Greetings, tactics fans! Together in Battle just launched to early access yesterday--but since I've already received helpful feedback and bug reports from many of you, we already have our first update here on day 2!
To start, there were a few bugs reported to me over the past 24 hours that have now been mercilessly squished, including a couple that were eradicated via day one hotfixes:
- fixed: the game would treat voluntary surrender on roguelite mode as a normal defeat and delete the player's saved game.
- fixed: the game could cause a qualifier or league match to occur on a day where other events were scheduled, even after pushing the event back on the in-game calendar.
- fixed: golems could take a morale penalty from falling in battle.
- fixed: you could change a spriggat's innate elemental type via training. (Spriggats can now be class-switched to different psy user classes instead.)
- fixed: the Sick Parents event would freeze if a character who was raised by both grandparents was chosen for the event.
- fixed: flickering was occurring in the Dry Mounds tutorial battle due to z-fighting between the low ground and the battle background.
I've received a lot of feedback on various aspects of game balance for Challenging and Brutal difficulties, most notably on the economic side of things. As such, I have implemented a bunch of tweaks to make things less difficult:
- Brutal difficulty now has a minimum first-day recruitment of 4 units rather than 6 (meaning that you can now deliberately forego overly expensive recruits and low-man the early fights).
- increased the starting aura for Challenging and Brutal difficulties by 500.
- reduced food costs for Challenging difficulty by 1/3rd; reduced food costs for Brutal difficulty by 1/4th.
- reduced salary costs on Challenging and Brutal difficulties.
- reduced item costs on Brutal difficulty.
- training costs are now scaled with difficulty. Relative to their prior values, they are now: 70% for Relaxed, 80% for Challenging, and 90% for Brutal.
- paradigm training now takes five days instead of a week.
- increased the number of uses Bandages have from 2 to 3 to make teams lacking a psy healer or gasul more viable.
- increased the availability (and massively decreased the price) of Cheap Novels in the shop, and doubled the morale effect of Beautiful weapons and armor from +1 to +2.
- imposed a hard cap of 5 on the morale penalty a character can take for falling in battle without dying.
- beating the tournament qualifier now gives the player 200 aura.
- further increased the monetary rewards for beating the league qualifiers.
- increased the monetary rewards for beating the last battles in "Gundhi Bug League."
- increased the team-wide morale boost for beating the Gharial League Qualifier from +2 to +3.
- on Brutal difficulty, toned down the potential added enemy types for the second non-league battle and removed added enemies from the other arena battles entirely.
And finally, we have a few miscellaneous changes:
- laid some groundwork for an eventual custom difficulty selection mode.
- new possible modifier for especially high-quality weapons and armor: Gorgeous. Grants the wearer morale +4 while equipped.
- adjusted default expressions tied to a couple of personality traits.
- new script action available to campaign creators: SetValByEvent. This lets you create or edit an integer variable by reference to the day upon which a scheduled calendar event will occur. The game will pick the first instance on the calendar by default; set Find Last Instance to true to find the last instance of the named event on the calendar instead. Parameters: Variable Name; Operator ( = + - * / etc); Scheduled Event Name; Find Last Instance (true or false -- optional).
I have more changes I'm planning to experiment with in the coming days! I'm considering replacing the "choose one activity per day" system with a more flexible "time points" system that will let the player either visit the Arena or partake in up to two non-Arena actions (e.g. shop and train, or train and recruit). I also quite like the idea of a daytime action that lets you hire out your characters to make some extra money at the expense of some energy, giving the player some economic breathing room when the team is injured from a fight.
A big thanks to everyone who's reported bugs or left suggestions in the forums thus far; and an especially big thanks to folks leaving nice reviews. This game has been an absolutely incredible amount of work to make so far, and your support makes a huge difference.
Keep on playing, and I'll see you in the next update!
--Craig