Happy Monday, tactics fans! I've been continuing to work very hard on Together in Battle, adding more content, improving balance, and fixing bugs. This update came together a bit slower than I wanted due to real-life stuff (and also because I took the time to push three rounds of hotfixes to the last update)--but now that it's here, I'm pleased as punch to tell you everything new!
First and most significantly, the next main plot event is now in the game! I won't say anything here about what it is, but it occurs on the day after the Festival of the Ascendant Lights. (If you have a playthrough where a match is already scheduled for that day, just be aware that you won't be able to trigger the event--but the game will avoid scheduling fights on that day for subsequent playthroughs.)
In addition to this, there's a new Axefighter skill and new items can appear in the shop. I also made a few more balance tweaks and fixed a whole bunch of bugs. Without further ado, here are all the changes:
- throwing a character onto a space occupied by an object with "flying" passability now produces a context-dependent effect: if the character is an ally, they are thrown on top of the object as normal; but if the character is not an ally, they will now be thrown into the object instead for collision damage (and--if the object is spiked--additional piercing spike damage).
- new skill: Grappler Stance. Places a hold on one adjacent space, keeping enemies from moving away from (or through) it. This skill is learned by axefighters.
- skills which creates Holds can now be targeted on spaces occupied by other characters.
- helms can now get modifiers as part of the procedural generation process! Modifiers currently supported include Stylish (+1 morale), Beautiful (+2 morale), Gorgeous (+4 morale), Visored (immunity to Blinded status), and Calming (+1 energy regen).
- item quality in the shop now automatically increases upon getting into Snow Leopard League and upon successfully completing the Nihal's Bandits side quest.
- new accessory worn on the head: Bifocals. +10% Accuracy, can be equipped by anyone.
- added bifocals and torches to the shop's pool of "miscellaneous" items; reduced the odds of runner's cleats showing up in stock to 5%.
- toned down the photokineticist's Dazzle skill: it now applies Blinded only once with a base 100% chance (removing the additional 50% chance to apply it a second time) with a 50% chance to apply Distracted once (instead of one to three times).
- changed the way the game handles thieves in arena fights: instead of allying them with the enemy team, thieves now have ignore tags for both armies and a target value of 0. This should keep the enemy team from seeing healing or buffing thieves as a good move.
- pay for hiring out now scales more slowly with strength and caps out at 75 aura per character instead of 90.
- characters now only give a friendly fire reaction when allied skills with the element "Falling" (e.g. Kinetic Gust, Shove, Throw) deal more than 5 damage to them.
- rewrote religious attack, deployment, and victory barks to bring them more in line with the particular doctrines of each given character's religion.
- the info bar in the top-left of the screen now auto-updates food consumption and payroll info as soon as you dismiss a character.
- updated the trainer's dialogue a bit to explain that characters undergoing paradigm training will keep their old skills and masteries, but will learn new ones exclusively in their new class going forwards.
- boosted the amplitude of the song "Conspiracy" to better match the amplitude levels on other tracks.
- fixed: Golem and Spirits could be selected for the Sick Parent event in camp, which would result in the game freezing when it came time for them to talk about their parents (since spirits and golems do not have parents).
- fixed: when an enemy applied a status effect under fog of war, the game would not load the associated status effect icon for the targeted character at all. This would then cause a range error when the affected character came into view and the game tried to display the nonexistent (but expected) status effect icon, in turn causing a cascade of other issues like fog of wars tiles no longer being removed.
- fixed: ranged attackers could sometimes counterattack after being shoved into water or lava.
- fixed: surrendering in the Monkey League Qualifier would not send the player back to the qualifier scheduling scene as intended.
- fixed: characters ending a battle while swimming would have their movement type appear as swimming during deployment for the next battle.
- fixed: the cavalier and mantis knight sprite animations for Mega Charge were wrapping up about 4 frames too early.
- fixed: the special Day 1 daytime text in Kalkerapur ("The tournament begins tomorrow and you need a team. Time to go recruit some fighters!") was no longer appearing.
- fixed: the arena manager was not saying the day of the month that league matches were scheduled for due to a formatting error.
- fixed: characters could sometimes ignore orders given during one-on-ones due to leftover ForceNextCampActivity tags from previous one-on-ones or random events.
- fixed: the RemoveTag script action was not splitting up tag parameters, leading to situations where it was failing to remove specified tags (most notably, ForceNextCampActivity tags).
- fixed: you could mess up the ordering of nighttime camp events if you happened to click the background during the 1/100th of a second delay before character dialogue appeared onscreen.
- fixed: skills, masteries, and other things learned at specific levels (such as Book of Power mastery or the Assassin's Leap skill) would get reintroduced into a character's skill progression upon promotion, leading to that character learning a duplicate of that thing upon reaching level 2 of their promoted class.
- fixed: the upper UI buttons in recruitment had become unusable when a character was selected during recruitment.
- fixed: even if slain before turn 5, the Monkey League Qualifier team leader would still issue a taunt.
- fixed: losing fights or winning league qualifiers would modify golem morale.
- fixed: characters' steps taken would be reset to 0 upon promoting mid-turn in battle.
- fixed: if the skills bar was set to a character's second page of skills and they were thrown into water or lava, the game would still display their second (now blank) page of skills upon selecting them, making it impossible to command them to swim.
- fixed: the game was not recognizing player-placed Caltrops as traps for purposes of warning the player about moving their own units into them.
- fixed: when fire was spawned in front of elevated terrain, its smoke particles would aggressively clip through the terrain.
- fixed a formatting error in the character dialogue responding to a player's decision not to reclass a character in camp.
- fixed: the logger was not saving the version number in log files.
- fixed: status effect immunity popup text was misformatted.
For the campaign creation suite, we have a few improvements:
- the map editor now supports loading and saving a discrete defeatScene attribute for battles, allowing you to easily set a next scene dependent on the player's defeat without using conditions.
- new script action: SetDefeatScene. Sets the defeatScene attribute to a different scene for the current battle.
- new script action: AddStock. Programmatically adds stock to an existing shop in the scene. Lasts until the scene ends.
- new tag supported: Immunity. Grants status effect immunity to the tagged unit.
- new tag supported: AreaPreference. Alters the AI's calculated value for moves in which the tagged character ends their move in the named Area. You can use to nudge particular AI characters toward choosing moves that place them in specific areas of the battlefield; or alternatively, to dissuade them from pursuing moves in certain areas.
- new usable skill icon: Grappler Stance.
- new usable item icon: Bifocals.
- fixed: the character creator could roll up generic units with morale above zero (i.e. neutral).
And finally, we have some progress on gamepad support. (Gamepads aren't officially supported in-game as of yet, but hey--progress is progress):
- rather than duplicating the left trigger's zoom function, the right trigger is now mapped as an automatic "End Turn" button.
- the game now automatically repositions the gamepad cursor when auto-panning the camera during in-battle dialogue.
- fixed: gamepad controls were not functioning properly in the shop tutorial.
- fixed: the gamepad would sometimes be locked out of movement during deployment due to an internal failure to clear dialogue triggered at the start of turn 0.
Reviews!
TIB is already garnering some great reactions from content creators less than a month out from its early-access launch, including this one-two punch of positive launch review and even-more-positive follow-up vid from delightful SRPG channel 89 Games:
There have been some very nice reviews from players as well--today I'll highlight this one, which I really loved:
If you haven't done so yet and you're enjoying the game, please consider leaving a review of your own. Positive player reviews like this make a world of difference (as do gentle nudges to your favorite content creators to check out the game, *wink* *wink*).
Anyway, that's all I have for this update, but there is much more to come. Thanks for your support--I'll see you in the next one! 😉
Tactically yours,
Craig