I named the update after the Laboratory pictured here, but the biggest new addition is the ability to assign followers to your champions. You can now drag and drop up to three minions on your champs to order them to tail and fight with that champ as much as possible; most importantly, this feature can be used to build custom encounters by stationing a champ on a floor and giving them some followers that complement that champion's abilities.
You can actually drag the same minion over a champ multiple times to assign more of that type to the champion. If a follower is slain, the game will automatically attempt to replace them with another minion of that type; if you see an exclamation point on the follower slot, it means that there are no other minions of that type available, and you'll need to purchase reinforcements. You can also click a follower slot to dismiss that type.
This update also includes a lot of wave strength and drop rate adjustments. For the most part, these are designed to increase the difficulty for skilled players while easing the pressure on those who lag behind. Deployable items should be a bit more common, while usables are slightly less-so than before. I am sure that all of this will fluctuate over the next few weeks; please let me know how the game is playing for you, because it is difficult for me to get a lot of different opinions from myself =P!
I am currently trying to reduce session length (which generally involves ramping up the difficulty), because the next major set of features are aimed at cross-session carry-overs, allowing you to jump start subsequent games and play farther, without having single, super-long games. As a result of these changes, high scores may decline in the short term, but in the long run, these new mechanics will probably push them back up to where they've been recently, if not higher still.
Changelog
Additions:
- New Mechanic: Each champion can now have up to three followers
- New Floor: Lurid Laboratory--Alchemist + Cellar (for Mad Scientists) or Alchemist + Catacombs (for Flesh Golem)
- New Minion: (3) Mad Scientist--Pretty frail with some poison/armor-corroding potion throws and a minor party heal
- New Minion: (2) Flesh Golem--Very sturdy with a strong melee attack; loads of traits (living AND undead AND construct! Poison immunity and fire weakness)
- F10 now toggles fullscreen mode (you can use this to fix things if fullscreen doesn't work out for you)
- Characters' names, health, and defense are now displayed in tooltips
- Clicking a champ portrait will jump the view to their location in the dungeon
- Support for multiple font colors in a single tooltip; should help add distinction to some longer tooltips in the future
Changes:
- Lots of changes to wave strength balancing and heroic champion rate
- Hovering over a floor will highlight it on the minimap now
- Champion cap reduced to 16 to make things more manageable with followers
- Outlined characters are now rendered in front of other characters
- Item drop rates adjusted (more deployables, fewer usables)
- Items should be far less likely to drop when there is no room in the Hoard (should see fewer artifacts blowing up =))
- Can no longer mouse over a character that is in the background of an encounter
- Champion UI now sorts by level
- Kobold Shaman requires arcana and not gear
Fixes:
- Fear "ghost" icon would hover around characters who were doomed to die
- Fear damage wasn't being dealt consistently
- Characters could get sucked through the floor as though they were still on an elevator
- Tooltip region for many UI icons was a few pixels off
- Required floor wasn't listed on champion codex pages, where it was listed on vanilla unit pages
- Satyr "playing" animation was using the wrong arm frames
- The Codex, Pause/Play, and Production On/Off buttons would sometimes disappear from the bottom of the screen