Alpha 12 is here! After two months of extra hard work, alpha 12 is ready and brings with it some great changes to Judgment. Try it out in the beta branch and let us know what you think.
Our main focus in alpha 12 was split between remaking the world exploration mechanic, and rebalancing the entire game. These two changes alone have a huge impact on the gameplay, but are not the only ones in alpha 12. A few other of the larger changes include redoing food bonuses and adding a management window for food, redoing our research tree and splitting it into categories, giving armor a whole new meaning, improved base visuals, and new audio tracks.
Reminder: To play on the beta branch, right click the game in the steam client, select properties, and then select "beta" from the betas tab.
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World Exploration
World exploration has been completely remade. The world map has new visuals, and consists of several biomes. You now create teams of survivors called "Taskforces", and directly control them as they explore the map, searching for rare scavenge and biomes containing those much needed materials.
We've also added random encounters, so exploring the map is no longer safe, be sure to arm your teams well, and do not enter areas (biomes) that are crowded with tougher demons before you are ready to take them on.
Balancing
The balance changes encompass pretty much the entire game, but I'll try to list a few of the principal changes.
Enemies and equipment are now divided to tiers. The difference between enemies or equipment of different tiers is much larger than it used to be (around 2x stronger).
Armor has become a very important part, and now determines not only damage mitigation, but also your evasion and hitpoints.
Research has been divided into categories, and is now more vertical and less spread around. In each category there is a clear progress path, with a few side branches to spend your spare resource points for an additional edge.
Difficulty and pacing of missions, defense, events, etc have all been redone based on the new guidelines.
These are a few of the changes, but there are many more. We wrote all the numbers in the game from scratch, so pretty much nothing has been left unchanged.
Feedback
As always, we're looking forward to hearing your feedback on these latest changes.
Now more than ever, we'd love to hear your feedback about the new balance. Is it more predictable? Not too punishing but not too easy? Let us know what you think!
We also improved pathfinding and enemy AI performance, which fixes the performance issue with late game attacks in maze-like bases. Please try it out and let us know.
Once we are sure this alpha is stable and well balanced, we will make it available in the main branch.
Previous Saves
Due to the major changes in both the generated map and the balancing, playing old saved games would be completely different than the experience we had in mind. So saves from alpha 11 and earlier can not be loaded in alpha 12.