Hello, gamers, and welcome to patch v0.7! I'm very excited to be finally bringing you Relics, along with some very exciting other new features! Let's get right into it.
Relics
**NOTE:** Some relics are using temporary placeholder art while the rest of the relic art gets finished.
Relics are a new feature which enhance the player or the train's carriages in some way, either enhancing them defensively, economically, or providing some other enhancement. There are Common, Uncommon, and Rare relics. Chests containing relics drop from bosses that spawn at 5:00, 15:00, and every boss which spawns every 15:00 minutes after that for the rest of the game. The player can also unlock Starting Relics, which provide a relic at the start of the game.
There are currently around 30 relics, most of them Common. I plan to add more every patch until the full game release (coming this summer). Since there's a small number, you might be able to reliably get specific relics every game for now, but don't get used to it!
Post what you think about the relics, and your ideas for new relics, in the Steam community forums!
All-In!
Expert All Aboard! players have been clamoring for a way to buy massive amounts of carriages without having to open chest after chest manually. Now introducing the new feature, All-In!
Unlocked by achieving level 6. Available starting after 1 hour of a game session, open a chest (press the "Buy Carriage" button) and select the "All-In" button, which is next to the "Banish" or "Skip" buttons.
The All-In feature will risk ALL of your gold trying to upgrade a train carriage to the next level. If you have a level 5 Hyper Beam, going All-In will try to use all of your gold to upgrade it to level 6. It will open chests using the same carriage odds, the same number of cards that appear when opening a carriage chest, and the same Pity logic that's used when you open a carriage chest. Make sure you improve those Upgrades as high as you can before trying to All-In!
All-In will NOT buy any carriages other than the one you're trying to upgrade. That means All-In is gold-inefficient compared to buying carriages manually, but I think most players will be grateful to not have to manually buy 20,000 carriages anymore!
Wise Investment Changes
Experienced All Aboard! players know just how overpowered Wise Investment is. If you didn't know, Wise Investment generates interest gold every 10 seconds based on how much gold the player currently has. I'm OK with it, but it has a few problems:
- Due to the carriage having a quality of "Rare" (blue), it's very easy to find. You can even get a level 2 Wise Investment carriage before 2 minutes easily. This means that the player can break the game wide open even before the 1 hour 30 minute mark. This also means there's very little reason to advance the "Carriage Odds" upgrade until you already have trillions of gold.
- Wise Investment's uncapped interest generation creates quadrillions of gold, making money effectively infinite and trivializing other forms of gold generation too early, and too easily. The "Gem Value" upgrade can be left at level 20 for the whole game and it doesn't matter.
- Once money gets high enough, due to uncapped interest generation, no more thought, strategy, or timing is required, and the game just becomes about how many chests you can open until your fingers hurt, and the game can literally go on forever or until it breaks or crashes.
I'm attempting to solve these issues and make the game more interesting with the following changes:
- Wise Investment's quality has been bumped from Rare (blue) to Very Rare (purple). This makes it more difficult to find in the very early game, and incentivizes you to push for higher "Carriage Odds" upgrade levels.
- Wise Investment's gold generation per minute is now capped. The cap is very generously high, but prevents you from getting to the 9 pentillion maximum number limit quickly. The cap value is based on two things: 1) The level of Wise Investment; and, 2) The level of the "Gem Value" upgrade. If you want to increase how much gold Wise Investment is doing, upgrade Wise Investment and make sure "Gem Value" is as high as you can get it!
In compensation for these changes, the amount of interest generated per carriage level has increased.
In my testing, Wise Investment is still pretty overpowered, is still the best way of generating gold by far, and still gets you trillions of gold easily, but I wouldn't consider gold to be "infinite" anymore. Use the new "All-In" feature to level Wise Investment quickly!
Difficulty Changes
Relics, especially "Rare" relics, can be quite powerful, so the difficulty of the game in general increased a little bit in terms of enemy scaling to compensate. Most of this will be felt past the 2 hour mark. There's also a surprise waiting for you at every hour which might provide an extra challenge!
Also, since there's nowhere else to put this:
Summoner's base HP was given a boost.
New Boons
5 new Boons have been added! Access the Boons menu under the Collections main menu item to upgrade them.
Carriage Changes
When I first created All Aboard!, I never thought people would level carriages past level 5 since there are too many carriages you'd have to buy. I even considered setting the max level of train carriages to 5. I certainly underestimated everyone, didn't I?
This lack of consideration on my part caused me to carelessly put in absurd, exponential power scaling for higher carriage levels, where a level 8 carriage would be something like 50 times stronger than the base carriage. A level 9 Hyper Beam would do enough damage to destroy everything, forever.
With the new All-In feature making it very easy to get high level carriages, I've toned down the high level carriage scaling to be more reasonable, and not exponential. Some carriages which were absurdly strong past level 5 were toned down.
Earthbreaker: Did you find the secret carriage unlocked at level 20? Attack speed scaling reduced. A bug was fixed which prevented Earthbreaker from benefiting from Critical Strike.
Laser: Reduced damage scaling. It was the best boss-killer in the game, and definitely still is, but you'll have to get it to very high levels to match its power from before.
Mine Layer: Mine Layer had a pretty serious problem at high levels where it'd spawn mines so often, and so quickly, that it could cause serious lag or worse. To help with this, a maximum mine limit (per Mine Layer) has been added and set to 200, and the time for each mine to live was reduced from 3 minutes to 1.5 minutes. This isn't a nerf - if you have that many mines on-screen at once, they weren't being used anyway, and if they are being used, there's no difference from before.
The mines themselves now get bigger (and therefore easier to hit) per star level.
To prevent screen clutter, mines will now turn mostly transparent a few seconds after being laid.
Also, a bug was fixed that caused mines to expire while the game was paused.
Life Drainer: Chance to restore health per carriage level reduced. Some players have figured out that high level Life carriages can be used to drain-tank bosses effectively. You'll have to get a higher level Life carriage to achieve that effect now.
Cursed Orb: The amount of damage that cursed enemies take at higher levels of Cursed Orb was reduced. The scaling should be a bit more reasonable now.
Sonic Generator: Attack speed and damage scaling reduced.
Cannon: Base damage, damage scaling, and attack speed scaling buffed.
Grenade Launcher: Damage scaling and area-of-effect scaling buffed.
Bazooka: Damage scaling improved.
Missile Launcher: Damage scaling improvewd.
Upgrade Changes
Pity: Pity had a tendancy to always favor whichever carriage you had the most of. This is useful when you're pushing for higher levels of your highest level carriage, but inconvenient when you're trying to level anything else. It still favors immediate upgrades, but will now choose Pity options that aren't just your carriage that takes up the most slots on your train more often. If you want it to behave like before, only giving Pity to whichever carriage took up the most train slots, make sure no other carriage type takes up more than one slot on the train.
When you buy a chest, if one of the cards is selected by Pity, it will always appear under the default cursor position; that is, you don't have to press left/right arrow to navigate to it anymore. This is mostly for keyboard and controller players.
Hire Miner: The "Hire Miner" upgrade was made cheaper from levels 21 through 64.
Gem Value: The last 10 levels of Gem Value have been massively boosted in terms of gem value.
System Changes
- New Display option: Low Effects Mode. Turn this on to make certain effects, such as Hyper Beam, more see-through. You can also use CTRL+ALT+F to toggle this in-game.
- New Gameplay option: Show Overkill on DPS Meter. If you want a new view on how each carriages' damage per second (DPS) is displayed in the DPS meter, you can disable this if you no longer want to see overkill damage represented on the DPS meter. Did you know that you can press Tab/LB to open the Damage/Second meter in-game?
- Reduced the maximum size scaling of most creatures.
- The name of power-ups collected now appears under the "POWER UP!" pop-up text.
- Even without Low Effects Mode, some carriage effects were made more transparent when they reach high carriage levels. The field should no longer become impossible to see just because you have a high level flamethrower.
- The UI in the Game Setup dialog was improved.
- It didn't make much sense that worse power-ups were available as unlocks, and the best power-ups were available by default, so the "Double Damage" and "Double Gem Value" power-ups are now unlocked in the first 10 levels, instead of "Critical Damage" and "Train Strength". Don't be surprised if you unlock these when you open the game.
- Reduced the amount of post-game experience gained from number of carriages upgraded.
- The pop-up label that shows the name and description of each boss will no longer show after the first time it's shown (per game session).
- When you've opened a carriage chest, and you want to Skip and buy another chest, you can now hold SHIFT while pressing the "Buy Carriage" button to immediately Skip and buy another chest in the same action. There's also a dedicated keybind for this (default: "period" on Keyboard, or Right Shoulder Button on controller).
- You can now hold SHIFT (controller: LB) while upgrading something in the Upgrades menu to upgrade 5 at once (if you can afford it).
- 6 new achievements! Mostly related to bosses on hard mode.
Bug Fixes
- Fixed a serious memory leak that occurred after upgrading or destroying a carriage.
- Fixed a bug where the player was repeatedly notified about tickets gained every time they opened the game, if they had gained more than 5 levels at once previously.
- Fixed a rare bug where the "Buy Carriage" dialog would not show any carriages. It happened if you bought a chest too quickly after skipping or closing the dialog.
That's all for now! The next patch will be May 9th (American time), which won't have any major new systems, but will have a lot of maintenance work and new content - new boons, new relics, new carriages, new enemies, and more. The game's 1.0 release is on-track for June 26th, just in time for the Steam summer sale.
If you have any feedback, please feel free to post it in the forums, or submit it anonymously through the feedback form.
Thanks for playing!
- Likadev