Hello, tactics fans--another month means another update! This month was unexpectedly challenging for non-game-related reasons ranging from unexpectedly putting my home on the market to my day job being unexpectedly busy to me being unexpectedly ill for more than a week, but I still made sure to put some nice improvements together for you!
The most significant change this month is a much-requested balance tweak that eases up on the game's "messy camp" morale penalty:
- instead of morale dropping the moment you have a night where no one cleans, it now takes two (or more) consecutive nights of no cleaning before morale will start dropping from having a messy camp. This gives you a bit of extra leeway when no one is available to clean so you don't have to order cleaning every night to guarantee that morale doesn't drop.
We've got a handful of fairly elaborate new random events as well:
- wrote a unique battle event that can appear in Snow Leopard and Tiger leagues wherein a surprising combatant shows up on the field (with variants depending on what kind of relationship the character has with them).
- wrote a new random event in camp where a character's mom or dad shows up unexpectedly, with variants depending on what kind of relationship the character has with them.
- wrote a new random event that offers the player an opportunity to further boost shadowling recruitment (and get more use out of their Psy Clash deck).
- wrote new dialogue in the Manbir Letter plot event making better use of the text input feature.
There are also a variety of miscellaneous improvements, including some new UI:
- there is now a dedicated deck viewer screen you can use to see all the cards in your Psy Clash deck. (The screen is accessible in both camp and in Kalkerapur once you acquire a deck.)
- new AI handicap level: 11. On this handicap level, the AI will actively avoid using lethal attacks, preferring attacks that don't finish off enemies.
- Relaxed difficulty now sets the AI handicap to 11 in order to make the game more accommodating for absolute newbies to turn-based strategy.
- added an option to set an AI handicap of 11 manually for custom difficulty (under the moniker "Lobotomized").
- proc gen character nicknames for their parents now subtly differ depending on the kind of relationship they have: "Mom" or "Dad" if they have a positive relationship, "Mother" or "Father" if they do not.
- personally painted a variety of new proc gen portrait elements for human characters! Specifically, there are six new types of noses (for a total of 17), a new type of beard, and a new bird-wing hair clip. The new noses increase the total available nose variety by more than 50% and just generally allow for a greater variety of unique-looking faces.
- refactored a bit of the proc gen character portrait generation code to make it easier to add in new facial feature variants over time.
- commissioned and received several new cut scene backgrounds for the palace, one of which is now used for a relevant plot event (and another of which will be put to use soon)!
- new mood supported: WorriedAbout. Allows a character to feel worried about a specific other character.
- when changing a character's army in battle, or when altering their salary or appetite, if the info bar is open, it now auto-updates salary and food consumption figures to reflect the changes.
- added items to the chest in the Strikebreaking map.
And finally, we have--what else?--bug fixes!
- fixed: the AI was double-counting the back cover bonus for non-Shield skills, leading to it greatly over-preferring moves that put characters' backs up against things (especially the edge of the battlefield).
- fixed: the AI was reversing the value of healing moves used on enemies without first checking to make sure that the move already assessed as having a positive value. Under some circumstances, this could cause the AI to heal the player's characters.
- fixed: a couple of AI routines were set to be excluded at the wrong AI Handicap level.
- fixed: the game was double-counting status effects that impact accuracy when displaying the accuracy of skills in tooltips.
- fixed: the game could display accuracies below 100% for mental attacks and shield skills in tooltips.
- fixed: pushing an enemy with reflexes into a spiked object would cause the enemy to turn and face the object. (Even worse: if the enemy had counterattacks left, they would counterattack while their back remained turned to the attacker!)
- fixed: changes to the level-up screen code were causing the game to throw a couple of null errors when characters promoted via a Book of Power.
- fixed: minimum recruitment is no longer displayed in the recruitment scene when the player already has a roster larger than the minimum recruitment number.
- fixed: item sacks dropping on a space covered by fog of war were visible to the player.
- fixed: attack animations for characters under fog of war would sometimes inappropriately play upon the character's tile being revealed.
- fixed: energy regen visuals appeared for units under fog of war.
- fixed: particle effects appeared when units were destroyed under fog of war.
- fixed: particle effects accompanied units newly spawned under fog of war.
- fixed inconsistent grammatical phrasing for dialogue where characters talk about liking cookies.
- fixed: the fruit tree in the thief attack battle contained no fruit.
- fixed a typo in one of the introvert "like" dialogue variants.
- fixed: when calling the script action UnitsToList in battle during deployment, the game would not check undeployed characters in the roster for the specified army.
- fixed: proc gen characters forced into a promoted class because they were generated at or above level 20 were not having their displayed level reduced appropriately.
- fixed: the Talkable status effect could "run out" after 9,999 turns and had a displayed duration within character screens.
- fixed: the game would say "Talkable wore off" when removing the Talkable icon from characters.
- fixed: in some cut scenes, it was possible to click the background in the split second between the report screen vanishing and the dialogue menu reappearing and thereby inappropriately advance the scene.
- fixed for 0.2.11a: a file had been accidentally overwritten, causing traps and certain skills to no longer work properly.
And we have some goodies for campaign creators!
- the OnTalk dialogue trigger is now more robust! The game now allows custom variables in the trigger parameters, permitting the use of specific named characters based on prior events.
- new optional parameter for the SetStringByString script action: Strip Capitalization. By default, this parameter is false; if set to true, the resulting string will be in all lowercase letters for easier parsing (e.g. for checking passwords and player-created names and such).
- new script action: RestartBattle. Forces the current battle to restart, even if the player is playing on roguelike mode.
- the game now checks ahead for the correct number of parameters when running IfStat-type actions, making it more forgiving of scripting errors.
- the game now supports group projects (i.e. projects that aren't tied to just one character) and camp activities tied to progress on those group projects.
- did I mention all the new proc gen portrait elements? You can use those for your own character portraits, too!
So that covers this month's changes. Needless to say, I ran out of time before I got around to finishing the arena championship plot line; that will be top priority for next month's update. Also on the agenda: creating new events that advance the palace intrigue plot line, making some new random events to further develop sibling and parent drama, and more.
Your reviews matter!
While I'm writing this update, here's a little reminder that if you're enjoying the game, leaving a positive review is the #1 thing you can do to help it out! More positive reviews means more people discover Together in Battle through the algorithm, and discovery is the name of the game! (Well, okay: "Together in Battle" is the name of the game. But you get what I mean.) If you're having a good time playing, please consider leaving a nice review!
All right folks, that's all I've got. See you in September! 😉
Yours in tactics,
Craig