The Battle of Polytopia: Moonrise

The Battle of Polytopia: Moonrise is the current version of The Battle of Polytopia. Moonrise uses the Unity game engine, while previous versions used the Adobe AIR system. Moonrise was first released as the Steam version of Polytopia on August 4, 2020. It was later released on mobile as an free update on November 23, 2020.

The developers of Polytopia decided to port the game to Unity to ease future development. For example, using Unity makes hiring additional programmers easier because Unity is more commonly used than Adobe AIR. However, the port delayed the release of the Steam version and caused an unprecedented hiatus in content updates.

New Features

• 

  The menu for starting a multiplayer game in Moonrise

  A new online multiplayer server:
  • A lobby for random matchmaking.
  • Every move is uploaded to the server in real time, which prevents players from "turn resetting" (undoing the actions they had taken that turn or, if hosting the game, resetting the game's spawn).
  • See opponents' moves in real time. (Previously, players had to wait until it was their turn.)
  • Turn time limit options ranging from 5 minutes to 7 days. (Previously, 24 hours was the only option.)
  • Add opponents by their username. Previously, 16-character friend codes were used.
  • Player avatars.
• Larger maps. The maximum map size was increased from 324 tiles (large) to 900 tiles (massive).
• Adjustable water amount.
• Mirror matches (multiple players can pick the same tribe).
• A new world generation system. Zoythrus stated, "...starting conditions should be much more fair and fun! No more one-tile islands or unwinnable starts."

Changes

• 

  The push order before Moonrise

  The push order for forced spawns was changed to depend on the direction the pushed unit previously moved in instead of being consistent for every incident.
• Units with 0 attack, namely the Mind Bender and the Mooni, gained the ability to capture cities. (This made the 0.1 attack of the Ice Archer redundant.)
• The Dragon Egg and Baby Dragon gained the ability to grow after being converted.
• The maximum number of opponents in single-player was increased from nine to one less than the total number of tribes.
• The Perfection difficulty bonus was changed to increase logarithmically per additional opponent instead of increasing linearly. The previous system was had a base bonus of 100% for Easy opponents, 120% for Normal opponents, 140% for Hard opponents, and 180% for Crazy opponents, and an additional 10% bonus was added per opponent.
• Disabling tribes was changed to limit opponents' tribe choices in online multiplayer as well as local games.