This week's update is already available and brings a re-worked system of diseases & injuries, as well as a few updates in user interface and game mechanics.
Release notes are available on the game's forum, as well as below –––>
CONCEPT
With version 179, we aimed to ship a few cool things, including the travel magic functionality, but most of them got moved to the next update because life got in a way ;). And so the scope of this week's update is a bit less ambitious: arriving today is the re-worked system of injuries and diseases, a few changes in how various game mechanics work, and a few visual updates for the user interface.
VICTORY AGAINST A STRONGER OPPONENT
For a few weeks now, this feature was stuck in the queue. But now it's finally in the game: when player party wins an encounter against a stronger opponent, every character present at the end of the encounter gets Euphoria (for 5 days).
What does it mean, "a stronger opponent"?
This means that the number of creatures in the opposing party (on the screenshot above: 4) is larger than the number of player party members who participate in the event (here: 3).
With one of the future updates, we'll bring a possibility to "retire" a player party member during encounter, and draft a replacement from the rest of the team. Any such replacements will affect this counter, i.e. if I would draft 2 extra characters for this specific encounter, I would lose the mechanic.
And what is euphoria, you may ask?
It's a lasting condition, like stress, which temporarily gives:
- +2 to Courage
- +2 to Endurance
- +1 to Memory
The inspiration for this mechanics, just like with Stress, lies in the chemistry of primates, where a monkey that challenges another monkey wins the fight, it gets a hormone input that makes it braver and more alert; while a monkey that loses the fight, gets a hormone input that motivates it to stop fighting, and recover.
INJURIES & DISEASES: BOTH SYSTEMS GOT REWORKED
Some weeks ago, there was a comment in the community that the then-current diseases (diarrhoea, for example) sounded way too boring. Around the same time, we also posted a note internally that both diseases and injuries need to be reviewed for how they work. And finally this week, as we've been working on an updated character profile (which ship only next week, by the way), we hit the same issue from another angle: no matter how we tried, we couldn't explain, intuitively, that injuries self-heal while diseases get worse on their own.
It was a high time to rework both systems, and so now we have totally new sets in the game –
Current groups of injuries:
- Concussion
- Dislocated shoulders
- Ruptured lung
- Fractured skull
- Broken ribs
- Acid burns
- Gut trauma
Injuries come in 4 levels (minor, moderate, severe and permanent) and have static effects (loss of Memory, a chance to miss the target, and so on). The higher the severity of the injury, the more averse the effects. Every type of injury, except for permanent ones, gets easier in 10 days. And every injury can be removed by applying Bloodplaster.
Once you get an injury, its discovery card becomes available in the Encyclopaedia.
Current groups of diseases:
- Bloody tremors
- Fear of light
- Whispering voices
- Blinding hallucinations
- Demonic visions
- Red strangler
- Daytime nightmares
Like injuries, diseases come in 4 levels (minor, moderate, severe and chronic). Unlike injuries, diseases do not progress – they neither get worse, nor do they get better, until they are healed (use Foul drops). All of the diseases have dynamic effects, and all affect characters in the encounter mode.
Once you get a disease, its discovery card becomes available in the Encyclopaedia.
We hope that you find the updated systems a bit more intuitive!
"WRONG TARGET!" MECHANIC UPDATED
As we worked on the new sets of injuries, we felt it's time to update the "Wrong target!" mechanic: now it chooses a new random target, instead of the intended, on the same side as the original target. In other words, if you place Protection on one of your own mages, having "Wrong target!" will randomise the recipient – but won't send the spell to the opposing side, and vice versa.
CONVERSION OF DAMAGE & FEAR UPDATED
Another "housecleaning" task that we solved this week is the update for the formulas of how Damage and Fear convert after the encounter.
Previously: each token that remained on the character, increased the chances (by about 5%) of getting an injury or a stress condition.
Now: we look at the proportion of each stat. So in the screenshot below, the lass has a 50% damaged Health, and it is this value – rather than the absolute number "3" – that will be used to determine, if she scores an injury (full disclosure: it's % of stat multiplied by 50%; thus here, she currently runs a 25% chance of scoring an injury).
UPDATES IN THE TRAVEL MODE UI
A small update this week on the travel mode: the buttons for Alchemic cauldron, Party inventory and Travel Spellbooks got a facelift. This is a tiny change for you guys, but a bigger conceptual decision for us, as we finally settle on all similar buttons in the game being done in the same style of "painted glass that lights up".
We also slightly updated the character panel, which is now a bit less ornate (the portraits retained their sizes from version 178):
This is all a part of the preparation for being able to re-arrange the characters here, so that we can finally get rid of the pre-encounter drafting screen. It's progressing nicely in terms of visuals – you can see a bunch of test framing we tried on the game's Discord server – but we haven't been able to ship this feature with version 179. I have high hopes for version 180, though.
OPPONENTS NOW USE SPLASH DAMAGE WITH MORE IMPACT
Another small quality of life (or quality of death, in this case) improvement: now opponents who use attacks with splash damage, consider the position of their target, and will prefer to hit player party in the middle – or at least in a way that maximises the damage inflicted.
This makes multi-turn attacks more dangerous, obviously.
CHARACTER NAMES ARE NOW SHOWN IN CHARACTER PROFILE
Certainly not groundbreaking, but pleasant nonetheless: character names have returned to the character profile. Next in the plan: the ability to edit these names (this is all connected to the Character Mulligan screen at the start of the campaign, which is still in the works; we want you to be able to both select the characters that you like the most, and then edit their names as you please).
"THE LAST WISH OF THE DEPARTED" IS NO LONGER CONCOCTABLE
I know that a lot of you, myself included, loved this great potion, but we decided to remove it from the list of concoctable items because it was the only recipe that used 2 items of the same type. So for the moment, the only way to get "The last wish" is by looting the barrows. In the future, though, we may bring it back into the recipe book, when we add a few more resources that can be used as ingredients for the new formula.
WHAT'S NEXT?
Next week, we're going to do our best to ship as many "long haul" features as we can.
While we don't have a definite release date set for the general Early Access version of the game, we're pretty eager to get there as soon as we can – which means that we need to focus on the big stuff, and let the small stuff take care of itself later on.
Travel magic, deck management, the Spire and its upgrades and sieges, and non-humans with the first boss battle – this are the exciting things that we're itching to complete! And once it's in the game, it will be finally the time to hit that PUBLISH button =).
Stay warm, and stay healthy out there!