Mar 14, 2024

Ortharion : The Last Battle - Aryal

Update 0.3 should be released at the beginning of May, with the launch of seasonal characters and a reconfiguration of the game, here is an overview of what has been done and what remains to be done.

What is already done

A new building is present in the middle of the guild, The Tower of Challenges! You will find many merchants there.

There will be 6 new game modes

Damage to mannequin: Deal maximum damage to the mannequin in 1 minute, the more you do, the more you reward.
Resistance test: Resist as long as possible against the plains dragon, the longer you stay, the more you will be rewarded.
Wave of monsters: Face as many waves of monsters as possible, this stops when you are overwhelmed or dead, the chosen difficulty level increases rewards and ranking points.
Boss Dungeon: Kill 3 bosses, rewards are fixed, you can choose the difficulty level before starting. Several random dungeons will be offered.
Monster Dungeon: Take on a dungeon full of monsters and kill 100 monsters within the time limit. You can choose the difficulty level. Several random dungeons will be offered.
The Arena: There are 5 bosses in the arenas currently planned, for now these will be replacement bosses. Each boss will have its minimum difficulty level, for example difficulty: 5 then, 20, 50, 100, 150, you can perfectly choose to face boss 1 of the arena on a higher difficulty level for a better reward. The final boss of the arena will be of "Divine" rank in a later version.

You will need keys, found during the campaign, to try your luck.
The keys will be rare to find and the content of the challenge tower will bring many rewards!

Changes have been made to stats: Dexterity, Vitality, Energy and Charisma have new bonus stats to rival Strength and Intelligence.
New statistics have been added, in particular to more easily increase your defense.
Many changes have been made to skills with cast times and cooldowns to make them more powerful.

Many other balances and improvements are to be expected, but I will reveal everything in the update patch.

The game is more dynamic at the beginning

Equipment with powers and sets has more choices from the "rare" rarity instead of sometimes being limited to rarity types.
Skills are easier to obtain, requiring less stats and some new skills have been added.

What remains to be done

The aim of the changes is to make the game much more dynamic from the start and to vary new situations as much as possible for players, as well as to make creating new characters more interesting.

The many interfaces below are in draft version, so a lot of work remains to be done, both on the design and on the code.

Single object creation

The content of the challenge tower will give you, among other things, a new currency, you can spend it for example to create "unique" objects, create from A to Z by yourself, only one unique object can be used per character and its cost of Creation will increase depending on the number of items you put on it.

Item upgrade interface

All item improvement components will be sent directly to the same interface, no need to manage them and it will be linked to the account.

Change on maps

The world will be explored differently, instead of everything being connected together, you will have a global interface, the order of which will be different from one character to another, allowing you to vary the surprises as much as possible and to collect the runic letters in a random order, allowing you to test new runic words which are now fully functional!

Missions

The old-style quests will be removed, as soon as you appear in an area you will have 3 missions offered, which you can change by spending gold. These missions will be done during your current game assignment, returning to town will remove the current missions.

Game guide with reward

The game will have a game guide to better explain all the content present, each time with rewards, this will also serve as objectives for the most powerful players among you, the last steps to completely finish the game n 'being not easy to achieve.

I hope to see you all in-game in early May for the Challenge Tower season!

Mar 14, 2024

Darkness Descends: Pacing and Difficulty Update

Mind Over Magic - Sparky-Jason

Overview

This update adds new difficulty settings and major changes to balance and pacing, particularly over the first 60 days of gameplay. Future updates will focus on the mid-game economy, improvements to combat, the Underschool, and helping Mages move more quickly around the school.

The new Pressure setting controls the arrival of threats to Mages and the school itself. Different Pressure settings allow different Event types and have different pacing. Pressure also controls how rapidly the Fog advances.
The Relaxed Pressure setting is now more relaxed than before. Relentless is now MUCH more aggressive. There is also now a new Balanced pressure setting that is in between.
The new Challenge options affect general difficulty, including Starting Staff, Starting Research, Combat, Conviction, and the Conviction effects of the Fog.
Randomize Keywords For Room Types is now independent of other options and can be enabled in any mode.
Iron Mage Save Mode is a new option that lets you opt into restrictions that make it more difficult to reload to avoid negative situations.

Existing Save Compatibility

Existing saves default to Pressure: Relaxed and Challenge: Hopeful Horizons. This is intentionally a low pressure and low challenge setting, even if you had harder settings on previously. Many effects have changed, so this gives you a chance to get a sense of the update before taking on the difficulty levels.
You may modify Difficulty settings for an existing game using the Escape menu at any time. A popup will offer to take you there when you load a save from before this update.
When you save a game that is older than this version, we will make a backup so you can return to it if needed.
Active Events will be cancelled because many have changed in their pacing and how they work.

Notable Changes

Arcane Scroll gates in Research have been completely removed, as have Arcane Scrolls.
Death Saves have been removed from the game. Mages reduced to zero HP are now “At Death’s Door” and must be transported to a Medical Bed for a Revive ritual before their timer expires and they die permanently.
Trauma lasts much less time. There are now new forms of Trauma with different kinds of effects, not just Conviction penalties.
There are new Events and most existing Events have been updated. Poltergeists now appear from Rifts that can be battled before the Poltergeist even arrives.
All natural Iron sources are now in the Underschool. Some iron can be mined before doing any battles.
Medical beds now cost less Iron.
The new Nurse's Office Room has simple requirements and speeds up healing, but impacts Conviction negatively.
Mana Burst is the new Human faction power. Each cast, in or out of combat, has a chance of costing no mana.
The Underschool is now opened by the first Repel Fog ritual at the beginning of the game.

Other Balance Changes

Repair speed now scales with Mage skill.
Gremlins and Oozes will focus on attacking targets with prior damage.
Poltergeists that can’t find a target may begin to breaking Wall blocks.
Doors not attached to walls do not provide luxury.
Early Spine and Stone biome Underschool battles now always drop Iron.
Deeper Stone biome rooms are guaranteed to drop Sculptstone.
Malice Crystals are no longer destroyed by the Fog. You can repel fog to reveal them if they are covered.
Losing or fleeing an Invasion battle will no longer end the Invasion.

QoL

Many Events will now auto-pause the game to give an opportunity to react. This behavior can be modified in Settings under Gameplay.
Resources are now counted differently for the UI and for deliveries to help prevent situations where Rituals or other tasks in progress have their resources grabbed by a different Task.
You can now hover items in the Resources panel to see what resources are currently in use. This helps to show why the Resources pane might show 0 of a resource, but you can still see it in the world.
The "No Research Selected" alert no longer displays if all research is complete.
Enemy combat spell descriptions explain if a spell is AoE or not.
There's now a button for Aid tasks that can be use to disable rescuing Death's Door, Cursebound, and Bound mages.
During initial Staff selection, you can specify the wand type for a Mage.
Mages actively eating will finish their meal even if their scheduled eating time ends. Half-eaten meals are now dropped instead of destroyed if Eating is interrupted by a Direct Order, Break, or other immediate Task.
Improved the alerts about invalid ladder placement in many cases where the placement was valid.
Added action buttons to toggle Tasks for Filling Medical Beds and Tending Plots and Planters.
Added control over animation speed during Battles.
The right-click selection buttons now try to stay on screen when activated.
Improved targeting visuals for combat to be more clear when drawing over lava.
Incoming Rain and Thunderstorms now link to information about Rain/Thunderstorms.

Fixes

Fix for delivery issues when some of the ingredients you want have Move errands on them.
Don't display healing info on medical beds until the character is IN the bed.
Filth no longer shows up as "None" on multiselect.
Fix not being able to place ladders in some cases where it should be possible.
Fix for some statuses showing up in the event feed more than once.
Don't show a 99 skill requirement for cleaning.
Fix direct orders not being available for Students in some cases where they should be, like Recreation.
Fix typos and improper terms used on a number of Statuses
Fix ritual positions for Funeral ritual to avoid character overlaps.
Fix Mage pathing issues when the space they used to get into a bed is no longer a valid place to stand.
Fix for Skill Cap Medallions not always working properly.
Fix the way that Shrinks are counted for the Resources panel.
Fix typo in New Student Conviction bonus hover.
Fix up the smaller conviction bar when a Mage is selected so the pointers are more accurate.
Change status effects that say "may not" to "cannot", to make it more clear that Mages are unable to do the thing.
Fix not being able to click on roof confirmation UI when it is over a room invasion UI.
Fix to some combat icons showing a value when they should not.
Fix for a case where the Ritual UI can be superimposed on the Combat UI.
Fix for missing divider line on Recreation need bar.
Fix some spell impact audio not playing.
Fix all duration-without-status badges to explicitly state that the days must be consecutive.
Fix 'Saw a Gremlin' and 'Saw an Ooze' statuses being incorrectly applied in some cases.
Fix ritual animations starting on game load when they should not.

Mar 14, 2024

Major Update 0.8.0.0 Released!

MegaFactory Titan - Q Switched Productions, LLC

Update 0.8.0.0 is out! The new Population Dynamics adds a new game mechanic, the largest such gameplay change since MegaFactory Titan has entered early access!
Older saves will work with the new mechanics, however, you will need to rearrange and rework parts of your factory to do so.

Population Dynamics

People are no longer solely the domain of the AI. Now, as a player, you too need to manage your own population! In order to run your factory, you will need to build habitats, hire workers, pay their wages, and supply them with food, potable water, oxygen, and medicine, and also make sure they remain happy. You start the game with several days of necessities, but once those run out, you will need to start producing them yourself at your factory, or buy them from other factions. You can also hire workers off of other factions, but be careful -- this can cause other factions to be drained of people, and they will demand less trade from you as a result.

Pollution Dynamics

Pollution dynamics have been expanded greatly. Pollution now negatively affects most production facilities in the game. Pollution also reduces the happiness of your workers, and can cause them to leave your factory if you don't address it. In addition to previous pollution removal buildings, there is now an early pollution scrubbing augmentation you can install directly into your structures. Visually, polluting now leaves huge black clouds lingering all over your factory.

Interface Theme Overhaul

The main interface has been overhauled, with changes made to nearly aspect of the interface.
The default color scheme has been redone as well, and now there is support for many different color schemes.
The infolinks have been completely redone to be much clearer and easier to navigate. A lot of extraneous / useless information has been removed from it. The info is much more compact, and infolinks can now be searched.
A ton of changes have been made to make the UI better suited for players with smaller monitor resolutions, with more compact interfaces in a lot of places.

Difficulty Rebalancing

Normal difficulty has been made less difficult financially. Crises are now less devastating on Normal and Easy mode.
There are more ways to deal with the meteors, as certain defenses which work well against storms now work well against meteors.
Certain Crises, such as meteors, now show you a countdown timer of when they will arrive. This gives you enough time to prepare defenses.
Crises are less frequent in general.
You can also change the difficulty mid-way through the game. If you are in custom mode, you can edit the individual variables as well.

Performance and Memory

Vulkan now uses significantly less memory during the game, especially for players who explore a lot. There is now better performance in general when lots of mining is occurring. Load times have been improved. Large save files use less memory as well.

Quality of Life

Graphical improvements for lower resolution monitors, such as improvements to jagged bloom effects, and ugly SSAO artifacts.
Mission success or failure messages go away after a few seconds if you ignore them.
The ledger shows a pie chart of your expenses so you can quickly tell what is costing the most money at a glance.
All tutorials and loading screen tips are now readable in Infolinks.
And a huge amount of small tweaks and UX fixes.

Full Changelist
0.8.0.0
Gameplay
- Production structures, extractor structures, large powerplants, certain upgraders, radar, research labs, cloud seeders, vaporizer stacks, and most population-related structures now all need workers to function.
- Habitats now can have population assigned to them, which allows them to send out workers to nearby structures.
- You can hire workers from most of the allied factions. This will pull away population from that faction, reducing their trade demands.
- You can lay off any of your unassigned workers.
- Workers cost a flat daily wage (except for the Cult faction).
- Population needs food, potable water, oxygen, and medicine. If they don't get what they need, they will become unhappy, and if too unhappy, they will leave. In the case of missing oxygen, they will immediately leave.
- Oxygen, when consumed, converts into Carbon Dioxide, which must be passed back into Oxygen Gardens (or Farms) to convert it back into Oxygen.
- Potable Water converts into Waste Water once consumed, which must be passed back into Water Treatment Plants to be cleaned.
- You can purchase necessities from some of the allied factions, if they have any in stock.
- Population becomes unhappy when there is no power in their habitats, but they still function just as well.
- Population becomes happier if they don't have any work to do.
- Luxury habitats reduce unhappiness modifiers.
- Comm Towers, Office Parks, and Hospitals increase the happiness of nearby habitats.
- Happiness of population drifts towards the mean over time in the absence of external factors.
- In new games, you will get a fixed amount of population and several days worth of necessities to start with. In older saves, you will get these as well.
- Pollution reduces the working speed of most production facilities in the game.
- Pollution reduces the happiness of habitats.
- Pollution Scrubbers help reduce inefficiency caused by too much pollution.
- New Scrubber Augmentation for installing into your structures, which reduces pollution generated.
- Farms and Habitats now can take augmentations.
- Most population-related structures are now in the tech tree and must be researched.
- You can change the difficulty while in game. Easy, Normal, and Hard can be switched between. Sandbox can not. Custom difficulty allows you to tweak some of the individual variables of the difficulty, but not all of them.
- Difficulty - Normal difficulty has reduced costs. All difficulties have reduced crisis intensity by default.
- Crises are less frequent in general.
- Meteors can now also have their damage reduced slightly by using Stabilizer Floors and Mass Dampers.
- Underground structures are also resistant to meteors by default.
- Different Crises have differing warning times now. Meteors, in particular, have a very long lead time, to give you plenty of time to set up turrets.
- Selling trophies is no longer a way to get near-infinite money. The price of trophies now falls off the more you sell. They still can net you a lot of money in the short term, but in the long term, it stops being a viable way to support your factory.
- You can only stash items from structures, not from vehicles now.
- You can't destroy your main base while there are items inside of it now.
Graphics
- Large pollution clouds now hang around your factory if you pollute too much.
- Dust clouds don't move as fast in the wind.
- Tweaked fog to look nicer, especially in the minimap view.
- Fog has greater variety of color, and is more noticeable.
- Minimap view exploration cutoff is smoother.
- Tweaked pollution/temperature/tides/geothermal overlays to look nicer.
- Improved SSAO to be crisper and less noticeable.
- Reduced bloom jaggies on lower resolution screens.
- Toned down the brightness of certain glowing structures.
- Added floor lights to farms and oxygen gardens.
- Tweaked smoke particles.
- Tweaked a number of other structure models.
UI
- Default color scheme redone.
- Several new color schemes to choose from.
- The infolinks have been completely redone to be much clearer and easier to navigate.
- Infolinks subsections has a search bar.
- Extraneous info removed from many infolinks sections.
- Certain Crises now show you a countdown timer of when they will arrive. This gives you enough time to prepare defenses.
- UI is more compact in size, better suited for smaller monitor resolutions.
- In the Missions Board, requests are grayed out if you already have a prior request from the same faction.
- Below your money display is now a population display, which tells you your total population, assigned population, if any habitats have errors (such as lacking in oxygen), and a button to lay off your workers.
- Habitat UI now shows you a breakdown of where your people are working.
- Mission success messages now go away after a few seconds if you don't open them up.
- Explorer notifications are usually sent to the bottom corner of the screen now. These notifications only appear in the middle of the screen if that explorer is selected.
- Inefficiency due to pollution is now shown in the "Bonuses and Penalties" panel of all producers.
- High Priority setting now applies to worker usage as well as power consumption.
- Land buying UI made more compact, with improved clarity of options.
- Loading screen reports load progress better.
- Ledger shows a pie chart of daily expenses.
- "Sell Only" structures build button removed, replaced with "Population" structures button at the bottom of the screen, also rearranged.
- New overhead floating error that appears when a location has no workers that can work there.
- In the tech tree, nodes will stay filled when researched fully.
- Tutorials and loading screen tips are now readable in Infolinks.
- Items are now sorted better across all readouts in the game, in infolinks, in the action bar, etc.
- In Infolinks, some goods (like necessities) will show you where they can be purchased at.
- Added a new tutorial for population dynamics.
- Tons more small changes made to all the UI across the game, too many to list.
Performance / Memory
- Performance - Improved load times for large save files.
- Performance - Better performance when lots of mining is occurring.
- Performance - Made improvements to UI performance.
- Memory - Significantly better memory usage in general, especially with large save files.
- Memory - Vastly better memory usage when mining or altering terrain.
Other
- Bug fix - Floors no longer report a repair cost because they don't cost anything to repair.
- Bug fix - Fixed UI badges not showing up.
- Bug fix - Fixed thumbnails showing blackness in parts.
- Bug fix - Fixed goods classifications being sometimes incorrect.
- Bug fix - Fixed glowing models sometimes causing black spots.
- Bug fix - Fixed window size resetting whenever you change options.
- Bug fix - Fixed changing themes not resetting all of the UI.
- Bug fix - Fixed a major bug where the stores wouldn't sell autocannon rounds in a meteor storm.
- Bug fix - Fixed a shadows bug where far away shadows at dusk and dawn were not getting rendered.
- Bug fix - Floating icons in game fade out properly when far away or when the mouse moves close to them.
- Bug fix - Fixed bug where mining vehicles would freeze up when their pickup vehicle was near, even if they had nothing to give their pickup vehicle.
- Bug fix - Fixed vehicles going to the wrong spot after finishing a job.
- Bug fix - Fixed tutorial not triggering properly in some cases.
- Crash fix - Crashes when exploring or buying maps fixed.
- Crash fix - A number of general out of memory crashes in Vulkan fixed.
- Crash fix - Rare crash when mouse cursor moves outside the window.