Hey everyone, it's been a while! Didn't rest a bit over the weekend lol, spent two days taking care of my little firecracker son, and now I'm back with another massive update.

🆕1. New Features & Optimizations

• 1. Mandate of Heaven — Multi-Forms: Mandate·Demon and Mandate·Saint arrive!
  • ① Rotation system implemented: within a single run the form is fixed; the next run is guaranteed to cycle to a new form.
  • ② Mandate·Divine adjustments (reducing HP slog time and relaxing counterplay limits): Easy/Normal — ATK 4, HP 30, SPD 4. Talents: Huairou, Duanhe, Qijin, Chongzhen Hard — ATK 7, HP 50, SPD 6. Talents: Bazhen, Shenwei, Jinma, Chongzhen

• 2. All four Avatar type talents optimized and buffed:
  • ① Li Shi rework — threshold 2→3, Persuade→Recruit, now triggers from battlefield/hand/deck/map, no longer requires Zhenhu.
  • ② Li Chen / Li Zhan — threshold 5→4, all description text synced.

• 3. City display adjustments
  • ① Cities in locked provinces now display their corresponding faction's city icon, rather than showing nothing (note: dual-faction province cities still have random factions).
  • ② Conquered cities now display as a neutral faction city icon.
  • ③ The first city of every province now uses a neutral faction city icon, and its battle background has been changed to the neutral background too.

• 4. Added a "Reset Cycle" button in Settings — clicking it will show the save file location and confirm to wipe all progress.
  
• 5. Added a Voice Volume slider in Settings — you can now adjust the voice volume for unit dynamic performances.
  
• 6. On Hard difficulty, all gold Epic-quality units (originally blue male units) now have dynamic performances.
  
• 7. Disabling a unit's dynamic performance in the Star Chart now also prevents the enemy's corresponding unit from playing it (only for units whose toggle has been unlocked).
  
• 8. In the Star Chart, hovering over a star will now display that unit's name; the description text on the Star Chart interface has been slightly adjusted.
  
• 9. Removed from enemy battles: Fengchu, Baiyi, and Huwei — three banner pole talents that dragged out fights or were meaningless.
  
• 10. The Main Menu button is now permanently on top while on the map, so you can return to the main menu at any time.
  
• 11. Combat display: floating text for damage taken, stat gains, etc. is now larger, with a white backing. Stat icons now also have white edges.
  
• 12. Talent description text on unit cards is now larger, and the talent text display logic has been optimized.
  
• 13. Naihe Bridge revival panel now has a Back button.
  
• 14. Xun Yu's death dynamic performance has been adjusted and improved.
  
• 15. Fire Ship's Burn application now triggers during the talent trigger phase, rather than after status resolution.
  

🐛2. Bug Fixes

• 1. Fixed an occasional bug where Jing Fu / Di Meng and similar effects could not remove the Shenwei talent status or the Shen Su (Swift) status applied by item cards.
• 2. Fixed a bug in the Luoyang battle where after defeating Liu Xie, quitting and reloading with "Don't Skip" selected would cause the Liu Xie phase to be lost.
• 3. Fixed a bug in the Luoyang battle where after defeating Liu Xie, quitting and reloading would leave your deck in the post-Liu-Xie state.
• 4. Fixed a bug where the Tianshi banner pole + Qun faction banner would cause Qun infantry to spawn infinitely (now Tianshi infantry are not affected by banner bonuses).
• 5. Fixed a Mandate battle bug where the Mandate's sweep attack would cause Unit 2's Chongzhen to be calculated twice.
• 6. Fixed a Mandate battle bug where after the Mandate killed Unit 1 and attacked Unit 2, the Jinma (Speed-on-kill) bonus would not apply in real time.
• 7. Fixed a bug where Chongzhen / Ganglie / Zhiyue would still take effect under the Fengjian (Sealed) status.
• 8. Fixed a text display bug where the Recruitment event incorrectly showed "两名精兵" (Two Elite Soldiers).
• 9. Fixed a bug where after right-clicking to cancel an item selection, a prompt to select a target unit would still erroneously appear.
• 10. Fixed a bug where Avatar awakenings via Naihe Bridge / Buddha Statue were not counted in the Star Chart and Codex Avatar awakening counts.
• 11. Fixed a display bug where enemy Fengchu / Fire Ships occupying slots would cause the enemy's upcoming deck cards to appear erroneously reduced.
• 12. Fixed a bug where breaking the 15 stat cap via Miao Bi (Retraining), Yan Wu (Drill), or Awakening would not immediately complete the corresponding achievement.
• 13. Fixed a bug where the Diamond Body achievement was calculated based on current HP rather than max HP.
• 14. Talents like Bazhen and Langgu, when triggered in hand via Zhenhu, now correctly display their interception text prompts.
• 15. Fixed a bug where a unit with the Wusheng (God of War) talent, when Confused, would kill an ally and then chain-attack an enemy afterward.
• 16. Fixed a bug where when the Avatar reached red quality with only a single talent, the awakening talent selection would erroneously pop up the replacement panel.
• 17. Fixed a bug where the Mandate·Demon's two on-kill talents would clash in timing, causing only one to play.
• 18. Fixed a bug where surrendering in a normal battle and choosing "Return to Previous Level" would leave you stuck in place, able to click the next node.
• 19. Fixed a bug where the Mandate talent banner displayed for a fixed 4 seconds instead of matching the video playback duration.
• 20. Fixed a bug where leaving the Buddha Statue event with mergeable units present would not grant any copper.
• 21. Fixed a bug where the city icon would not immediately turn colored when a province was unlocked.
• 22. Fixed a bug where quitting and reloading or returning to the previous level during a Mandate of Heaven battle would erroneously trigger the previous node's event.

🔍Tested — Unable to Reproduce:

• 1. Unable to reproduce the bug where Stealthed units get attacked by the Mandate of Heaven, unless the Stealthed unit is the very last one remaining and all other units were killed by the Mandate during that same attack — in which case Stealth expires automatically for this battle.
• 2. Unable to reproduce the bug where talents inherited via Cavalry Banner would be lost upon Borrowed Star awakening.

💬3. A Few Responses

To be honest, I'm always worried that I'm not updating fast enough and might let everyone down. But sometimes a single person can only do so much (and when DeepSeek decides to act up, even less than that lol). Hope you all can understand — from a 30-something dad juggling a toddler 2333.

Just to briefly share some directions for future versions (definitely won't all come out at once — I can usually only manage 1-2 at a time, in no particular order): new game modes, new Mandate forms, Han faction Signature Talents, new units, early-game out-of-game progression, late-game out-of-game progression, new events, continuously adding Steam review IDs into the credits video, Steam Workshop (never done this before, will explore it — lower priority for now, gameplay comes first), and new bug fixes (I hate bugs, and I hate dumb DeepSeek too).