The December Update! New features + first major balance patch!

Level Cap Setting

This is available in settings menu at any time, from the beginning of a new game or even in the middle of any match. This setting will artificially reduce the levels of your Beasties when they exceed the level of your opponents. They'll still receive EXP as usual.

Beastieball was intentionally designed with peaks and valleys of difficulty; we think there's great joy in venturing to difficult areas, growing stronger, and then returning to easier areas where you can win matches easily. But some players would prefer an experience that's more difficult, slow and consistent. By enabling this setting you can ensure that you're never "overlevelled" and always have an interesting strategic match whenever you encounter any opponent at any time in your adventure.

Random Team

In Team Setup (available in Sportnet or during certain post-game challenges), you can save pre-set teams or download teams created by other players. There's now a "Random Team" option on this menu, which will generate a new random team for you at the beginning of every match you play. You can use this new option to quickly jump into high-level PvP matches without building your own team!

Mountain Expedition Redux

This Roguelike post-game challenge has been particularly popular among players, and we thought it could use a little more TLC, so we spent some time adjusting it. In particular our goal was to enable a greater diversity of playstyles and better reward careful planning. The original version was great fun but pushed players towards using only a small handful of Beasties to succeed. The new version is completely reworked and a lot more strategic! We hope you enjoy it.

Note that records set in previous versions will have to be wiped if you want to continue playing Expeditions. We don't intend to wipe progress like this with every update we make, but in this case we felt it was necessary since we've changed how the mode plays and also how it scores a "win" for some Beasties.

Other Little Things

Balance Changes

This is the first of what will be many adjustments to balance.

In general, our goal with these changes was to reduce the effectiveness of some combinations which could consistently create 1-turn 50/50 or no-win scenarios regardless of matchup. Combinations which were strong in the previous patch should still be strong, but slightly easier to play against, allowing for more diverse match dynamics. These changes are subtle and will only impact players deep in postgame or PvP, such as those competing in the upcoming fan-organized Bring the Heat! tournament.

We also aimed to better distinguish some Beasties' roles by adjusting their plays/traits/stats. Kassaleet and Broslidon now have clearer separate specialties, while other Beasties like Armantis and Musselbound have been given more options to expand their playstyles.

Core Mechanics

The difference between "+50%" and "x1.5" is subtle but meaningful. For example, in previous versions, if a Beastie was at the net (+50%) and jazzed (x1.5), their power bonus would be 100% + 50% x 1.5 = 225%. Under new balance change, where jazzed is +50%, the same state would yield a power level of 100% + 50% + 50% = 200%.

Effectively this means that power growth will be more linear rather than exponential when stacking certain effects.

Traits

Plays

Movesets

Stats

Other Fixes

Thanks!

These first few weeks have been exhilarating for the team! Working on the game and adding all these things feels extra amazing thanks to the enthusiasm and encouragement of players. More to come!!!