Salve, dear players!
I'm thrilled to announce patch 0.6.0 just in time for the holidays! The biggest patch just occurred in my own life: I got married since the last update! In that spirit, I hope you will fall in love with your new starting gladiators, Dacius, Leander, and Pio. But more on that below.
What's New in 0.6.0
Major Features
- Stats: In 0.5 and before, gladiators were basically interchangeable. They looked a bit different and had different perks, but they weren't really unique. That changes in 0.6! Each gladiator now has three stats, Power, Constitution, and Agility, which roughly correspond to damage, health, and chance to hit an dodge. This gives some compelling reasons to pick one gladiator over another as well as to specialize them towards one or another weapon or defensive skill (dodge or block).
- Training: Each week that a gladiator is uninjured and not participating in a match, the gladiator will train to improve the aforementioned stats. Under the hood, the gladiator has a certain proclivity for each stat which will affect their training rate. They also have an overall level of talent which will help them learn stats across the board. These talents and proclivities also affect the initial skill you'll see when you recruit the gladiator.
- Aging: I'm feeling this one in AD 2024 and the gladiators are too. As gladiators get older they heal more slowly and have a significantly harder time keeping up their stats, even if they train regularly. This puts a soft expiration on even the best gladiators and also makes a more interesting choice for recruiting. Obviously, aging (and training) is a somewhat slow process, so I expect the impact of this mechanic to be more apparent as the game expands
- Starting Recruits: To get off to a bit of a quicker start, your roster will now include three gladiators: Dacius - towards the end of his career but quite skilled, Leander - a decent mid-career gladiator, and Pio - a promising youngster. That should give a decent and fairly balanced 'quickstart' to the game.
Minor Changes
- There are now notifications to let you know when equipment returns to your inventory, when gladiators level up, and when gladiators heal fully. These should help some confusion in which players thought that when a gladiator died, their equipment disappeared with them
- Candidates now appear naked and sans-perks to make comparison amongst them easier and to remove the premium you'd pay for their equipment. Since the candidates have no equipment, the equipment display in recruiting has been replaced by a quick-reference on their stats.
- Selling a gladiator now automatically unequips all their gear and sends it to the inventory
- Added help indicators and tooltips to several menus to better explain their function
- New tooltips, though mostly affecting all the new UI added for stats
- Changed the basic unit of time from a day to a week to make a little more sense with the rate of training and injuries, as well as how a gladiator ages
- Bugfix: prevent a gladiator who fought this week from also healing the same week
- Bugfix: previously, you could accept a challenge, then pass a week or more, then start the challenge. That is no longer possible and the 'advance time' button change into a button (a skull) to start match since that's what it seemed like it should be doing anyhow
- Bugfix: The perk icons no longer overlap text on the detailed gladiator stat tooltip
What's Next
The holidays!
...
I haven't quite decided on the theme of next major patch yet, but in the next few patches I hope to:
- Spice up the combat visuals and sound effects
- Introduce visiting characters who come with special events
- Find out more about what's happening at your school out of combat. Who trains your gladiators? What do they eat? Where do they live? What are they thinking?
Got opinions, let me know! I just found out about the discussions tab on Steam, so I'll start to look there for feedback. And if you want to get an inside scoop on new updates, join the mailing list at the bottom of https://vittoriagames.com.
Until next time,
Nick