Every time I sit down to optimize something, testing it ends up making me fix and build even more stuff haha. This time I've accumulated a big batch of small updates — some from your feedback, some planned in advance (paving the road for later). Here's the rundown:
⚙️ System Reworks
- War Banner Rework: once you've defeated Emperor Xian (Liu Xie), starting a new game will now grant you the neutral war banner right from the beginning, and you can encounter Ji Qi (Banner Offering) events within the first two cities — letting you assemble your banner much earlier.
- Mandate of Heaven Battle Skip: added a quick-skip function for the Mandate of Heaven challenge: if you've already defeated Liu Xie in the Luoyang battle, then in subsequent runs if you lose or manually quit, when you continue the game you'll get a popup option to "Face the Mandate Directly" — skipping the first two rounds of Han faction battles.
- Mandate of Heaven Difficulty Tuning: Easy/Normal: Mandate stats and talents optimized — HP lowered to 50, base Attack raised to 5, talents updated to Taiping, Shenwei, Zhiheng, Chongzhen. Hard mode (Variant): base Attack raised to 9, talents set to Bazhen, Qijin, Xiaorui, Chongzhen.
- Qiaojiang Cancel: items summoned by the Qiaojiang (Artisan) talent now support right-click to cancel use, with descriptive text added.
- Event Weight Optimizations: primarily added higher-quality event rewards to City 6 (Province Capital) and City 7 (Luoyang).
- Zhaoxian (Draft) / Guan'ai (Pass Trial) events: in Cities 6 and 7, the paid options or successful 3-pick-1 card rewards now offer 2 purple units and 1 blue unit.
- Treasure Chest events: Cities 1 and 2 remain random between white and red quality. Cities 3–7 now have a raised floor of blue quality minimum, still with a chance at red.
- Shop events: in Cities 6 and 7, the Epic Shop now has a significantly higher chance of gold items and can also randomly roll red items.
- Talent Disabling Nerf: talent disabling is now a debuff status — "Seal" (Fengjian) — with its own status icon. It can be cleared by retreating the unit, blocked by Zhuge Liang's Bazhen (Eight Formations), and removed by debuff-clearing effects. Diao Chan's Biyue and the Jinyu talent descriptions have been updated to match.
- Buddha Statue Event Initial Buff: the Buddha Statue event is now buffed — it can perform awakening upgrades between two same-name units of different qualities, promoting the higher-quality one by one tier.
I've received a lot of feedback about Buddha Statue and the reason it's taken so long is I was considering a new out-of-game progression system. But seeing how much impact this event has on the actual gameplay experience, it doesn't make sense to lock this behind future content. For now, here's a modest buff — I'll keep watching and planning.
🐛 Bug Fixes
- Fixed a critical bug introduced by the combat flow refactor where the Dongfeng talent would trigger and incorrectly cause a softlock.
- Fixed the Buddha Statue event bug where choosing "Back" during talent merging selection would erroneously pop up the initial Buddha Statue panel on top of the unit selection screen.
- Fixed a display bug where if the Mandate of Heaven killed one of your units with an attack that triggered Xiaorui, it would get stuck in an enlarged display state.
- Fixed a display bug where choosing Farming or Scouting at the Encampment would cause the map node brightness and "You Are Here" icon to update a beat too late.
- Fixed a bug where hovering over a card and then moving the mouse to the status description box would incorrectly trigger multiple sound effects.
- Fixed a bug where if you deployed a Fire Ship in the No.2 slot where a lord like Liu Bei / Sun Quan was supposed to enter, it would prevent the enemy boss from entering the field.
- Fixed a bug where if any of your units had higher Speed than the Mandate of Heaven, its Chongzhen talent would completely fail to trigger.
- Batch fixes for Qiaojiang-related item bugs: e.g. items causing units to get stuck in hover state, Qiaojiang-summoned Supply Carts still requiring you to click an allied card slot.
- Fixed a bug where a Confused unit standing next to a Stealthed ally would not skip over that unit and attack a farther ally.
✨ Small QoL Improvements
- Improved card selection interaction logic: when a card in your hand, a friendly unit on the battlefield, or an item in your inventory is in a selected state, clicking an invalid/incorrect location will now cancel the selection.
- Synchronized all toast tip text for clicking incorrect locations across all card types.
- Bazhen and Langgu talent adjustments: now a toast notification will appear when a debuff or buff is blocked by these talents.
- The Zhongchangshi (Eunuch) death video was way too long and hurt the pacing — sped up.
- Adjusted the Ji Qi event text: now reads "Jiejia Gui Qi" (Removing Armor and Returning to the Banner), softening the tone of this chaotic world a little.
I'll probably take a short break to record a Bilibili video next (unless a critical bug pops up!), then focus on late-game replayability and out-of-game progression. With the typhoon coming, stay safe out there everyone! Thank you all for the support — have fun~