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Hello there Celeste players! We are back again with another Developer Update blog.

Here, we are going to spotlight a few of the important changes that are included in this patch, alongside some updates about the Roman Civilization and also some of our plans for the future.

Quality of Life Changes and Bug Fixes
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PF2K's Personal Note: This is my favorite part of the patch! It's so good.
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The way almost every upgrade works in AoEO is that the upgrade value gets added to the current stats of units, on a percentage-based system. While this is an excellent way to balance them, it can sometimes be confusing for players to know which upgrades have been researched by the opponent. Now you don't have to worry about this anymore!

Upgrades that will appear on the Unit Stats Tooltips: (as of the time this Blog is written)

• Bronze Age (Age II)
  • Pierce Damage
    • Barbed Arrows
  • Melee Damage
    • Temper
  • Melee Armor
    • Scale Mail
    • Scale Mail and Hide Armor (Egypt Only)
  • Pierce Armor
    • Shield Rim
    • Scale Mail and Hide Armor (Egypt Only)
  • Factory Techs
    • Conditioning (Barracks, Roman Castellum)
    • Marksmanship (Archery Range)
    • Horsemanship (Stables)
    • Sacramentum (Roman Auxilia Camp)

• Silver Age (Age III)
  • Pierce Damage
    • Broadhead Arrows
  • Melee Damage
    • Iron Smelting
  • Melee Armor
    • Chain Mail
    • Chain Mail and Boiled Leather Armor (Egypt Only)
  • Pierce Armor
    • Shield Truss
    • Chain Mail and Boiled Leather Armor (Egypt Only)
  • Factory Techs
    • Combined Arms (Barracks, Roman Castellum)
    • Improved Fletching (Archery Range)
    • Purebred (Stables)
    • Patronage (Roman Auxilia Camp)

• Golden Age (Age IV)
  • Pierce Damage
    • Bodkin Arrows
  • Melee Damage
    • Damascus Steel
  • Melee Armor
    • Laminar Armor
    • Lamellar and Lacquered Leather Armor (Egypt Only)
  • Pierce Armor
    • Shield Boss
    • Lamellar and Lacquered Leather Armor (Egypt Only)
  • Factory Techs
    • Close Combat Expertise (Barracks, Roman Castellum)
    • Composite Bow (Archery Range)
    • Horseshoes (Stables)
    • Desert Conditioning (Egyptian Stables Only)
    • Citizenship (Roman Auxilia Camp)
    • Roma Invicta (Roman Praetorium)
    • Ptolemy's Might (Egyptian Fortress - Champion Mode Only)

Priests in Champion Mode
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When we made the changes to Single-Target healing Priests in Champion Mode, we didn't see enough of these units get used as often as we would like, so we are now changing their behavior slightly to both reward good unit control and to make these units viable in combat as healers.

Loot System Improvement
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We are working on the loot system and these are our current plans. It's worth noting that these improvements wouldn't have been possible without the great work of Ryddag who created the base of the server code, which will now be worked on by our current Server Engineer, @martinmine!

Advisor Reworks - Phase 2
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The initial round of Advisor Reworks and Adjustments has been met with very positive feedback from the community, so we will be continuing on that path and plan to make further adjustments to Advisors to provide better experiences for players.

Twitch Channel Subscriber Perks
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Thanks to the PvP community, we've been able to host many tournaments throughout the history of Project Celeste, our most recent one being the Cup of Beer 6 tournament which just finished yesterday. You can find the VoDs for the tournament HERE.

Our Twitch Channel has now grown large enough for us to be able to have subscriber emotes and badges! Check it out below:

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You can find us on the Official Celeste Twitch Channel.

Join the PvP Discord for the latest news on PvP here!

Updates on the Romans
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Our small band of volunteers are about 18 months into development of the Romans. In recent months we’ve openly discussed a sort of languid haze cast upon us as we’ve muddled through the winter and spring.

Pleasantly, the skies are clearing a bit and we find ourselves walking around the civ making a final list of remaining tasks and talking in specific terms of when everyone should have their stuff completed. This is the Romans equivalent of when the passengers have taken their seats and the airline announces the final call for boarding.

We aren’t exactly closing the cabin doors and preparing for takeoff, but we are getting serious. Every piece of the Romans is either ready to go or close enough at hand that we are accounting for it. From here out, other than a few final projects (music, quest line, vanity, gear, vocals) our development will mostly consist of loose ends. Loose ends may not make for particularly enlightening blogs, but we promised to give you the most transparent behind-the-scenes view of development possible. And so if we are just toiling away completing our punchlists, then punchlists you shall see.

Here’s a quick rundown.

Music: In the last two weeks, game musician WeRFury has teamed up with Chaos and has started to lay down some tracks. All told, we are aiming to release at least 13 total tracks. These include five longer songs for Roman quests (3:30 to 4:30), four shorter quest songs 30 to 1:00), one song each for quest victories and quest losses (each :40 to 1:50), and two capital city tracks (1:30 to 3:50). The tracks are starting to come in now, and as of this moment, we have two or three finalized.

Campaign: About a month ago, PF2K turned a handful of us loose on the 65+ quests. We submit feedback to him directly through an online form every time we complete a quest (or at least every time we have something to say about one). The quests honestly don’t need much work, but with every one of us reviewing every quest we play, the comments and suggestions add up quickly. He's been pulled in lots of different directions since then and has about 120 separate forms to cull through and revise. We will continue to rinse and repeat this process of revision-replay-review until launch. Meanwhile, Andy has most Quest Giver lines written and we will start finalizing them in waves next week so our faithful translators can begin preparing the Romans to launch in the other languages Project Celeste supports.

Vanity: We will launch with two full sets of Roman vanity - The Gladiator and Heroic Roman Vanity Sets. Happy Smurf and Chaos are about halfway there.

Gear: PF2K has had the icons ready for months and Jeinx has already assigned stats and named the different Banners. We may end up tucking a couple more new items into the Quest Line that we haven’t yet created, but we are generally in good shape with Gear.

Animations: Phillus and Anubis have been working hard, and our animations are almost totally done, though we still have the Primus Pilus and his complex death to sort out. Other than him, we have a few small items here and there.

Yesterday, however, while creating the Primus Pilus animations for his final stage, we found ourselves in a... strange situation. See for yourself:

All credits go to Phillus for this masterpiece.
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The Primus Pilus is the most unique Unit of the Romans, you can find more details about him in his reveal Blog.

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3D Modelling: Happy Smurf and Chaos have been working on a few final Buildings on their list (mostly shops and other miscellaneous stuff for the City of Rome and Roman Army Camp regions). We still intend to use the City of Rome region as a bit of a hub for a number of Project Celeste items, and we keep thinking of new Shops, etc., so this list has a habit of never ending.

Vocals: PF2K spent about 6-7 hours one day a few weeks ago to clear some large technical hurdles had been preventing us from gluing our Roman vocal tracks to the Roman units themselves. Since then, we have been finally ready to start recording and testing the vocals in the game. However, just as most of us were pulled away for the Summer Event, Kai77 had some personal distractions. As of now, we are cautiously optimistic that we will start recording and shipping new files to Chaos soon, and we hope to build out our vocals across the civ shortly. Oh, and we found a vocalist for the Roman female Villager, so Andy's ever patient wife is off the hook.

Wiki: We hope to have the Romans page on the AoEO wiki updated at launch. KazMx, Tim619 and a few others from our discord have started putting things together. Thanks so much! You can check it out here.

Marketing: We hope to spread the word about the Romans around the RTS and gaming world at launch. Please remember not to spam up official Microsoft and Age of Empires social media channels. But it's always nice to have our players mention us to their friends and on regular social media, youtube, twitch, reddit, etc.

Post Roman Content: We have nothing to announce about this yet other than that Kire and JilgueriN have been playing around with the Roman assets in preparation for our first Roman Legendary Questline. The historic scope and gameplay details are under wraps, but there's never been any secret about our desire to make a ton of Roman quests, so we figure we might as well let you all know we aren't messing around and hope to have a follow up Romans patch perhaps a couple of months after release. And so we wanted to get our troops marching now to be ready.

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All current and future content will stay 100% free and accessible to everyone.

Quick update from PF2K: The upcoming weeks are going to be quite busy for me IRL, so I'm not sure when the next Dev Blog is going to be going live, but stay tuned to our Discord for all the latest news! Thank you for your continuous support.

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Thank you so much for reading, and we will see you all next time!

Project Celeste Development Team

What do you think about this week's blog? What would you like to see next? Let us know in the comments below!

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Missed the Roman Civilization's announcement? Find out about it HERE.

Project Celeste is completely free and always will be. However, we gladly accept donations for our overhead costs, which are larger than we have budgeted. If you want to support us, you can do so HERE.

Read every Romans related blog HERE.

Tell your friends! Join our Discord HERE.
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