By the end of next week we're planning to do another massive content patch, this will include 3 heroes that you can choose to start with! The hero mechanic is something lots of people asked about and we've been wanting to introduce for a while, and it's finally here. On top of this big change we'll also rework the tutorial and I'm doing some more big internal code rewrites. Depending on how long all of this takes, we might also introduce a new hitpoint and rating system. All in all, a lot to look forward to :)
Features:
Art for the encounters got small improvements
Advanced options, will add more to it in the future, but we currently have:
Framerate
Max Particles
Summon Speed
Pierce Damage reworked: now only targets 1 extra unit straight behind the target (instead of all units straight behind the target)
You can play a bit around pierce damage early on, but later in the game it becomes nearly impossible. It's difficult to have units that buff the pierce effect like we have for explosive (ex. Velmir the Wizard) because of how oppressive the effect can be, and how hard is it to counter. By just having it target 1 unit, there is way more depth on how you can position your board and we can have units with higher Pierce Damage while still keeping it as a powerful and useful effect. The Damage types will also be better explained in-game in the near future
Units:
NEW ART:
Artillery Repeater (name change from Dynamite Turret)
Lumberjack
Electrocatalyst: no longer stuns friendly Tinker units, but only triggers units with a cooldown of 5s or less
Tinker builds have been the strongest amongst the high ranks, and toy turrets are part of that build. But instead of facing our attention to those units, I wanted to look at Electrocatalyst. This was able to keep triggering the new Toy Production units, essentially making all toy turrets resummon nearly infinitely. Now you'll need to actually wait for its cooldown or try to speed it up if your toy turrets destroy themselves quickly
Power Plant: now just gives +1 damage and speeds up 3 random friendly town units by 1%
The Electrocatalyst change will already have a big impact on power plants and their main synergies, but just to be safe I want to reduce the speed scaling on it some more and shift it from single-focus scaling into a spread-out buff
Weather Machine: now always targets 5 random enemies and 1 random friendly unit. Starts with 5 Damage and gets +0.5 for each friendly Tinker/Magic unit (start of combat)
Weather Machine is a very cool and unique unit, but incredibly niche. Early in the game it's almost useless and late-game with a proper setup it can be unbeatable. This redesign gives it some early strength, controls the scaling a bit better and has a noticeable drawback to make its unique targeting not too broken. We'll see how it performs and if it needs more changes
Bugs:
Camera wildly shaking out of nowhere (I made some changes to the camera system, but can't reproduce the bug so I have no guarantee yet)
Quests/Warehouse giving conditional units
Dragging an unit in the Transmute encounter didn't always work (This issue was caused by a previous change to the drag system. It would sometimes accidentally engage a multi-select for that 1 unit instead of a normal drag)
Well wasn't working
Other:
Slight memory & RAM improvements (I optimized the island sprites a bit)