Content has been edited for clarity from original source.
Following the December development update for Dune: Spice Wars, developers Shiro Games and Funcom have now dropped the new update, The Line In The Sand. This update introduces a number of changes, additions and balancing work based on the feedback and suggestions of players over the last few months, alongside some major additions and improvements the team have been cooking up since the launch into Early Access last year.
The Line In The Sand update is a substantial update addressing numerous aspects of the game, and for players looking to understand all the big changes coming to the game, read on:
Main Changes in The Line In The Sand
- Added End Game Statistics
- Military alerts now appear on the border of the screen pointing in the direction of the crisis
- Military units can now Hold their Position (With C)
- Fremen Harvesting Teams can now harvest Spice in neutral territories
- Map Generation improvements:
- Main Bases and Deep Desert spawning has changed to make maps that are both more fair and varied
- Changed Spice spawn to ensure less spiceless starts
- Military balancing
- Major performance improvements and optimization
Economy
- Plascrete factories produce more Plascrete but have a Solari upkeep
- Harvesters Crew cost less Manpower
- Balanced starting Ressources
- Pillage gains nerfed but increased by the number of buildings on the targeted Village
- UHQ Buildings have no Solari upkeep
- Nerfed Guild Favor gain from Events and Discoveries
Hegemony
- No more gain from votes on resolution
- More gain from paying your spice contract
- Balanced Hegemony for Small and Large maps
- Emperor Monument now gives hegemony over time instead of instantly
Military Changes in The Line In The Sand
- Units now cost more Command Points
- Auras range increased
- Rework of Fremen units: They are now specialized in putting debuffs on their opponents
- Supply:
- Reworked the Supply system to be easier to read and handle
- Units regenerate less Supply in occupied villages
- Units are now divided in two types:
- Mechanical (Drones, Ships and Frigates)
- Non-Mechanical (Humanoids)
- These types lead to the following changes:
- Atreides Healing drone now only heals non-mechanical units
- Harkonnen 5K Hegemony bonus now only works upon killing non-mechanical units
- Harkonnen Combat Drugs and Toxic Vapors now only affect non-mechanical units
- Harkonnen Sleeper Agents now only procs with non-mechanical units
- Bannerjee Health regen now only works for non-mechanical units
- Supply drop now only affects non-mechanical units
- Demo effects now only apply on their ranged attacks (Wreckers Contamination, Heavy
- Weapon Squads Disruption…)
- Harkonnen Stealth Probes only give their buff to nondrones
- Harkonnen Gunners: Damage ally units → Reduce healing of damaged units by 50%
- Idle Sleeper Agents and Unchained Cerberus are now aggressive
- Units firing projectiles are now considered “in combat” as soon as they fire
- Units with camouflage now lose it upon firing projectiles instead of losing it once the projectile hits
Kraken:
- Now gains power for each transported units
- Base power has been rebalanced
Overlord:
- Stings are now only deployed when the Overlord attacks and are then aggressive towards any enemy
- When out of combat, the Overlord now retrieves its Stings if they are no longer attacking anyone
- Stings are considered low priority by missile batteries and main bases
- Stings are more spread out
- Stings considered as Drone
- New ability: Decimation protocol, boosts Stings generation speed and increases damage of nearby drones and stings but damages them over time
Wraith:
- Damages were based on current Health and did an additional 1 damage per tick, it is now 1% max Health per second as stated
Cronos:
- New ability: Can be deployed to be used as an airfield
Smugglers Combat Drone rework:
- The Scavenging Drone gathers loot from the fallen and distributes it to ally units in the form of Power and Armor
Rework of landsraad units:
- Landsraad guards are melee units that receive reduced damage from low Standing factions. They are granted by a resolution or a development
- Landsraad Judges are focus range units that deal increased damage to low Standing factions. They can be trained by the holder of “Judge of the Council”
- Landsraad Punishers are demo units that deal increased damage to Main Bases of low Standing factions. They are granted by a resolution
- All three units participate in Landsraad Raids against Pariah
Neutral raids:
- Now move in a more compact group and act in unison. They should no longer separate due to different pathing. They should also be harder to distract from their main target
Gear
New Gear:
- Free Company: Dual Guns (Becomes ranged)
- Cerberus: Dual Swords (More damages)
- Gunners: Gatling Gun (High attack speed, no longer demo)
- Wreckers: Bazookas (More range)
- Stealth Probes: Mounted Explosives (Explode on death)
Changes:
- Incinerators: Better Fuel Pumps: Increased range 30 → 50%, now correctly impact the range of the area damage and changes flames FX accordingly
Villages following The Line In The Sand
New Village traits:
- Local Sourcing: 20 Solaris production when the village has at least one Building of each type
- Versatile: +10% production when the village has at least one Building of each type
Buildings
- Recruitment Office: Produces more Manpower
- Listening Post: Not stackable anymore, gives +1 Influence even if neighboring more than 1 enemy regions
Main Base
Bazaar:
- Added a new effect: In a completed district now also gives the district bonus of the previous level of the same type (ex: Bazaar and 2 economic buildings in a level 3 district give both level 3 and level 2 economic district bonus)
Emperor Monument:
- Doubles every district bonus in the Main Base it’s built in, instead of doubling traits for adjacent villages
Sietches
- New bonuses when allied
Spying
New Operations:
- Defense Sabotage (New): Reduce power of enemy missile batteries and Main Base
- EMP Bomb: Reduce power and speed of enemy mechanical units and missile batteries
- Defense Breaches: Increase damage taken by enemy Main Base
- Fremen Sabotage (Fremen only): Reduce enemy power and speed
Removed Operations:
- Defense Sabotage (Old)
- Gear Sabotage
- Sand Cloak (Fremen only)
Other:
- Changed Missions duration
- Easy missions don’t cost Solaris anymore
- Changed some mission difficulty level and cost
- Supply Drop no longer affects mechanical Units
- Agent Sacrifice removed from certain Missions (Nukes, Assassinations)
- Arrakis Diplomacy now also disbands Renegade raids and Rebels. Sietch in the affected region no longer gain relationships, but increased resources from trade
- Awake the People now boosts Rebels
- Communication Jamming now removes all active Operations
Developments following The Line In The Sand
Balanced Knowledge generation:
- District 1 bonus now gives +30% completion speed in the relevant developments, instead of +50%
- Research Center: now gives +2 knowledge, +20% Knowledge and 20% Research hub upkeep, instead of +3, +30% and 30%
- Research Hubs: now have 16 solaris upkeep, instead of 10
Regions
New Regions:
- Space Cruiser Wreck
- Mountains
Other:
- Acid lake and Desolation damage now only affects ground units
- Equatorial Regions can now have 7 Wind
Events
- Some Events have been reworked to be more involving
Landsraad
- Landsraad bar with segments (Work In Progress), indicating the different landsraad phases relevant to the player
- Landsraad button now blinks harder when you have an action available in the landsraad screen.
- Landsraad UI now displays other Faction’s Influence
- Base max influence is heavily reduced
- High levels of Landsraad standing now give max influence
- AI now spend vote and influence by increment of 10, with the same restrictions as the player
Diplomacy
- Truce now generates 0.2 standing or 1 influence per day for both sides
- Truces now have a small grace window during which any attack will be ignored for the good of the treaty (this should prevent truces from being instantly canceled when they are enacted in the middle of a fight)
- Entering a truce did not cancel queued attack actions and the alerts of canceled actions did not target the right entity
- Political agreement no longer prevents voting for the other side on negative resolutions
- Abilities with diplomatic restrictions will now cancel themselves when diplomatic statuses change
Councillors following The Line In The Sand
Some councilors have been reworked:
- Thufir Hawat can Hasten any village building or mission to fasten its installation time. He still gives a second trait to any agent.
- Duncan Idaho gives the trait Loyal to villages after a peaceful annex which gives many bonuses.
- Iakin Nefud base cost refund for military units is now 30%. He also prevents units from leveling up, giving a further refund bonus instead.
- Piter de Vries no longer improves Ornithopters. They still improve the stealth drone. They also give further incentive to put a few agents on faction infiltration.
- Drisq now has stealth ornithopters, on top of all other bonuses.
- Staban Tuek gives Solaris through adjacent underworld headquarters, and by resolving discoveries.
- Mother Ramallo now reduces production on neighboring enemy villages on top of other bonuses.
- Otheym now reduce damage received by isolated unit, instead of increasing armor
- Chani’s Incite Rebellion does not prevent Fremen from voting for the targeted resolution anymore.
- Stilgar produce authority for each spice field within your territory, and increase production in region containing an allied Sietch
- Wensicia can build 1 more of every village building, but increases upkeep of buildings that are not duplicated.
- Aramsham reduces all cost and upkeep of Conscript by 25%, but reduces their power and health by 15%. He also gives one recruitment slot.
- Irulan’s Development investment can now only be used on Villages in Truce. It can be turned on or off, with an upkeep, instead of having to start it again constantly.
AI
- Reworked the military decisions engine
- Added unit micro management in combat
- Fremen AI can now use Worm Riding
- Small improvements and fixes in general
QoL Changes in The Line In The Sand
- Added AoE preview on Units
- Attack orders now continue when the target is dead and units will go to the target’s dying position
- Units with a deploy system now correctly undeploy to move when they are asked to attack out of their range
- Harvesters now have to wait for the Sandworm attack to be finished to redeploy
- Improved russian translation with the prepositional plural form
- Some units using rocket launchers now fire visible missiles
- Units refund amounts from the Iakin passive are now displayed in the world similarly to looting effects
- Units now have quotes on certain abilities
Audio
- Added sound effects to some gear and spying operation.
- Added voices to unit abilities where it was missing
UI
- Alerts are a bit bigger, and wiggle more
- All timed traits now show their duration left in their tooltip
- Added statuses on Ornithopters that are escorting Harvesters and Units
- Double clicking a unit portrait in the right bar now selects all units of this type, regardless of whether they are in view, instead of focusing the unit (which can still be done with right click)
- Transported units portraits can now be interacted with
- Current game settings are visible in the ingame menu
- Game Settings new UI style
- Main menu visual changes
- Irulan’s Development Investment now displays predicted and current gains on the tooltip
- Added alerts upon a successful pillage
- Removed eligible factions from Governorship notification
- Added Units move speed in their Health tooltip
Bug Fixes
- Neutral units could not be targeted directly by sandworms (they could get eaten but not be the actual target of the worm so raids would never get eaten by themselves for instance)
- Some missile attacks showed an additional one with a weird trajectory on clients
- Decimals in units power resulted in rounded damage, this is no longer the case
- Actions queues were not correctly wiped in some instances (Attacking a unit now correctly works with queues, the unit will go to the next action once the targeted unit is dead)
- Fixed Ornithopters wrongly detected as idle
- Fixed Shuttle ability not appearing in groups containing a ship
- Fixed ranged attacks that sometimes did not play effects when firing units in the air
- Hid resupply UI on unrecconned Villages
- Fixed combat between neutral Factions
- Banners should no longer show up in fog right after a Unit spawned
- Fixed unlimited pause softlocking the game if the player that paused disconnects
- Fixed votes not being multiples of 10
- Fixed issues with resupplying near villages and bugged interactions with the smugglers 5k Hegemony
- Fixed victory type achievements, they are no longer attributed to team members (example: winning a CHOAM victory only gives the achievement to the CHOAM winner, not his teammates)
- Removed reposition phase to prevent Mobile Turrets from never attacking and all Units clamping up on the village before starting the fight which caused delays
- Spying UI no longer wraps if the resource is too long
- Fixed some situations where villages would be incorrectly considered in siege
- Fixed some crashes upon loading old saves
- Fixed disappearance of some ships FXs
- Fixed reactivity issues on the Developments window
Other Changes in The Line In The Sand
- 7 New Achievements
- Added helper tips to loading screen (can be turned off in settings)
- Corrino base units are now named Conscript Swordsman & Conscript Rifleman
