Difficulty Systems Update
-Nightmare system rework (almost all changed)
--Choose between a random selection of good and bad options with point values
--Nightmares now scale in difficulty a bit faster
--21 mostly new blights
-Bosses now must be beaten before moving on (the enemy cubes are randomized each time, lives rebalanced)
-Difficulty change animation and various difficulty based adjustment
-Enemy mana shown on enemy leader
-Enemy cube setup generation adjusted to be more reasonable (until late game)
-Big Balance changes: 46 Cubes/Perks adjusted
-Hand overflow event
-5 new Curses, 1 golden perk, 3 normal perks
-Various fixes, other adjustments and QOL improvements
Full patchnotes as always in game.
This update contains a lot of changes to existing systems, as such I am going to explain my reasoning for some of the changes:
New Nightmare Choice System:
-The old system was generally fine, but also generally not very interesting with many players simply sticking to nightmare 1 for the terrain and while I would assume that some are still going to stick to that, the new system should be a lot more interesting and create much more varied starts.
-The old system also didn't scale well at all leading to many classes/species beeing unusable at higher nightmares with the first battle often beeing rediculously hard compared to later battles, since a lot of the nightmare effects were immediatly active with very little starting choices to allow strategizing and playing around the increased threat.
-In generaly I want to avoid runs where it just feels like there was no chance of you winning.
-Of course this new system is also a lot more chaotic and will sometimes generate a bit too easy or a bit too hard starting conditions, but I feel like thats still a lot more fun.
Boss Repeats:
-Prevously if you had enough lifes you could never beat a boss and still win the run, this is a bit borring and can make battles and especially boss battles feel meaningless or irrelevant. Additionally since "skipping" the boss fight this way means you don't get the 100 gold it also pushed you down a losing spiral where now you are less likely to win and encouraged to take more lives to get through the run that way.
-With the new system when you lose a boss fight you get an event which puts you into a new boss fights, this means enemy cubes are re generated so you don't get stuck. (The Skip perk can also be used to skip the event as always)
-Since this change makes lives a bit less powerfull various things were slightly rebelanced:
--Bosses have -1 difficulty except during looping
--Lives map node also gives 10 gold now
--The nightmare which starts you off with less lives is no longer a thing
-In general I hope this makes boss fights a lot more scary while still making lives meaningfull and usefull as their original intention of protecting you against blunders or extreme rng.
Cube Balance Changes:
-Various starter cubes were nerfed by roughly 33% and various non starter cubes were buffed.
-My intention is that you should be able to keep 2/3 of your starting cubes your entire run but it should be less likely that you keep all your starting cubes.
-This is because I think trying to build around the new cubes you get is a lot more fun than relying entirely or largely on your starting cubes.
-This should also make finding new cubes more exciting and meaningful.
-With this change the enemies base mana generation was also decreased from 1 -> 0.8 to account for the slightly reduced starting power of the player.
In general this update contains a lot of changes to the base systems of the game and while it has been tested on the beta branch, some problems may only be revealed by more people playing. So if you have any feedback/opinions after playing I would welcome it (discord is easiest).