Thank you to everyone who wishlisted and bought Manacaster during Launch Week! It's been so encouraging to see our wish list count increasing after launch, which means that you, the players, understand what we built, and why. Many of you have communicated to us that you're waiting to see the game evolve during Early Access, so today's gigantic patch notes represent our first step towards showing you Manacaster's evolution.
Warning: Wall of Text Ahead.
As we detailed in our launch announcement, Early Access games should be considered "buggy until proven otherwise", and I am proud to announce our prediction was correct! Manacaster indeed has bugs! In all seriousness, we really appreciate all the bug reports, even the ones that turned out to be "user error". Even those tiny reports provide a lot of information for us to fine-tune our user interface.
The quantity of bugs was not particularly large, nor were they particularly severe. Few, if any, were game-breaking. This is consistent with our expectations that we set before launch, and we're glad to say that the level of bugginess is quite manageable. Most of the things detailed in these patch notes are actually feature additions, upgrades, or slight quality of life adjustments ( which we believe are as important as bugs )
Depending on when you're reading this, our first major post-launch patch may already be live ( 3.2.3 ) on the main server. We'll post detailed patch notes as usual, so provided below is a summary of the most important changes.
NOTE: Many of these changes can be previewed on our PTR ( playtest realm ) before going "live". If you want playtest realm access, please join Discord and we'll set you up!
Combined Patch Summary: 3.2.2/.3/.4
We have combined three patches into a single patch to the "live" game. If you are on the playtest servers, you will have seen each of these patches deployed individually for stability testing. If you are on the live game, this will be represented as one patch download.
Major Fixes & Resolutions
AI Opponent making bad choices: "Bad choices" might be an understatement! Some games the AI Opponent just declined to play any Units until turn 5. Other games, it buffed a useless Unit and the skipped a valid attack. We found a bug in the deployment logic that was making the AI confused as to when it should deploy "Cannot Block" Units, along with some other adjustments to make it more aware of the need to play a tight, mana-efficient early game. *Note: the AI Opponent is still under development. Please see the "known issues" section at the end of this report to understand its current state.
Select Attackers Interface improperly color-coded: The "Skip Combat" button was showing as green, incorrectly encouraging players to Skip Combat. The "Select Attackers" controls now contain 3 buttons, each of which change color and text based on the situation. This should form a much more literate interface that makes it clear at each decision point what the player is able to do, and the colors should help indicate the magnitude of their decision.
Feature Requests Fulfilled
Adventure Mode Features: There were many requests related to Adventure Mode and we have a separate section for that below.
Detailed Tooltips: Cards in all modes now have more detailed hover tooltips that explain the keywords. Advanced players can disable these tooltips in their settings.
Combat Was Too Slow: We increased the speed of combat animations by around 33%, which includes "Fast Mode". Players will notice a much more natural flow through the game. Please continue providing feedback on this because player comfort is extremely important to us. Tooltips have been added and updated accordingly. We also fixed an oversight where "fast mode" was not being applied equally across the turn cycle.
Incomplete Deck Warning: Multiple players became confused after making a deck and trying to play with it, only to discover "something" wasn't right. We added a "YOUR DECK IS NOT FINISHED AND HERE IS WHY" banner in bright red letters to ensure that you always know what's missing. Thanks to everyone who reported this concern!
Mystery of the Missing Decks? No mystery here, just the game automatically hiding decks that wouldn't be legal to play with. Unfortunately, this led to mass reporting of "missing decks", which simply turned out to be a case of poor communication in our UI. The fix was simple; we added a * before the deck's name on the list to indicate it's missing cards.
More Stats in-Game: The card detail that pops up on hover now has much more information for curious or data-oriented players. This is optional and can be toggled in your settings.
Explain "burning" a card in draft: Players were not always aware of why "burn" exists in draft, nor how to use it. We've added a tooltip to the "burn" button that will give players the info they need. As a reminder, you get ONE burn per draft, and it allows you to remove a card from the draft and take a random card instead. Tactically, you want to use this when you don't have a good card to pick but you want to deny a card to your opponent. In this case, you can punish your opponent and gain a potentially better card at the same time.
Adventure Mode Adjustments
Full Progression Mode Enabled: As promised in our launch announcement, the Adventure Mode progression model was disabled while we stress tested the system. Now that things are working as desired, we've enabled the progression system again. A detailed explanation of this will be the focus of an upcoming article.
Adventure Mode Shop: You didn't think we'd leave you hanging on this, did you? We love the smell of commerce in the morning. You can access this shop from within your Inventory screen by clicking the SHOP button or clicking on your GOLD balance. Reminder: Gold in Manacaster is purely an in-game currency used within Adventure Mode and for cosmetics. There is no way to gain gold other than winning games.
Nodes Have Special Powers Now. As promised, Adventure Mode nodes will have extra abilities beyond "having more life". They can currently now gain powers that fundamentally change how you'll play the encounter. For example, your opponent's units with Focus might now gain 2 defense ( not 2 attack ) each time they deploy an Action card. This would be very bad news for you against certain decks!
Nodes' Special Powers Affect Loot. Defeat your enemies and absorb their powers! After each win, you'll get to pick one reward Equip Item from among the equipment of the node you just defeated, plus one random card.
Re-Roll an Item with Gold: When re-rolling 3 items of the same rarity, you can instead re-roll 2 of the same rarity and pay some amount of gold. This amount is currently set to 50 gold for Common items, but we'll adjust it according to what players tell us feels right. The costs to re-roll higher rarity tiers will be accordingly higher.
Re-Rolling got buffed. The first round of playtesting showed that the re-rolling costs were too severe. Previously, you could use 2 of the same item ( which remains true ) or 4 of the same item rarity to re-roll ( which has been reduced to 3 of the same rarity ). This should let players have a lot more fun re rolling things they don't need right that moment without a lot of sunk cost and regret.
Seriously, re-rolling got buffed. Previously, re-rolling gave a 5% chance to upgrade the rarity tier of the output item, but we found that was a bit too low. We wanted this to serve as a means of "guaranteed progression" so we've increased that rate to 10%. You now have a 89% chance to get an item of the same quality level as your inputs, a 10% chance to get an upgrade, and a 1% chance to get a double upgrade.
Re-Rolling and getting the same item sucks. A check has been put in place to ensure that you will not get any of the items you put in. Re-rolling and getting the same item really sucked!
Equip Items no longer stack. This was simply an oversight on our part, as players will almost never hold duplicate equip items. Re-rolling items is now much more intuitive and clear about what you have and what you need. This does not affect items that "should" stack like reagents and consumables! Inventory will now feel more familiar and in-line with other games.
Tiny Tweaks & Bugfixes
The following issues have been addressed:
Adjusted the icon and the color of the "Life Gain/Loss" notification.
Re-Roll screen now has an intuitive exit button in addition to its "toggle" button.
Small style adjustments to scrolling combat text.
Fixed bug where permanent stat changes were carrying over between games! Yikes.
Enemy AI names should seem slightly more flavorful :)
Deck Invalid check incorrectly calling the Human as an AI.
Incorrect deployment notification after skipped combat identified and patched.
Top-down camera not re-adjusting to foucs on the loot chest after a game/match.
Fixed some text wrapping and scaling issues, including the rulebook, which was fragmented on some screen dimensions.
Unit DEF showing as lower-than-normal in some situations with permanent debuffs.
Units with MUST ATTACK were being de-selected in combat when clicking "clear all attackers".
A bug potentially exposing one card in the opponent's deck at the start of the game.
Match Log moved from the Help panel to Stats panel.
Adventure Mode Item Store now has more filters to help you search more quickly and accurately.
Upcoming Feature Unlocks
As we detailed in our pre-launch announcement, a few features are currently disabled ( although they may be enabled by the time you are reading this ). These are all scheduled to be unlocked very soon, but need to be evaluated on the Playtest server before deployed widely to players.
Adventure Mode Enemy Builds Its Own Decks: The current array of decks in Adventure Mode is quite limited, and our deck generation system will allow it to instead make a new deck every time you challenge a node. This system is experimental, so we'd love your feedback on it as we develop.
Three-Color Adventure Node Expansion: The current Adventure Mode map has 6 Elemental nodes, 9 Hybrid nodes, and 9 duplicate Hybrid nodes of a higher difficulty level. When the "enemy builds its own deck" innovation goes live, we will convert the duplicate Hybrid nodes into three-color nodes, and add 11 more three-color nodes. ( There are 20 unique combinations of three-element groups, hence the 11+9 ). These 20 Hybrid nodes will all be at least "Level 2" nodes, more than doubling the size of the current "endgame" of the campaign.
Boss Nodes: We have intentionally left these unbuilt because we'd like to see how players enjoy the regular nodes and the more difficult nodes. We have a lot of good ideas for Boss Nodes ( mostly including legendary equipment that'll make your life miserable! ) but we're going to deploy them slowly so we can evaluate which are the most fun, most challenging, and most replayable.
Mana Selection Screen Too Cluttered: We have three types of Mana cards, but that doesn't mean we won't add more. The current "three rows" approach isn't going to scale once we add another type of Mana card, so we've switched this to a tab-based layout to match the rest of the deck editor. This applies to both the Constructed deckbuilder accessible from the home screen, and to the post-draft deckbuilder.
Known & Ongoing Issues
What fun would a patch note be without new bugs to introduce? Actually that would be wonderful, but there are still a few issues that are being evaluated.
AI Opponent not making intelligent buff stacks: The AI is failing to recognize one-turn-kill ( OTK ) opportunities because it's not understanding the right way to evaluate buff-stacking. We think we know why, and we're working on fixing it. If you want to help us test the AI's decision-making, please join Discord and we'll get you into the Playtest.
AI Opponent misunderstanding certain board states, resulting in self-destructive behavior.