Update 1.8.0: Season 5, Casual Mode And Fire Badger Remake

Hello, commanders! It may be hard to believe, but Friday (September 26) marks the one-year anniversary of the release of Mechabellum 1.0! We have gathered some interesting statistics for you. Over the past year:

• All players have played a total of 34,399,855 hours worth of games, which, if converted to years, is nearly 4,000 years.

• We have released a total of 56 patches, carried out 10 major updates, including 4 season updates.

• We have added 7 brand-new units, 3 new specialists, 5 new variants, and completely reworked 3 old units.

• During this year, we made changes to every single unit, among which the most frequently changed were Arclight, Overlord, and Tarantula (all more than 10 times), and the least changed were Melting Point and Hacker (both only once).

After these fun little stats, let’s talk about Season 5! Mechabellum Season 5 has finally arrived! Season 5 will start on September 25 and end on December 18. To avoid introducing significant gameplay mechanic changes in the middle of the season, starting from Season 5, we will change our previous strategy of two major updates per season to one major update and multiple minor updates. In Season 5, we will slow down the release of completely new systems and focus more on improving existing content and adding quality-of-life features. Update 1.8 will take place at 8:00 AM UTC (4:00 AM Eastern Time, 10:00 AM Central European Time) on Thursday, September 25. During which the server will undergo approximately 4 hours of maintenance. The following are the main update contents of Update 1.8:

Casual Mode

Many players wished for a game mode where they won’t lose MMR, so they can test various strategies without stressing over MMR. Therefore, we have decided to introduce a new matchmaking mode in Update 1.8:

• Before searching for a new match, players can now choose one of the two matchmaking modes: Casual or Ranked.

• Players who choose casual matchmaking will neither lose nor gain MMR, but can still earn Combat Power and season rewards.

There are three things to note:

• Similar to games like StarCraft II, players in both the casual and ranked modes share the same matchmaking queue, and past research has shown that this does not significantly lead to MMR inflation.

• For players ranked among the top 200 on the global Combat Power leaderboard, although you will not lose MMR in casual mode, you may still lose Combat Power.

• In 2v2 battles, solo players without a premade team will not be able to use the Casual Mode during matchmaking at this time. We will change this in a subsequent update during Season 5.

Developer's Note

Casual Mode is the first step in our effort to improve the player matchmaking experience. In the coming months, we will continue to roll out more matchmaking-related experience improvements, which we will introduce in more detail in the subsequent update plan at the end of this announcement.

Unit Remake: Fire Badger

• Brand-new model

• Has become a core unit and can now be freely unlocked and recruited in all game modes

• EXP required for upgrade 1000 → 1300

• HP 5181 → 4589 ( -11 %)

• Range 60 → 70

• Movement speed 10 → 9

• Napalm Ground Fire duration 15s → 12s

• Scorching Fire Price: 200 → 300

• Range Enhancement Price 200 → 300

• New Tech Counter-Fire: Taking damage increases the Fire Badger’s Range by 40 and ATK by 80% for 4s.

• New Tech Scorching Charge: Increases the Fire Badger’s base HP by 50%. When its HP drops below 50%, it charges an enemy and detonates, dealing damage equal to its remaining HP to all enemies in a 40m radius and igniting the ground at the impact site.

And here is a video about the new Fire Badger produced by MAG1, edited by Stoney, and voiced by RoosterPB. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYYH-rvkMxA)

New Music

Searching for Battles, Unit Modification, Match Victory, Match Defeat, and Tournaments now all have corresponding music.

Season 5 Rewards

In Season 5, we have prepared many new exciting rewards for you, including many avatars, avatar frames, emoticons, and unit skins.

New Unit Skins

New Avatars

New Avatar Frames

New Emotes and Emoticons

New Medals

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Balance Adjustments

Sledgehammer

• Mechanical Rage Movement speed modifier +4 → +6, Attack interval modifier -1.5s→ -1s

• Armor-Piercing Shell Attack Interval modifier +30% → +40%, ATK modifier +200% → +225%

Developer's Note

In the previous version, the combination of Mechanical Rage, Range Enhancement, and Armor-Piercing Shell was too well-rounded, allowing a large number of Sledgehammers to be effective against 80% of ground units, which led to an undesirable amount of Sledgehammer spam at certain MMR ranges. Now that Fire Badger has become a core unit, there are more options for countering light units in the early game. This finally gave us the opportunity to adjust the role of multiple Sledgehammer Techs. Now, Mechanical Rage will be more focused on high movement aggressive play, while Armor-Piercing Shell will be more focused on long-range sniping. We hope that through this adjustment, we can further strengthen the specialty of Sledgehammer in different upgrade directions, which will make players’ Tech choices for Sledgehammer more strategic and also provide more opportunities to players to use other units in combination with Sledgehammer.

Phantom Ray

• Sticky Oil Bomb Ground fire duration after ignition 12s → 7s

All Ground Fire

• Damage 350 per second → 290 per second

Developer's Note

Since Fire Badger has become a core unit, there is now a pretty good amount of chaff-clearing options in the game, which finally gave us the opportunity to reduce the damage to ground fire.

Specialist

• The effect of Fire Badger Expert has been adjusted to: Decreases Fire Badger’s Tech Upgrade cost by 50. Get 1 Rank 1 Fire Badger in Round 3.

Optimization

• Optimized the performance of some UI components

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Bugfixes

• Fixed some UI issues

• Fix the data error issue caused by Shield Airdrop

• Fixed the issue of incorrect range display for units with Elite Marksman.

• Fixed some localization issues

• Fixed some VFX issues

Minor updates in Season 5

In addition to Update 1.8.0, Season 5 will also have multiple minor updates:

1.8.1 Update (Expected to be released by the end of October)

Unit Variants

• New Hound Variant

• New Raiden Variant

Combat Power Rule Changes

• Even if a player loses a match, they can still gain a small amount of Combat Power.

• Players will be able to gain Combat Power in PvE battles and custom lobbies.

Matchmaking Changes

• Solo players will also be able to engage in 2v2 battles in Casual Mode.

• In 2v2 Ranked Mode, solo players without a premade team will lose significantly less MMR if their teammates prematurely surrender.

UI Improvement

• Building Damage Statistics

1.8.2 Update (Expected to be updated by the end of November)

Fire Badger

• Fire Badger will be available in starter packs

Unit Variants

• New Void Eye variant

• New Farseer variant

UI Improvement

• Players will be able to view past Reinforcement Card offers

Wrapping Up

That’s all for the main updates of Season 5. And we haven’t forgotten about the building layout. Currently, we’re actively researching ways to further optimize the building layout, and we’ll communicate more with you after making more progress. Thank you for all your feedback so far! That’s all for today, commanders. See you on the battlefield!