Hail, Adventurers!
We're fighting on, through winter or as it is right now, extreme heat, and the work is paying off! Time for another major update, and 0.12.0.1 is introducing two of the systems we've been waiting for the longest.
The first is a system we knew we're going to have since the very start - Hero Traits, random perks that change specific heroes and differentiate them in interesting ways. While a few are mostly cosmetic, many are actually game changing, and since each hero will draw 2 random traits out of the pool (the first batch has 17 but we'll be adding many more) - we're going to have more varied gameplay right away.
The second major change is in how towns operate and look like internally. Town interface and menus have been reworked from the ground up, buildings have visual representations as they are built, and each town will have slots that need to be cleared up before structures can be constructed there.
We'd love to hear your feedback about these changes, and the easiest way is over at our Discord, join us there and share some thoughts!
Major Changes (0.11.2.2 Hotfix + 0.12.0.1)
- Save files from previous versions will not work in 0.12.0.1
- An initial pool of 17 Hero Traits introduced, more coming very soon.
- Starting heroes will randomly get 2 traits from the growing pool.
- Buildings now appear in towns after being constructed.
- Buildings now have a 1 turn base construction time and will not instantly appear.
- Towns now have building slots, slots should be cleared before used for construction.
- Factions now have a maximum number of heroes they can have across all armies, which can be raised by upgrading their fort.
- Renown is back as a resource! You get it in fights, and spend it to get guild upgrades.
- Tactical Ability bar upgraded with better UI and differentiation between active and passive effects, will also display traits and artifacts now.
- Added a strategic layer tutorial as well as multiple new helpful tooltips.
- New music tracks added to our campaign intro.
- New guild upgrades added.
- New artifacts added.
- New events added.
Balance
- Neutral groups on the world map can now be composed of multiple creature types rather than just one.
- Cages will now yield heroes instead of creatures, if there's no room in your party, a new one will be formed instantly.
- AI will now value slowing and speeding effect slightly less. For example, Wizards are less likely to use Frostbite over their regular attack.
- Grapple Hook now has an accuracy bonus.
- Increased daily Beetcoin income from towns and farms.
- Slightly increased the mean magic provided weekly by the Magic Distillery (2-4 instead of 1-4).
- Starting resources reduced.
- Player factions will start a skirmish game with a single party of 3 heroes.
- Building prices changed.
Technical
- Slime and Freeze slower animation removed following feedback.
- Visual and sound effects upgraded for many abilities and attacks.
- Physics have been sped up, associated bug eliminated (see below).
- Loading times improved, especially for story missions.
- Improved text layout for non-English languages, more readable font too.
- Updated multiple ability icons.
Bugs Squashed
- Skirmish mode will no longer sometimes spawn a high difficulty fight near your initial spawn's nearest town.
- Bleeding effects from different sources will now stack properly. For example, using an ability which causes bleeding and having a bonus bleeding damage from a building will stack.
- AI parties will no longer sometimes lose units after a player battle (in some cases it happened even to parties not participating in that battle).
- Fixed the diagonal kicks physics bug reported in recent weeks, at a small performance cost - we'll optimize this in the following weeks.
- Fixed a bunch of tooltip visual bugs.
- Insatiable Bloodlust will now properly yield a single AP rather than occasionally providing 2.
We're happy with progress overall, and hope you are too :) The next major update is planned for next month, and among other things we're going to introduce physics-using enemies. Other than that - optimization is the name of the game, and we have a lot of ground to cover in the next couple of months.
For now have fun, and please report bugs you encounter as well as share your thoughts with us either directly, in our forums or over at our Discord server. Thank you!
Onwards!