Hello dear Lanistas!
A couple of hours ago another milestone was hit when the game hit its all-time peak of 619 concurrent players!
Truly thank you for all the support - It's honestly overwhelming in the best possible way!
Furthermore, I really want to highlight how great it is to see so many of you helping out each other answering questions, and discussing ideas / suggestions in such a civil and polite manner, even when you have different opinions which is so refreshing.
Now regarding these suggestions, there's been a lot of very good ones so before we get to the patch notes I wanted to emphasize which ones I have already added to my list and I will be adding in the future:
Custom Ludus Designer (Logo & Name)
Roster view QOL improvements
Historic stats of Gladiators
Being able to view other Ludus details, information, history etc. Makes sense to combine with the one above
Market improvements - Will likely add a new Ludus Upgrade that allows the player to focus on certain categories e.g. you focus on Tier 4 and the next week more Tier 4 items will show up. Kind of like how the scout works for the Ludus Exchange
Tactics improvements and additional instructions
Posibility to see "possible" opponents in the pregame selection. I was thinking about adding a spy character who would be able to provide intel like this for the player(s)
News section improvements to make messages overall clearer
Decisions in regards to Ludus Management - Small random events / decisions the player has to make on the non-match days. But I think it's important it doesn't become too spammy and will probably even make this optional for the players that want a more focused playthrough
Rework the Champions Cup and have higher division teams enter the competition at later stages/rounds
Now for this patch I see there's quite a lot of threads / reviews / comments about the current balancing, and let me start out by just stating that the AI in the game does not cheat nor do they have any starting equipment or other advantages.
They play by the exact same conditions as players which means that for the AI controlled Ludi starting in higher tiers, they will have gotten the higher earnings from matches, end of season rewards and so forth. This is why quite a few players experience a significant gap when they get promoted to a higher division, suddenly facing these teams which had a headstart.
Now I generally dislike dumbing down AI, but on the other hand they are currently min-maxxing everything, spamming training/exhibition matches as often as they can and so forth. So I might do this in the future and make them behave differently according to the difficulty.
However, for now due to a brilliant suggestion on the forum I have changed so that the Medicus gets 1 attempt per gladiator instead of per match, which means that it should be a bit more forgiving loosing matches in terms of less gladiators dying depending on your Medicus level of course.
Buffed Medicus so that they get 1 attempt on each Gladiator
Added missing voice announcement for Emerita Eagles
Fixed the Scout tooltip to make it a bit more clear what the next upgrade provides
Fixed a bug that if you change the tactics, clicked save quick and moved to another panel it didn't save that change
Added the new translation system to the PostMatch Panel so it should now be all nicely translated
Fixed an issue that Cyrillic and East Asian letters would not format correctly when characters with those letters in their name was shown in the Cup Panel
Fixed a bug for Multiplayer games where when loading a save, it wouldn't correctly register which teams were previously player controlled and have the AI take over
Added several improvements to Multiplayer save / loading
Also kind reminder that if you do encounter a bug, please post it in the "Bug reporting" channel and try to be as detailed as possible as it makes it so much easier for me to fix after all.
All the best and remember Rome wasn't built in one day, but it became quite great ;)
Mathias