Greetings, tactics fans! I've been working hard to improve Together in Battle based on your feedback (and to address the worst of the bugs you reported).
A fair few of you piped up to say that you felt limited in your ability to address shortfalls in your resources while also earning enough money to make payday, and so I wanted to address that as soon as possible. User "peeper keeper" offered a couple of suggestions in his review of the game that I found quite insightful; I've taken it upon myself to implement them, along with some other things, in order to give players greater flexibility in managing the economic side of the game.
Without further ado, here are the changes:
- created a new time points system for the daylight hours. You have two points to spend, and activities can cost one or two points. You can spend the day on a single 2-point activity (e.g. going to the arena) or on a selection of two 1-point activities (e.g. shopping and training).
- new daytime activity: Labor. For 1 time point, you can go down to the docks and hire out characters as laborers for the day in exchange for aura (with the payout scaled in part off of each character's base strength stat). This will consume some of the character's remaining energy; they will leave your group to work, but will return that same evening.
- if you don't make payroll, the game now accounts for how far short of making payroll you actually fell when calculating the morale penalty. The morale penalty can now be as small as -2 if you missed payroll by a relatively small chunk (as opposed to a shortfall of any size producing the full -10 drop). This makes missing payroll by small amounts far less dangerous and less prone to producing economic death spirals.
- further increased Cheap Novel availability in the shop, and further decreased its price.
- increased the morale-boosting power of regular Novels.
- took Sprint out of the cavalier skill progression, as it was producing enemies that could cross the entire arena and charge down characters in one turn.
- Stone Golems now start with Toss at level 1, allowing players to have fun throwing enemies around right from the word "go."
We've got some significant bug fixes, too:
- fixed: the game was grabbing the wrong date for league matches in monkey league after the first league match, effectively preventing any and all forward progress in the campaign after that first Monkey League league match.
- fixed: if a character attempted to use a self-move skill like Stick-and-Drag or Pull while subject to a Hold effect, it would leave the attacker in place while telling the game that they were in the process of moving, eventually freezing the game as it waited for expected character movement--which wasn't actually occurring--to complete.
- fixed: the game would reset a character's wound level to zero upon reapplying equipment effects--and opening the character overview screen in camp would reapply equipment effects, essentially auto-restoring wounded characters to normal with no recovery time or risk of death.
- fixed: the game was failing to give stone golems the tag that reduces the cost for Shove 2, and was instead giving it to them as an invalid skill at level 2.
- fixed: Throw appeared twice in the Stone Golem promoted class skill progressions.
- fixed: Trade, Twirl, and Juxtapose worked on objects, not just characters. (The game now gives you a message explaining why it didn't work if you try this.)
- fixed: Trade worked on enemies, not just teammates. (The game now gives you a message explaining why it didn't work if you try this.)
- fixed a couple of typos in camp narration/dialogue.
And a couple of goodies for campaign creators to use:
- new supported text sprite: Time.
- the game now recognizes Health Left and Energy Left as stats for most stat-related script actions.
That's about it for this one. I put in a lot of work over the past 24 hours to get this update out so fast--I sincerely hope that this improves the experience for you all! If you have any feedback on any of these changes (or suggestions for entirely different changes you'd like to see), please don't hesitate to email me or post about it in the forums. I check both regularly! 😉
Barring the appearance of any new bugs that require immediate intervention, I'll be making a content push for the next update, including new random events and the Snow Leopard League qualifier battle. Until next time!
Tactically yours,
Craig