Most of the time working on this patch went into (hopefully) fully fixing that nasty revive-bug. But also throwed in some minor tweaks to make earlier phases of the game more fun & higher paced, but also reduce the snowball on endgame / game ends really fast.
Oh and a reminder, all these changes are for the experimental-branch, so a lot of “extreme” testing, rather then small balance-changes too see if a large balance-change had an affect (probably will, but if to big, easily can reduce it, instead of doing lots of small balancing-patches, that is for the second branch of the game (Testing & Balancing) before reaching the final branch that should have stable & well-balanced version. And where your thoughts & suggestions can be a big part of the molding of the game :).
This patch is on the Experimental branch, so to try out this new version, you have to start steam, go to your library, right click on the game/Properties/Betas and select "Experimental - Latest version arrive on this" Now you should see "SELECTED VERSION experimental" right next to the play-button in the library. (Or if you right click on it in the system-tray, it says Myriad Mayhem [experimental])
Content
- Re-added Piercing to enemies defences, higher piercing on tougher targets (their arrow will not stop when hitting a target, until they hit x-amount of units in a line, Think of it like a ballista-arrow/bolt). To lessen the snowball effect of your army.
- MapSetting: "Unveiled Regions" have now reduced values, (10, 15, 19) -> (5, 10, 15), so much smaller map. Let me know if anyone misses the "large map", then we can make the "gap" between smallest and largest bigger.
- Added a fourth toggle-setting for MapSetting: "Unveiled Regions", it will unlock the whole map, the game is not balanced for this large map open at all, but might be fun for people to play on :).
- Added restrictions to not be able to start on region 10, 13, they were too strong as a starting region, but region 10 is now in the pool of regions for LandingSite-Challenging.
- Added all regions with more then two possible connection, as restricted starting-regions, as they could make the game way to hard (will remove these restrictions later, when I made you able to get stronger starting-location / not as vulnerable by a "multi-connected starting location", but for now, they are super-tough to deal with).
Balancing
- Map-generator: Now goes more depth before breadth (e.g. try to create maps that are more "deep one path", rather than the closest first & splitting like crazy.
- Map-generator: Reduced chance to open up more paths to the same region, to make unlocked/picked regions less connected (e.g. if you have a path to a region, it is much less likely a new path to it to be opened).
- Reduced the difficulty on Relaxed, Tenacious and unyielding. (more soon to come with new "smarter" attack-target calculations).
- Trying out reduced price on all buildings, 50% on small ones, and 25% on the rest
- Reduced price on Market extra amount, total 90%. And Barracks by a total ~75%
- Double barracks spawn-time - testing around values, so now they are much cheaper, but not as effective, so you can afford them earlier, but not half as effective.
- Nerfed Allies mages health, so they are less tanky then archers. (glass cannons).
- Nerfed Allies mage area spell, radius 3 -> 2. And its damage by 25%, reason is to not make them a killing-machine snowball endgame. But maybe I have to go another approach.
- Buffed enemies late game buildings to be tougher.
Other
- Had to change some settings, which affects the user settings affecting a match (e.g. difficulty, Unveiled Difficulty, etc). So sadly I had to reset these user preferences.
Bug fixes
Regarding all these bugs, I have found at least one place where a bug enters. But in the worst case, there were even more places the bug sneaks in that I have missed, so maybe a bit misleading with "Bug fixes".
- Finally got to replicate revive-bug & patch that bug, so after that I let the game run a hour without a single event (facing slowing enemies that kills you over and over), so hopefully it is gone.
- Fixed that the game never saved the validated version, e.g. you would get the "reset warning" on every startup
Known bugs to be fixed (but minor, so put on hold for now)
- The talent Conduit shows incorrect CritDamage on lvl 1 card (still gives correct).
Known & Remaining nasty bugs
These are bugs I've experienced or are reported but have not been able to replicate or fix, with at least a couple hours per bug (even when trying all known scenarios, so usually a race condition for threads == happens rarely). So I'm sorry you had to experience this one as well, but as they are minor so have I put them to the side, and instead future playthroughs, have my eyes open for them and try to have an optimal scenario for them to be replicated.
But I gladly take all the help I can get, so if you experience a bug, if so only once, so would I love to hear the scenario/case when it happened. E.g. you die & won't respawn (non-hardcore-mode), were you attacked by enemies, did you have a healing-effect on? (healing-ability, healing equipment), roughly how many enemies were there? etc. This will help in much easier replication & identify the cause of the issue.
- When you are chilled (slowed) by the Harpooners, and the slow never disappear.