Even after the buff to Tsunami, Aquamarine has been the weakest gem type overall with some cards being very strong and borderline problematic in certain specific situations. To address this I reverted Favorable Current to a version close to the paper one, only slightly increasing its attack bonus. To compensate I made the power gain portion of the basic Aquamarine attack and defense cards unconditional.
I also reverted the starting deck size back to 12 cards. Not only did this present a notable discrepancy to the paper version, it also did more harm than good all things considered. If infinite loop decks remain problematic it will be rectified in a different manner.
Apart from game balance I got to spend a lot of time on improving the ways player and ladder information is displayed and I added a bunch of new achievements to hunt for or just to be happy about when getting them unintentionally. These include combinations such as readying Airship using Resupply, Mechanical Bird or Tide Generator or just efficient deck construction resulting into high pay-off via Tsunami, Onslaught or Despair.
Hammer received a new set of illustrations as her cards were still not in line with the look of her character. Now even her Gembearer and hair style matche the character model pretty much exactly.
Balance
- The starting deck size is back to 12 cards.
- Favorable Current will draw a card again and cost 1 power to use. The attack bonus has been increased from 2 to 3.
- Breeze generates 3 power instead of 2, making it a more desirable pick.
- Flow and Be Water always generate 1 power and only the life gain is tied to gem card skill played or in discard pile. This makes these core Aquamarine cards efficient and reliable power providers to fuel Favorable Current or inexpensive card effects in other gem types.
Features
- Added a number of new steam achievements, and many more are yet to come.
- Added graphic options. For now, you can change resolution and toggle fullscreen.
Quality of Life
- The gem wins in the statistics screen are displayed as win rates rather than raw wins.
- I merged the display of gem games and gem win rates into one bigger and more instructive pie chart that is also consistent with how Gembearer statistics are presented.
- Changed the default graphic mode to fullscreen window for more desired overall behavior.
Polish
- The main menu options panel has been restructured. It’s now split into three sections and the control overview as well as the credits have been moved to the link section under the main menu.
- The control overview and credits panel have been rearranged to make them consistent to their new placement.
- Slightly repositioned the “Main Menu” button in the win screen and renamed it to say “continue”.
- Modified leaderboard display so it can accommodate large entry numbers.
- Intuition now draws the cards simultaneously for both sides in online multiplayer.
- The result screen at the end of the match fades in more quickly and very slightly later.
- Replaced the Hammer illustrations for better quality and to better match the character.
Bug Fixes
- Secret Stash should now close correctly when only retrieving some of the cards all of the time.
- Fixed the error handling for Spark.
- Intuition no longer allows you to discard an additional card by clicking a card before all three cards have been drawn.