Hello. Hey there. It's been a while, I know.
After pushing hard to complete the majority of the Early Access roadmap from October to February, I took a break through much of March. I couldn't keep away from Seedborne Soldiers for too long though, and in the time since coming back I've been plugging away at a whole bunch of quality-of-life improvements, bug fixes, and balance changes.
Let's dive in.
Quality-of-life improvements
While there weren't any big new features left to implement, there were still some changes to the flow of the game that I wanted to add:
- Steam Cloud saves are now available. You can now switch between devices and keep your progress.
- When you enter a Ruins (?) tile, you're less likely to see a repeat of the last Ruins you encountered on your run. It's still possible, but all the other Ruins are 3x more likely to appear.
- It should be almost impossible now to encounter crops with units that you already have at Lv3. Prior to this update, we did do some pruning, but not enough.
- When a unit has them, special stats like Strength, Lifelink, and Dodge Chance are shown in the Inspect Panel (what appears on the left when you right-click a unit). (Strength is a little strange in that it defaults to 100%. A 5% Strength bonus is shown as 105% and an equivalent Weakness penalty is shown as Strength: 95%).
- FPS is now capped at 60. This can prevent the game from taking a lot of your computer's resources when it's unnecessary to do so.
- Units have a slightly new targeting algorithm. Units have always preferred to target the closest enemy to them. When multiple enemies were tied for closest, the unit used to choose randomly. Now, the unit will prefer the unit that's more "in front" of them. For units the player controls, this means the unit will target enemies closer to the back of the arena. For enemy units, it's the opposite, preferring targets closer to the bench. There can be at most two units tied for this position, and if there are two, the unit will choose randomly. This change enables some more strategic positioning and prevents some annoyances where, e.g. the sniper in the back will target an enemy off to the side or an assassin will target a unit "behind" them instead of the important enemy the player wanted to get rid of early.
- There is a brief delay after hitting the "Next Crop" button where the button is disabled. This prevents you from accidentally spamming the button and losing a crop.
- The Rest Site UX has changed slightly to enable the player to go back to Harvesting after either Resting or Trading. It now requires an extra click to continue past it, but the UX should hopefully be much clearer.
- The total unit cost that counts toward Noble rewards is now displayed in the Noble Inspect Panel (opens if you right click on the Noble Icon).
- Small icons are displayed to the left of the damage and healing/shielding bars on the Team Display on the left side of the screen to make it more obvious what they represent.
Balance changes
The primary focus of mine for this patch was game balance. Of course, I wanted to buff underpowered things and nerf overpowered things, but I also wanted to solve some more general problems with game balance that vocal players and I have noticed. Before I get into individual changes, here's a list of major goals I wanted to achieve with this set of balance changes:
- Increase the number of teams and starts that could beat the highest Challenge Levels.
- Improve the efficacy of casters.
- Increase skill expression by giving more options to the player for item trades.
- Make units with the Dark trait more appealing.
- Make enemies that heal less frustrating to encounter.
I also want to give a huge shoutout to Nicolas Fernandez from the r/AutoBattlers subreddit, who helped a ton with finding both balance issues and bugs.
Without further ado, let's get into the changes:
Helping casters flourish
Casters have historically lagged behind ranged attackers in damage output unless very specific teams were built around them. Just dropping a caster on your team in the hopes of increasing damage output and diversifying damage types used to be relatively ineffective. How could this be remedied? Well, what if casters... casted more? In this patch, the amount of MP gained from attacking was increased from 10 to 12.
This may not seem like much, but for many casters it has a noticeable effect on how many times per combat they cast their spell. All other units (including enemies) also cast their spells more frequently now, but casters by their nature have more effectful spells, so this change greatly increases their usefulness in combat.
This also helps address another smaller issue, which is that fights went to overtime a little too frequently. Now, with more casts, more things happen each combat, generally keeping them from going longer.
Better time at run start
Balancing a roguelike can be tricky because of the inherent randomness involved. I know that, especially at higher Challenge Levels, it can be frustrating and very difficult to recover from a bad start. With that in mind, I introduced a new consumable item and run start option that can help.
- A new item has been introduced. Celestia Couplet: Create two Lv1 copies of a Tier I unit. It's only available from a specific option at run start. Its purpose is to help players stabilize even if they get bad early RNG. If players are already stable, it can be used as a creative tool to get even further ahead.
- A new option is available at run start. Look Upwards: Get a Tier I crop and 2 Celestia Couplets. This option is unique in that it will always appear after losing a run before you get to Map 2.
More item trade options available
Probably the most major change here is that any Greater Equipment can be traded for a Fragment. This can enable you to choose whether you focus more on hitting your traits or getting your carries online.
Also, most of the consumables now trade for each other. Specifically,
- Bark, Branch, and Root of Elyggdrien now trade for Phaisy's Favor, Traitbloom, or Summoner's Pick (if you're on Challenge Level 5 or higher).
- The newly added Celestia Couplet also trades for Phaisy's Favor, Traitbloom, or Summoner's Pick.
- Phaisy's Favor, Traitbloom, and Summoner's Pick now trade for each other.
Challenge Level 12 reworked
Challenge Level 12 is especially difficult. Losing a water each combat can really feel suffocating as crops pile up while you can't buy units from them. This challenge has been changed: instead, trades at Item Traders now cost 2 water. This should still have the intended effect of decreasing the amount of water available to the player, but now you get to choose more how and when that water gets removed.
Dealing with healing
A number of complaints arose around enemy healing. While "just be stronger" is a viable strategy, it can also be nice to have a way to handle these types of enemies while you're still in the "building your team up" phase. I made the following changes to help alleviate this pain:
- Bubblefly enemies have been moved up to the front line or close to the front line when they appear except on fights that are marked "Enemy Lv5" for the map.
- Decreased Bubblefly's base HP from 720/1152/1843 to 640/1024/1638
- Hazenloth's spell now reduces healing on all enemies it hits for its duration.
- Sieforen's spell now reduces healing on all enemies it hits for 2 seconds.
- Baal's spell now reduces healing on all enemies that hit him for 1 second each time they hit him.
- Draining Scepter now reduces healing for 3 seconds on-hit.
- Increased the chance that Branding Blade will brand the target.
Temptations of the Dark side
Early on in development, well before Early Access, having the Dark trait active was not strictly a downside. It was originally designed to give lots of up front buffs and slowly wither your team away over the course of combat. While interesting, it was changed into its current incarnation when we wanted to add "curses" into the game, and we needed something with a clear downside. Something that we wanted to do but never got around to was to change units with the Dark trait to account for the fact that they now come with this extra baggage.
Well, we got around to it. Dark units should now all be clearly superior to equivalent units of the same tier, but you can't use too many of them lest your team suffer from its weakness-over-time debuff.
- Night Sky Blanket now makes two pinlight tiles: one in the front row and one in the third row.
- Increased Kincaid's base spell damage from 264/475/855 to 440/792/1246
- Decreased Kincaid's magic scaling from 1.5/1.75/2 to 0.8/1/1.3
- Increased Varra's base spell damage from 139/222/355 to 185/296/474
- Increased Everett's spell's stun duration from 0.75s to 1s
- Increased Everett's base spell damage from 93/167/300 to 111/200/360
- Increased Everett's effect's magic lifelink from 40% to 50%
- Decreased Selene's max MP from 90 to 50 at all levels
- Increased Pallencor's effect's max HP buff from 150/250/500 to 200/400/800
- Increased Hazenloth's Skeletons' base HP from 375/600/960 to 500/800/1200
- Increased Hazenloth's Skeletons' base Attack from 32/51/82 to 40/64/102
- Increased Hazenloth's Skeletons' base Defense from 20/20/20 to 20/30/40
- Increased Hazenloth's Skeletons' base Magic Defense from 20/20/20 to 20/30/40
- Increased Hazenloth's Skeletons' strength scaling off of Magic from 0.1/0.2/0.5 to 0.2/0.35/0.7
- As mentioned in the "Dealing with Healing" section, Hazenloth's spell now reduces enemy healing for its duration
- Increased Abomination's spell's Attack Spd scaling from 50/60/80% of Magic Defense to 70/80/100% of Magic Defense
- Increased Jorintht Blaird's passive magic damage to his primary target every third hit from 44/79/142 to 49/88/159
- Increased Jorintht Blaird's passive physical damage to his primary target every third hit from 97/156/249 to 111/178/284
- Increased Death's base spell damage from 300/540/972 to 480/864/1555
Individual changes
In addition to the broad-strokes changes, I went in a tweaked a number of different individual traits, units, and items. On the whole, these changes largely make the game a little easier, primarily for the purpose of increasing the number of builds that can beat the highest Challenge Levels.
Traits:
- Decreased Ascetic's blocked attack interval from 6/5/4/4 to 5/4/3/2. While Ascetics were a viable but difficult team to build around, they weren't very useful as tanks. Before this our only tank traits were General and Tower, so another way to build tankiness into your team was sorely needed. The extra blocked damage also helps negate the built-in one-equipment-only drawback to Ascetic.
- Increased Blood's Attack and Magic per enemy death from 30/40/50 to 35/45/65 and the reap heal on its final tier from 150 to 300. Blood teams are relatively good on lower Challenge Levels, but they really have trouble on Map 3 in higher Challenge Levels. This change helps them become a viable team later and especially rewards the player for capping their team with 7 Blood units.
- Changed Earthen heal every 3 seconds from 20/40/60/80 to 20/35/60/90. These heals don't normally do a ton, but I still wanted to reward the player more for going deeper into the trait.
- Increased Light's on-hit magic damage from 40/60/150 to 50/75/150 and increased their AoE magic damage on hit at higher tiers from 30 to 50. During development, Light was one of the strongest traits for a long time. We continually nerfed it until it became almost unviable, even at Challenge Level 0. This change helps make Light a better vertical, though it's still relatively high risk with its 2/5/9 tier requirement structure.
- Tiers 2 (4 units) and 3 (7 units) of the Mecha trait also give Magic in addition to Attack and Defense while shielded. This can enable Vizreaper to become a secondary magic damage carry, which helps Mecha become a more viable vertical. The primary Mecha carry is Fyiernan, who is a physical damage reset carry, a very high-risk-high-reward option. Vizreaper's damage is lower as a Tier I unit, but it's more consistent.
- Increased Summoner's bonus HP and damage to summons from 20/40/60/90% to 20/50/80/120%. Summoners were another vertical that was flailing, even at low Challenge Levels. They were sorely missing damage, so this change plus a buff to Amalia should help this team thrive.
Tier I units:
- Metal Soldier's spell now provides a shield when it hits. Trying to go for a Mecha comp was difficult primarily because, despite being made of metal, Mecha didn't have a proper tank until Kalbarri at Tier IV! The purpose of this change was primarily to make Metal Soldier tankier to fill that void.
- Decreased Lorelei's spell's Attack Spd boost from 50/60/70% while it's active to 30/40/60%
- Increased Lobellia's base spell damage from 88/158/285 per second to 132/238/428. Lobellia was a pretty weak unit, which contributed a lot to Mist's general inability to handle the early game. This buff should not only enable Lobellia to thrive but should also help Mist teams in general to make it until they can get to better carries like Plutarch and Astrid.
Tier II units:
- Increased the max HP of Amalia's Soulspawns from 100/160/256 to 100/200/400
- Amalia's summons now appear next to the target instead of by her feet. This should give Amalia more DPS because the Soulspawns no longer have to spend part of their duration walking to their target. This was also done to give the Summoner trait a little more of the damage it needed to succeed.
- Increased the max HP of Mirani's Alyosha summon from 450/720/1152 to 450/810/1458
- Increased the base Attack of Mirani's Alyosha summon from 40/64/102 to 40/72/130
- Increased Toadstaff's spell's base magic damage from 139/250/449 to 222/400/719 and its bonus magic scaling from 0.8/1/1.2 to 1/1.2/2. Toadstaff was a bit underpowered, especially when compared to Terra, his lower-tier counterpart. This buff should hopefully make him more able to be the melee carry we always wanted him to be.
- World-Ending Flood is now briefly untargetable at the beginning of combat. Because this unit teleports instead of moves, he teleports to his target immediately when combat starts and was therefore also immediately targeted by most enemies. This change brings him in line with the other teleporting units (e.g. Assassins), which also have brief untargetability at the beginning of combat to prevent the enemy team from piling onto them.
Tier III units:
- War has a new initiative. Now, all ranged allies attack the closest enemy to him in a vertical line with bonus damage, and if 3 or more attacks hit, the enemy is stunned at the start of combat and weaker for the rest of combat. War's old initiative largely did nothing, especially for the amount of time it took. This is a stab at making this unit more viable. With his alternate traits being Slayer, Champion, and General, though, you're going to have to reach a little to find 3 ranged units that work with him.
- Faceless's effect's on-death summon now gets 1/2/3 more attack and 3/5/8% more Attack Spd per second that Faceless was alive.
- Increased the shield gained from Ixis's spell from 64/115/207 to 96/173/311
- Increased Ixis' spell's base damage from 113/180/288 to 225/360/576
- Changed Zilch's bonus magic scaling from 1.25/1.5/1.75 to 1/2/3. If you invest in Zilch, you should get a stronger carry now.
Tier IV units:
- Vulkathuna's spell now does 50% more damage if there are 4 or fewer enemies alive. This should help a team with Vulkathuna as the primary carry deal with fights like minibosses and bosses that are largely one or two enemies.
- Decreased the chance of Flaxen Maiden's Brilliant Javelin appearing from 25/50/90% to 10/25/50% per sunbeam
- Increased the damage that Flaxen Maiden's Brilliant Javelin does from 69/111/178 to 89/142/228 Flaxen Maiden was just really strong. She needed to be less consistent to prevent her from outshining other carries.
- Decreased Alruna's spell's damage per second from 66/119/214 to 55/99/178 and duration from 7 seconds to 6 seconds. Alruna has been something of a cheat code up until now. She was incredibly powerful, and even without the Burning trait active or any equipment, her spell could wipe out most of Map 3's fights in ~2 casts. This nerf puts her more in line with other Tier IV units. She's still quite strong, just no longer game-breakingly so.
Tier V units:
- Increased Hyacinth's Cleric bonus from 2% attack speed per attack to 4%
- Washing Machine's initiative now additionally taunts in a 3-tile radius around it
- Decreased Mahadeva's spell's base heal from 182/328/590 to 130/234/421
- Increased Sieforen's spell's execute threshold from 30% to 50% and increased its execute damage from 480/864/1555 to 720/1296/2333. Sieforen kinda didn't do anything before. He needed a buff.
- Freja's initiative now provides 10% Attack Spd and 10 magic damage on-hit to all allies. Freja was relatively weak for a Tier V unit. This buff should make her a more exciting addition to both Burning and Light teams.
- Decreased Astreumnull's spell's base damage from 200/360/648 to 150/270/486 and its bonus magic scaling from 1.75/2/4 to 0.5/0.5/2. Astreumnull is primarily a tank. He shouldn't also scale massively off of magic, especially since his spell hits and stuns the entire board.
Enemies:
- Decreased War Knight's spell's base shield amount from 132/238/428 to 106/190/342
- Decreased War Knight's magic scaling from 1 to 0.75 across the board. The only way enemies increase their Magic is through Challenge Level buffs, so this should make War Knight less tanky at higher Challenge Levels.
- Decreased Brutalist's magic scaling from 1 to 0.75 across the board
- Decreased Calmness Doser's spell's stun duration from 2/2.5/3 to 1/1.5/2
- Increased Calmness Doser's spell's damage from 118/212/381 to 141/254/457. Stuns are annoying and make fights take longer. This unit was still relatively well-balanced, so I upped the damage to justify decreasing the stun duration.
- Increased Mother Statue's max MP from 150 to 170
- Decreased Mother Statue's effect's bonus Magic scaling from 0.5 to 0.2
- Increased Echo Panic's max MP from 90 to 140 and their starting MP from 40 to 100
- Decreased Cerberus's fireball damage from 389 to 311. Backline units with no survivability now die in 3 hits instead of 2 for the most part.
- Increase Anemone Tree's (Map 2 miniboss) Minemone summon's max MP from 40 to 70. After increasing MP per attack, this fight quickly became overwhelming.
- Increased Florya's (Map 2 boss) defense debuff per second from 5 to 12. Florya was one of the easiest boss fights in the game, barely tickling tanks. Even though this change might seem large since it more than doubles the defense debuff, she's still on the easier side.
Equipment:
- Decreased Hellfire Insignia's Crit bonus from 45% to 20%. Note: this is now worse than the item it upgrades from.
- Increased Hellfire Insignia's Crit on-death bonus from 10% to 30%
- Increased Hellfire Insignia's Attack Spd on-death bonus from 10% to 20%. The goal here is to provide a clearer direction for how to use Hellfire Insignia: you're losing out on a lot of value if you're not triggering its on-death effect.
- Increased the Max MP removed by Draining Scepter and Nightmare Figurine from 15 to 18
- Increased the Max MP removed by Winged Boots from 20 to 24
- Increased the Max MP removed by Floppy Boots from 10 to 12. These changes all relate to the change in MP per attack. The goal is for these items to provide 1-2 attack's worth of MP.
Trinkets:
- Decreased Treemeld's max HP bonus from 100% to 90%
- Increased Arrowhail's damage bonus from 5% to 8%
- Increased Black Dagger's 4% more damage per initiative for 4 seconds to 5% more damage per initiative for 8 seconds
- Decreased the time at which Sign of Lazarus resurrects the unit from the 10-second mark to the 6-second mark
- Sign of Lazarus now makes a random Tomb tile on the second row instead of the third row. This is to account for Night Sky Blanket now occupying the third row.
Misc:
- When summons deal magic damage, it now counts as magic damage that their summoners deal. This enables summoners to heal off of their summons' damage if they have Magic Lifelink. This includes invincible summons like Zelheim's Flame Sword or Plutarch's Soul Copies.
- Increased the max HP of Soldiers (summoned by Unttvert and Samantha) from 200/400/640 to 250/450/810
- Increased the base Attack of Soldiers from 30/48/64 to 40/64/81
- Increased the base Defense and Magic Defense of Soldiers from 20/20/20 to 20/30/40
Bug fixes
I also squashed a number of bugs in the current iteration.
- The Discord link on the title screen now works! Apologies to folks who might have tried to join from there, but it's possible now. The Discord link from Steam has always worked.
- The player's team no longer gets extra weakness from the Dark trait after going back to the title screen and starting or continuing a run from there.
- Fixed a memory leak that happens when going back to the title screen from a run on Challenge Level 3 or higher.
- Cleric descriptions in the Inspect Panel no longer get duplicated when picking up a unit while it's open.
- The blue indicators of which units have a trait that appear when hovering over the metallic-looking hexagonal plate for that trait at the top of the screen now correctly display under the units' feet while combat is happening. Previously, it only highlighted the positions the units were in at the start of combat.
- The Noble trait can no longer get rewards on guard combats of a Ruins or Item Trader tile at higher Challenge Levels. This is technically a nerf to Nobles.
- Fixed the texture offset for Hill-Like Growth and Infested Mound.
- Fixed a typo in the description for Mirror Plate.
- If a boss attempt ends with Astreumnull in the middle of casting his spell, the effect no longer continues to play.
- Dreamblades now properly prioritize units with higher levels over units with more items.
Aesthetic changes
Some small things were done to make the game look and feel better.
- Units were all given soft circular shadows under them, similar to what old 3D platformers display under their characters.
- A sound now plays when collecting a trinket from a Trinket Chest or a Boss.
- Toadstaff's Leaptoad ability was given a slightly new animation to make it look like he's actually jumping and bouncing off an enemy.
- The Hellcore Bladeguard Map 3 miniboss was given a bunch of fire effects.
- The Participation Trophy trinket was renamed to "Soft Spotlight" and given a new image and flavor text. It is functionally the same, but now it creates a "Spotlight Tile" instead of a "Participation Tile".
What's next?
I will be moving Seedborne Soldiers out of Early Access into 1.0 on June 1st. As a software engineer by trade, 1.0 to me means "this software is (relatively) stable as a full product." What this means for all of you is: this is it. 1.0 will not be a gigantic update with tons of new features and content like you might see for some other games in Early Access. I'm pushing this out early to hopefully catch any bugs or gratuitous balance issues that I somehow didn't discover while working on this patch, and on June 1st what's here will become version 1.0.
After 1.0, we will likely not be releasing more content or quality-of-life updates for Seedborne Soldiers. I will, however, do my best to fix bugs and especially game-breaking issues. I'd once again really like to thank everyone who's come in and voiced their thoughts and constructive criticism. You've truly helped improve the game in a way that we just couldn't have done otherwise.
If you encounter any issues or you just have something you want to say, I encourage you to please reach out either on the Steam discussion boards or on the Discord (which you should hopefully now be able to access from the title screen).
I wish everyone best of luck out in the Dreamworld!