Hello everyone!
Before jumping into the patch notes, let me thank everyone who shared feedback over the months since release! Your reports and suggestions have been a tremendous help in improving the game's balance and tracking down remaining bugs.
While our previous major patch focused on improving the combat layer, today’s update turns its attention to the campaign layer, incorporating a lot of the feedback we’ve gathered. I believe the game is now in a much stronger state than it was at launch.
In addition, I’m happy to announce that Slaves of Magic will be participating in the TurnBasedThursdayFest, starting on March 9th at 1 PM EDT / 6 PM CET, with a 30% discount, our biggest one yet—a perfect opportunity to jump in if you’ve been waiting to try the game!
Now let’s take a look at what’s new in this update.
New research images:
A slew of new research/training images have been added both to replace all the placeholders and to provide images for the new ones that arrived in this patch.
New second wave options:
Randomized enemies: New enemy units that appear are no longer bound by their 3-unit groupings.
Invaders elven/dwarf/orc start: Forcing the specific group to be the first research group being researched by the invaders.
Random continent: Randomize the regions' base resources/starting schools/starting equipment.
Additional army: Adds an additional size-3 army for the invaders at the start.
Marathon mode: Rebalances the campaign layer to approximately double the length of a campaign.
No time limit: Removes the bonus for archiving the combat missions in time, but slightly reduces etherglow rewards per mission to compensate.
Longer combat: All units receive 50% additional health. Increases all time limits by +2 as well to take the longer combat times into account.
New training room:
A new training room has been added to the campaign map, and all non-magic school training has been moved to it. So these schools no longer directly compete with the researches for better equipment, encouraging more diverse school usage.
Training room buildings now provide trainers instead of soldiers (and no other bonuses), which affects the training's speed in the training room.
Added Basic training/Mastery of the fundamentals trainings that unlock universal skills, plus they act as a prerequisite for other schools' advanced/master trainings.
Added Diverse training, which increases the number of schools a unit can use by +1 (the old Great teacher starter bonus).
Added Combat drills/Expanded training yards/War academy trainings that, when done, will add a passive XP gain to all troops in the barracks every day (15/30/60 XP per month). In addition to reducing the retrain cost by 25/50/75.
Added Local Organizers/Hidden Cells/Underground Network/Resistance propaganda trainings that, when done, will increase the recruits per month to 17/25/35/50.
Research balance changes:
General rebalance of research time and etherglow costs.
Rune categorization research line has been revamped with the idea of making beginner magic accessible sooner. Master rune categorization now opens up the master magic school research for already known schools, and a new Grandmaster rune categorization takes its place in giving access to the third magic school.
Added Rune item creation research, which is the new prerequisite for Rune (tier3) equipment research, and it will be unlocked after advanced rune categorization research. In addition, it now unlocks rune cloth armor, magic charm, rune layered armor, rune bracers, and magic boots.
Added bomb creation research, which will now unlock the acid bomb utility item. It's prereqvisit is adamantine alloy and alchemy research.
Smith balance changes:
Equipment point rework. Instead of smiths giving equipment points directly, the newly added 5 new smith project is going to increase the available equipment points for the resistance. This change helps to tighten the balance of equipment by putting a cap on how high the player can go with available equipment point wise at certain tech levels. In addition, losing bases with smithies will no longer make the player unable to field units because of the lack of equipment points, making comebacks easier.
Equipment points per research: 25 -> 40 -> 55 -> 75 -> 100 -> 130.
The jump between 40 -> 55 requires adamantine alloy research.
The jump between 75 -> 100 requires the new rune item creation research.
Smithy rooms cost has been reduced to 200 (down from 300).
Both utility slots on units will be available from the start of the game.
The efficient smith bonus now grants a +20 equipment point bonus, instead of making the second utility slot available.
The deep pocket skill now halves (rounded down) the equipment point cost of used utility items.
Two-handed melee weapons equipment points cost increased by 1.
Ranged weapons equipment points cost increase by 0/1/2 per weapon tier.
General Balance changes:
Starting smiths/trainers/scholars now will be the region-based value. This makes the regional differences more pronounced, even at the beginning of the game.
The chosen region's base gold income is added to the monthly income as a base income.
Starting gold will be 900/700/500/300 per difficulty level + chosen region base gold per month multiplied by 4.
The early game goals related to the number of smiths/soldiers/scholars the player has been reduced to 25 (from 30).
Great teacher's starter bonus has been reworked to focus on spellcasting (magic training cost is halved, and it has a 25% increased success rate). Its original effect (being able to use 3 schools) became unlockable in the training room for all playthroughs.
Reduced global melee and ranged accuracy by 5%. This should make lucky crits against same-level units without some kind of bonus not possible, reducing the prevalence of crits in the early game. In addition, it slightly raises the importance of cornering and flanking in melee combat.
Increased the quality of the enemy troops on advanced and master difficulty for the final mission.
Updated the tutorials with all the changes, and added a new tutorial pop-up after the first mission to explain where the main quest can be seen, and how to start the passage of time.
Bugfixes:
Utility items that forbid duplications now forbid using multiple tiers of the same type. For example, it is no longer possible to use both layered armor and ether-infused layer armor utility items together.
The difficulty level XP modifiers (30%/15%/0%/-15%) were not properly applied, this has been fixed.
Fixed a visual bug for aura skills that occurred when a unit was affected by the aura, then removed in 1 action. Now the aura condition icon does not remain stuck on the character sheet in this case.
Optimized the auto-save system inside a combat scenario. Saving the file to disk is now being done on a separate thread, and it only saves at the start of the player's turn, rather than at the start of every unit's turn.