of life features, and preparing for future updates.

First off, the loot system has been completely remade.  The new system has a significantly more even distribution and does not nerf the experience or loot chance of smaller teams; having fewer bots already does this sufficiently.  In the new system, your individual loot rate will be the same for every bot of each type you kill: the size of your team, number of people alive, and other factors will not change the chance of you looting.  Having more people on your team will only increase your chance of getting loot by increasing the number of bots per wave.  This new system will also give you far more loot per run, balanced out towards demand.  You will (hopefully) not be looting 5 Wood of Glasir for every 1 Small Lump of Lead anymore.  Although the new loot system is implemented on all servers, only Normal, Hard, and Ragnarok have had their drop tables significantly altered.

The drop table itself has also seen a significant overhaul, separating the materials out between the modes based on tier.  For example, plants will be best found on Normal mode and will never be seen on Ragnarok, whereas Hardened Metal will be plentiful on Hard mode, but will have a low chance of dropping on Ragnarok.  This is to encourage players to play different modes and trade materials between each other to get everything they need to craft new items.  In addition to this, legendary items have been spread out so that each one drops from only one Nord (other than the Valsgarde... its special ) and many more mixed and challenge wave Nords are capable of dropping legendary items.  The legendary items have also been organized by mode, so you won't be finding a Tempest from Prince or a Dragon Axe from Odin.

Next, a new item tier has been added - Awakened Legendary items.  Recipes used to upgrade your legendary items are now available at the highest levels of House Crafting.  These recipes allow you to salvage or sacrifice old items to the gods in order to upgrade your legendary to reach its full potential.  These recipes will only be available for a month at a time before the supplies run short and the gods change their desires.  It is possible that future iterations of the same item may have different recipes.  These items are not meant for everyone to be able to obtain, nor are they something people are supposed to amass.  They are for the few people that want to upgrade specific legendary items they have grown attached to.

1.7.2 Client Release

We have a few more bugs to take care of from the 1.7.0 release.

• Fixed a problem which had Wraiths spawning on the Swadian team like Trickster assassins.
  
• Added Explosive Bolts to the list of missiles to prune around interactive props.
  
• Round two at fixing certain boss abilities.
  

1.7.1 Client Release

We have a few bugs to take care of from the 1.7.0 release.

• Horse health bars work again.
  
• Fixes have been made to some of the Ragnarok boss abilities.
  
• The Ornate Hopelite Shield shows up on your back.
  
• The Sunpike displays correctly in its alternate mode.
  
• Warborn Shieldmaidens all carry maces now in case they are dismounted.
  
• All the cavalry maps have been updated with barriers on top of the stables.
  
• Novice Rider gained 1 Horse Archery.
  
• Knight gained 1 Riding.
  
• Kaasovic has gained a Developer tag.
  

1.7.0 Client Release: Cavalry 3.0

In this update, we have heavily focused on making Cavalry mode much more enjoyable and functional than it was before. This includes brand new horses, horse armours, and lances; stat and wave balancing; and more. We have also included a few new features to improve day-to-day gameplay and added an interesting challenge to a few Ragnarok bosses.

To start with, there are four tiers of cavalry classes and items instead of five. This flattens the field and makes balancing more manageable. The new requirement for the highest tier cavalry class, Knight, is now 500,000 mounted xp instead of 3,000,000 which should be a much more obtainable goal. Anyone with more mounted xp than is required has been refunded three quarters of the extra xp as assist xp. For anyone curious, the formula was assist xp refunded = (mounted xp - 500000) / 0.4. Also, since the old horses and lances are obsolete, they have been updated to sell for the full value they were purchased for.

The new horses follow a more linear approach to stats with only one set of stats per tier which should help eliminate some of the metas that had formed around certain horses and their functionality. This may change in the future to allow for more personal preference and choice. We have also added horse armour as a separate purchase for your horse. Each tier has different stats that could apply to whatever you want your horse to be - a very light horse without much protection or a slower tank of a horse to ensure its safety. You can put any armour on any horse leaving it completely up to you how you want to equip your horse. We believe this should make for a much more personalized experience with a ton of horse and armour combinations possible. Customize to your hearts content!

Along with the new horses and armours, we have added shiny new lances! They are much prettier and more effective on the field as you can now stab with them once again. Along with this change, most of the pikeman weapons should be usable on horseback except for the longest weapons like Sarissa or Jormungandr. To make lances more usable for non-pikemen, we have also added a new Mounted Polearm skill which only applies to Cavalry mode. Marauder gets the most at 225 followed by 185 for other pikemen classes and 150 for all the other tier four classes.

There are also a few features in the rest of the game worth a special highlight. By pressing V, you can empty the bolts in your crossbow back into your quiver so that you can reload before leaving cover. To help deal with arrows and bolts getting in the way of building barricades and using refills, a new script clears missiles close to interactive props when prep time starts and the area around a barricade when you deploy it. Odin, Thor, and Loke have learned some new tricks which might cause a bit of mayhem if you aren't careful.

For a full list of changes, check out the next post.

Happy New Year!

1.6.6 Client Release

This is a very minor patch to update the tournament gear in preparation for the Swadian New Year Tournament.  The deathmatch servers have been converted to tournament practice servers for anyone wanting to try out the stats and gear.  The practice servers will not load any gear other than the tournament gear which you can equip on the tournament loadout page located under the Extras menu on the website.  The gear does not need to be purchased and only loads on the tournament servers.

Australia

The Australian servers moved again this past month and for a slightly higher monthly fee, 21 EUR (32 AUD), we are running one server of each mode: NI_Beginner_AU1, NI_Normal_AU1, NI_Hard_AU1, NI_Ragnarok_AU1, and NI_Cavalry_AU1.  With this service, the number of servers running does not affect the fee so we just have to keep an eye on how the performance holds up with that many servers running at once.  I have not heard of any issues with the servers so far so let us know if you find any.

Funding for the Australian servers is running a bit low again, though.  We are just short of the amount to pay for the next month so if you've been meaning to donate to the AU fund, now would be a great time.

More news coming soon...
- The NI Team

Hello everyone,

We've been hard at work getting things ready for the Swadian New Year Tournament and the next patch so this comes a couple days later than I first intended, but the annual Christmas event is starting once again. We have the return of the always-up Christmas themed servers and 2.5x xp which will run through New Year's Day.

Merry Christmas!
- The NI Team

Happy Halloween!

Preparations for Halloween were a bit delayed this year but not entirely forgotten.  Double xp started on Sunday with the first Halloween Challenge event and will continue at least through Sunday, November 5th.

With this patch, we gain a new Halloween themed mode aimed as being a fun mixture of normal and hard difficulty.  This new mode will be available on open Halloween servers which will remain up as long as the double xp lasts.  There might even be another running of the scheduled Halloween servers - keep an eye on the Official Events board.

1.6.5 Client Release
Halloween Invasion renamed to Halloween Challenge
Halloween Invasion re-introduced with different bots

Hello everyone,

As you may have already noticed, we once again have Australian servers.  We have changed to a hosting company which is offering servers at a substantially lower cost than our previous host.  The current cost of the two AU servers is roughly 18 EUR (27 AUD) per month.  The NordInvasion donation page has been updated with a new link for supporting the AU servers.  As before, please donate using the Australian donation link if you want to keep the AU servers around!

There have been a few hiccups shifting to the new host, however, and the most noticeable is probably that your gear loads a bit slower than before - that is where the 1.6.4 update comes in.  With this update, a "gear loading" message will block you from spawning until your character has loaded.  On EU and NA, you might never spot the message unless there is some delay in loading gear.  Over time, we will try to smooth out any other rough edges caused by the slower connection to our database.

1.6.4 Client Release

• Prevent spawning before the character has finished loading.
  
• Map Updates.
  • Ancient Bastion [barriers]
    
  • Hidden Farm [player access]
    
  • Hypers Castle [AI pathing]
    
  • Swadian City [barriers]
    
  • Swadian Folly [barriers]
    
  • Swadian Great Hall [barriers]
    
  • Swadian Keep [barriers]
    
  • Unuzdaq Castle [AI pathing]