Dawn of Steel

Bug fixing and device performance optimization

Blink and you’ll miss it, because the Blink Rig is here! The newest mechanized walker now available to the pilots of Leviathan is unlike anything you’ve seen in the game so far. The Blink Rig’s specialty is the ability to teleport behind enemy lines, catching his foes by surprise and wreaking havoc on their defenses. If that’s not enough, he can also teleport *into* enemies, dealing them significant damage! Complete the Blink Rig Challenge in the Orb to gain access to this formidable new weapon.

Blink Rig aside, this update includes the standard suite of bug fixes and bits of polish throughout the game that we include with every release.

Look away, vegans, because this update is meaty!

First of all, we’ve raised the Command Rank again. The cap is now 30, and it unlocks a number of new upgrades to all your existing structures, as well as a variety of new components for your Rigs.

Secondly, we’ve entirely changed the way that Rig repairs work. No more forgetting to use Plasma after battles, or waiting until your Extractors have matured to collect Plasma to start repairs. And no more Rig repair drones or using Influence to skip past repair timers, either. Instead, we’ve introduced Power Cells. The way they work is simple: Every Rig gets three Power Cells, every Power Cell lets you do one battle, and Power Cells recharge over time. That’s it. Additionally, we give you a random amount of Power Cells after certain battles and when scanning certain sectors in the Orb.

Next, there’s a new defensive structure and a new Support Ability. The new structure is the Beam Bender, which reflects the beam from the Charge Cannon towards any direction you choose. As for the Support Ability, it’s the Disrupt, which powers down enemy structures for a limited time. Access the Beam Bender from the Build Menu at Command Rank 16, and the Disrupt Ability from the Combat Support Center.

Lastly, you’ll find a bunch of other tweaks, improvements, and bug fixes. Our favorite include the ability to mute individual chat channels, the new Polaris Rig paint, and a teaser for our sixth Rig! (Hint: tap the shopping cart icon in the Hangar).

New content is here! We’re excited to unveil the Rail Tower base defense to the world of Leviathan. This powerful turret excels at picking off Rigs from a distance, and is especially effective against shielded targets. Its shots can pierce Rigs and deal pass-through damage, though its slow rate-of-fire makes it weak against drones. The Rail Tower can be built at Command Rank 9.

For those of you who haven’t unlocked the Drone and Dash Rigs yet, we’ve added new Challenges that do a better job of introducing you to their unique abilities.

We also added several minor tweaks to the Alliances feature, including the ability to reply directly to someone in chat; to share replays with your Alliance members; to test your Alliance members’ base defenses; and an indicator that shows you when each of your Alliance members was last online.

Lastly, the Command Log in your ORB now shows you how many times you’ve been scouted by an enemy who chose not to attack you. And for you iPad Pro users, we made an optimization to the turrets’ line-of-sight indicator.

We’ll have a much larger release with an important update to Alliances in our next release. Stay tuned for that, and thanks for playing.

Alliances are here! We’re excited to finally introduce the first of several social features for Dawn of Steel. In this update, we’ve added the following:

- Alliances: Tap on the Alliance button in the lower right to join or create an Alliance. Customize your Alliance insignia, create your own Alliance, and invite players and your Game Center friends to join in. More the follower type? Search through hundreds of Alliances created by others to join groups already in progress.
- Leaderboards: See how you compare to the world’s best Dawn of Steel players. We currently display leaderboards by Alliance (sorted worldwide and regionally), by individual player, and by your Game Center friends. The Leaderboard button is in the upper left.
- Chat: If you’re in an Alliance, hit the Chat button to the right of the screen to start talking to and sharing strategies with your Alliance members. Even if you’re not in an Alliance, there’s a global channel available to everyone in the game, no matter where they are in the world.

Additionally, we’re rolling out other features that aren’t related to Alliances in this update. They are:

- The option to switch to a different base layout if you feel yours is at a disadvantage (it’s really not), or if you just want a change of scenery. The map switcher is accessible from the settings menu.
- Speaking of the settings menu, we added volume controls for music and sound effects in there as well.
- But wait, there’s more! We gave the entire settings menu screen, as well as other parts of the UI, a nice layer of polish.
- We now swap out PvP opponents in your Arena for new ones if they’ve been on there for too long.

Lastly, we added a free custom skin for the Missile Rig for anyone who was playing the game before v.1.5.0 as our way of saying “thank you” for your continued support.

Alliances are available to anyone at Command Rank 3 and higher. More Alliance features, including co-op and competitive events, will be rolling out very soon. Stay tuned for these updates, and as always, thanks for playing Dawn of Steel.

Lots of little bug fixes and minor improvements, including:

- We made Wall Mode easier to access. Tap on the nested menu button above the Build Menu button and you’ll find a new wall-themed button. Tap on it for quick access to the Wall Mode.
- Some of our blurred background screens were misbehaving. We’ve kindly asked them to behave.
- We made some component and Rig stats clearer.
- It was possible to place structures inside a cliff of one of our maps, and to issue move orders outside of playable areas on another map. We put the kibosh on both of those. Also, what is a kibosh?
- We made it easier to use the Shield Rig’s shield ability.
- We reduced the amount of memory our Rig textures were taking up. Sweet, sweet optimization!
- We added a red indicator on top of Rigs that are being affected by the Robotics Lab during combat.
- Lastly, we added a teaser for our Alliances feature, which will be coming soon!

Thank you everyone for supporting Dawn of Steel!

Just a small update to add support for iOS 9, including ReplayKit, which lets you record videos of your battles while optionally adding voice commentary to them. ReplayKit functionality requires iOS 9 and is only supported on iPhone 5s and above, iPad mini 2 and above, and iPad Air and above. If you’re running a supported device, you’ll see a red record button right next to the Launch button as you’re getting your Rigs ready for battle.

We can’t wait to see what kind of combat videos you create and share! As always, we’d love to hear from you, so tap on the forums link in the Settings menu and let us know what you think of Dawn of Steel.

Call up the Reserves!
We’re proud to introduce a new feature that will make cracking tough, high-ranking bases a bit easier. Your Deploy Ship will now hold two groups of Rigs. The first group is your primary Assault squad, same as always. The new, second group is your Reserve squad. As Rigs from your Assault group start to fall in battle, you can call in Reserves during combat to help you finish the fight. Calling on the Reserves in combat is easy. Just tap on the glowing Rig icons in the lower left-hand corner after any one of your Rigs gets taken out, and then deploy them anywhere near that fallen Rig. Reserves are available to anyone at Command Rank 20 or higher with a level 4 Hangar.

And speaking of Command Ranks, we’ve increased the cap from 19 up to 25! That means a lot of new components for your Rigs and upgrades for your structures.

Lastly, we now support traditional Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Dutch, Bahasa Indonesia, and Bahasa Malaysia. We actually had added support for French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, and Russian in the previous release, but somebody (not saying who) left that part out. Get it together, Ben.

This update is all about the Hangar! The Hangar is where you manage every aspect of your Rigs, including purchasing, customizing, and upgrading them, so it’s a very important part of Dawn of Steel. In this update, we’ve rebuilt the Hangar from the ground up, making it easier to navigate and more intuitive to use (it’s also a lot prettier to look at, if we do say so ourselves).

The most noticeable change to the Hangar is in the Loadout menu. We’ve hidden away some of the stats that were cluttering up the place a bit, and surfaced only the most relevant info to you. We’ve also made it simpler to see what component you have equipped at any given time, what components you have in your inventory, and what components are available for purchase. Most importantly, we’ve now made the act of comparing the stats of any component to the one you have equipped a breeze. As you’re going into battle, it’s also much more obvious which Rigs you have selected for combat. Finally, we made accessing all of these changes a lot simpler too. The Rig status button in the lower right-hand side of the screen can now be tapped from almost any part of the game to quickly jump into the Hangar.

And with every update, this one also includes a number of minor bug fixes, tweaks, and bits of polish.

We’re really happy with the way that the changes to the Hangar have come out, and we hope you will be too. As always, we love hearing your feedback (both good and bad), so tap on the forums button in the Settings menu and let us know what you think. Thanks again for playing Dawn of Steel.

We’re excited to announce our biggest update so far. This latest version of Dawn of Steel includes two important changes. First is a massive revision to the world map and the Orb interface. Some of the things you’ll notice are:

New Look: Leviathan and the Orb interface received a fresh new coat of paint. We admit that the previous version looked a little cluttered, but this update cleans all that up and makes everything “look more readable”, as we say in the biz.

New Rules: Gone are the days of having multiple enemies per Sector. Now there’s only one bad guy per Sector, and you need to defeat them before moving on to the next one. Scan nearby Sectors to reveal who’s lurking in waiting, and clear every Sector in a Zone to unlock additional benefits.

New Sector Types: We’ve added a few new Sector types and changed the way some existing Sectors work. Collect your resources from the Reward Sectors directly from the Orb, and defeat Boss Sectors to unlock new Components and gain full control over a Zone.

Addition of the Arena: If all you want to do is engage in PvP combat, then scroll over to the Arena Zone and test your mettle against other human opponents.

Introducing Nyssa: Be on the lookout for Nyssa the Smuggler flying around Leviathan. You can recruit her services to sniff out hidden Black Markets that sell rare Weapons and Components for your Rigs all over the planet.

Redesigned Challenges: Like Bosses Sectors, Challenges now reward you with a high-value prize, if you can get through them in one piece. Challenges are tuned specifically for unique Command Ranks, so make sure to finish any Challenge you start before leveling up.

New Rig: The second major change is the introduction of the Shield Rig! He’s one of our favorite Rigs to play with. His ability lets him cast a protective shield over himself that makes him invulnerable to enemy fire for a short time. He can also cast that shield on any another Rig for a whole new level of strategic depth.

Other updates include UI improvements throughout the game, performance optimizations for low-memory devices, and improved matchmaking.

As always, we’d love to hear from you on our forums. Find the link in our Settings menu.

Spring has sprung and with it another release for Dawn of Steel.

RESEARCH TREE
The most obvious change you’ll notice is a reworked Research Tree. We removed the Tech tab from the old Research UI altogether and added those upgrades directly onto the tree of each Rig. No more guessing which upgrade benefits what Rig.

NO MORE TIERS
Shed no tears for the loss of tiers. Access to higher Rig levels is now gated by Command Rank, which is the same system that gates access to all the structures in the game. As part of this change, we’ve also unlocked Rig level 10, Weapon slot 6, and Core slot 3 in the Research Tree.

OBJECTIVES SYSTEM
For you new players, we’ve extended the objectives that appear during the tutorial through Command Rank 5 to help ease your transitions into the world of Leviathan. We even give you a little bit of Influence for completing each one.

OPTIMIZATION
We’ve made a number of fixes to improve memory optimization on low-spec devices, addressed some performance issues on the iPhone 6 Plus, and given our entire UI a liberal amount of polish as well.

For a complete list of all the balance changes, feature additions, bug fixes, and optimizations that we’ve added this release, be sure to check out our forums. Tap on the gear icon in the lower-left hand corner of the game, and follow the “Forums” link.

This release is a meaty one that includes new features, game balancing tweaks, bug fixes, and behind the scenes changes to the game to improve your experience!

** New Features **

COMBAT SUPPORT POWERS
Leviathan is getting more dangerous, so gain the added edge over your opponents by calling in Support Powers during combat! Distract enemy base defenses with the holographic Decoy Rig, trap drones within the Magnetic Rift, and give your Rigs some added zip to escape sticky situations with the Speed Boost. Support powers are readied from the Combat Support Center. If you’re Command Rank 5 or higher, then it’s waiting for you in the Build Menu under the Support tab.

COMMAND SHIP SHIELD
Protect your Command Ship from invaders with the new Command Ship Shield. The shield draws its power from other structures on your base so the more powerful your base, the more powerful your shield.

AUTO REPAIR DRONES
We’ve given you some more repair options when your Rig sustains damage. You can still repair individual Rigs (or all of them at once) with Plasma, but now you can also purchase repair drones that automatically start fixing your Rig as soon as you come back from a fight directly from the Hangar.

** New content **

NEW TIER AND COMMAND RANKS
As we’ve done with every release so far, we’re unlocking a new Tier in the Research menu and a whole bunch of additional Command Ranks. Tier 4 is now available (along with five new certificates to research!), and you can advance all the way to Command Rank 18.

** Game Improvements **

UI IMPROVEMENTS
We’ve massaged several areas of the game’s UI, like adding tooltips to all the HUD elements, making the upgrade menus for all items and structures more informative, cleaning up the available resources in the Store, and removing the Store from the Build Menu altogether — you now get to it by pressing that new green “+” in the upper right now.

PLAYER RATING
We now show your overall combat rating right on the screen. All new players start with a rating of 1,000, and that rating goes up and down depending on how many battles you win or lose, and the difficulty of those opponents. You’ll find your rating under your player name in the upper left, and the rating of any human opponent when you tap on their orange icons within sectors on the Orb world map.

LOTS MORE
Last but not least is a whole bucket-full of balance changes, difficulty tweaks, and economy updates. The most notable example is that enemy M.G. Turrets no longer prioritize your Rig with the least health. That was a bit mean — sorry about that!

Thank you everyone for your continued support of Dawn of Steel. It’s been a crazy and wonderful ride since our launch, and we love getting your feedback, so please keep it coming. Thanks again for playing, and be on the lookout for more updates in the very near future!

Hello, Dawn of Steel players! Thank you for all your continued support and feedback. We've been busy squashing bugs big and small. This version includes lots of fixes, loads of optimizations (including better iPhone support), bunches of polish, and some balance changes.

It’s a new year, and time for our first update to Dawn of Steel! It’s a big one with new content, lots of under-the-hood changes, and a number of technical improvements.

Progress Further
We’ve moved the Command Rank lock from 8 to 14 and the Research lock from Tier 2 to Tier 3, giving you access to more structures in the Build Menu, tougher opponents in the Orb world map, and brand new abilities to research.

Fight with 3 Rigs
Once you unlock Tier 3 in the Research Tree, you’ll gain access to the "Rig Slot 3" certificate, which lets you take a third Rig into combat! Now you can attack enemy bases with up to three powerful Rigs at the same time.

iPhone Support
Dawn of Steel now supports iPhone as well as iPad. Supported iPhones include the iPhone 5, 5c, 5s, 6, 6 Plus and iPod Touch 5th Gen.

Lots of Tweaks & Fixes
This update also includes loads of balance tweaks, performance optimizations, bug fixes, usability improvements, and other changes too numerous to list.

Thanks for playing Dawn of Steel! We can’t wait to show you what we have up our sleeves in the coming weeks and months.