May 12, 2024

Version 0.6.30: new interrogation, new events, balance buffs and UI niceties!

Together in Battle - Sinister Design

Greetings, tactics fans! You may have noticed that I pushed this month's update two weeks early--the reason being, I wanted everything nice and updated for Steam Endless Replayability Fest (which, of course, Together in Battle has been selected to participate in!)

Despite this month's update coming after only 14 days of work, rest assured: those 14 days were packed. This update contains the game's second ending, a new interrogation scene, two new random events, a new handcrafted battle, new skills, new dialogue, UI improvements, and approximately one ton of balance tweaks.

Let's start with the marquee new content:

new random event with associated battle: Smuggler's Den!
new random event: Catchphrase! (This one literally lets you write a new victory bark for one of your characters, which I think is pretty neat.)
new investigation scene: the second interrogation of Malatose!
wrote the event that occurs after the second Malatose interrogation as well as new palace narration.
the game's second ending has now been added!

We've got balance changes!

As mentioned above, I spent a lot of time improving balance for this update. One my goals here was to make the late game less focused on overwhelming offense by making defensive builds more viable. As an experiment, I tried boosting the default health gain from level-up increases from 2 points to 3; however, I found that once character levels got into the teens, the cumulative impact of this change was too strong, with too many enemies feeling like health sponges. Instead, I opted for a handful of more focused changes (with particular attention paid to melee classes):

promotions now increase character health across the board, but especially so for the melee combat classes (including the spriggat "claw" classes).
equippable shields now provide higher base health bonuses. (Note that this change is prospective only--shields you already possess from before this update will keep the same stats they had before.)
spriggat base health (i.e. at level 1) has been bumped upward 3 points, and spriggats now always gain Health Proficiency somewhere between levels 7 and 12 as part of their skill progression.

But those changes are far from the only balance changes...

reduced the influence that speed has on salary levels by 40%, rendering shadowlings and assassins more cost-competitive.
boosted the base level of enemy arena teams in the latter three leagues (especially for Snow Leopard and Tiger leagues).
arena team leader enemy level scaling increased from an additional 20% per match to an additional 25% per match once the player reaches Monkey League.
once the player gets to Snow Leopard League, the shop now has a 75% chance of having 1-2 medicated bandages in stock per visit.
increased the per-day rate of enemy level scaling in the Save Grandpa and Treasure Thicket event battles a bit to help keep the challenge level up later in a playthrough.
boosted the effect of strength and psy on the maximum health of an engineer's barricades: the barricades now receive added max health equal to 133% of the creator's combined strength and psy. (Previously, it was only 100%.)
the power of explosive charges now scales upward with the strength and psy of the engineer who places them, ensuring that they remain potent into the late game.
increased the energy cost of Place Charges and Place Timed Charges to 8 and 10, respectively.
proc gen cavaliers now either gain a lance counterattack or heavy armor mastery, not both. (They are still guaranteed to learn heavy armor mastery if they promote to a Mantis Knight, and still guaranteed a lance counterattack if they promote to Mant Lancer.)
proc gen cavaliers now start with 20% lower base Energy.
training energy for cavaliers now costs 8 times as much as it does for every other class.
proc gen cavalier base salaries are now higher.
spriggats no longer have a 1-in-3 chance of spriggats learning Mind Blast as their miscellaneous psy skill, and instead have a 1-in-3 chance of learning Kinetic Gust.
whenever you register for a Psy Clash tournament, you now receive two random, complimentary Psy Clash cards before the tournament starts. You can use these in the tournament, and will keep them going forward regardless of whether you win the tournament.
the Psy Clash card Leap now lets you draw another card after using it.
changed the Pocket Sand skill's element from Poison to Light so that it can affect golems.
further increased Ansh's health for the witness protection battle when playing on Relaxed difficulty.
new in version 0.6.30b: the blacksmith rescue mission now explicitly warns you about the time limit at the start.
new in version 0.6.30b: using particularly loud skills during the blacksmith rescue mission (Explode, Powder Bolt, Pyro Blast, Light Blast, etc.) now attracts guard attention, as does letting the guards on the northwest platform get in an attack.
new in version 0.6.30b: units on the raised platform in the northwest in the blacksmith rescue mission will now raise the alarm if they get a chance to attack you.
new in version 0.6.30b: added a bowman to the raised platform in the northwest in the blacksmith rescue mission when playing on challenging difficulty or higher.
new in version 0.6.30c: reduced the damage scaling on the elemental blast skills from 1.3 to 1.2.
new in version 0.6.30c: reduced the damage scaling on Mega Charge from 1.5 to 1.4.
new in version 0.6.30c: reduced the cost of Place Stone Barricade from 8 to 6.
new in version 0.6.30d: granting a character only half their requested raise now inflicts morale -3 instead of morale -2.
new in version 0.6.30d: refusing a character's request for a raise now keeps the "asking for a raise event" in the hopper, letting the event potentially recur thereafter.

We have visual and UI improvements!

darkened the background strip behind camp activity narrations to make the text easier to read against lighter backgrounds.
item sacks now visually drop into place when fans throw items onto the battlefield in the arena!
when grabbing an item sack with equipment in it in battle, if the grabber can use the equipment and they have nothing equipped in that slot, the game will now prompt the player if they want to auto-equip the thing they grabbed.
constrained the pop-up text animation in combat a bit more to make it easier to follow (and easier to tell which character it belongs to in the event of an AOE effect).
character tooltips can now display a different fourth stat besides counterattacks when appearing in menus.
character tooltips now display morale instead of counterattacks during selection for a one-on-one in camp.
character tooltips now display strength instead of counterattacks during selection for laboring at the docks.
while selecting a character in training, character tooltips now display each character's base strength, psy, and accuracy in lieu of counterattacks.
while selecting characters for random events, character tooltips now show morale in lieu of counterattacks.

We have a wide variety of miscellaneous improvements!

when loading up your save file from the demo campaign in the full game, the game now automatically converts it into a main campaign save file so you can continue where you left off in the demo!
lit battlefield objects (such as braziers, candelabras, campfires, and lamps) now visibly poke holes within fog of war, letting you see enemies within their light radius! (Needless to say, the effect goes away if these objects are destroyed.)
new Kineticist skill: Levitate Other. Levitate another character for one turn.
new Engineer skill: Place Brazier. Creates a lit brazier on the battlefield that reveals fog of war in a 2-tile radius around it (and burns enemies who attack it in melee).
increased the positive morale effect of rainstorms on the characters who like them.
characters who clean together now gain friendship with one another.
characters are now generated with a response line for when they receive a nickname from another character.
characters' friendship now mutually increases when they respond to a nicknaming event.
wrote some alternate dialogue for the second crush event for cases where the characters are mutually romantically interested.
wrote a new campsite Talk variation for characters who have a crush on their talk partner.
wrote new like/hobby dialogue for characters with the depressive personality trait.
wrote new Talk narration for depressive and introverted characters.
wrote new generic campsite Talk narration.
wrote a new two-person sparring narration for Suave characters.
wrote a new info response line for religious characters.
flirtatious characters now only deliver flirty lines to characters with whom they are fundamentally romantically compatible (i.e. they only flirt with characters of a gender and species to which they are attracted, and no longer have any chance to flirt with characters they are related to).
painted a 19th human female hairstyle.
if you reach a day with a scheduled league match and you have no one left in your roster to fight, the game now detects it and queues up a scene where the arena manager chews you out.
if the avenger remains after the conclusion of the revenge quest event chain, their background and secret dialogue now change to acknowledge what happened.
added dialogue options to the initial meeting with Manbir Raksha where you can ask him for advice on how to conduct the interrogations.
updated scripting in Battle in the Dissident's Den to activate Hari and his group if the player strays too close to the west door in his office.
updated scripting in Battle at the Northern Stepwell in case the kidnappee is a golem or spirit and, simultaneously, a golem or spirit is the one to reach them.
added some safeguards to ensure that a fall into a chasm will always be an insta-K.O. (Previously, the game would apply damage equivalent to falling 10 levels of elevation under the assumption that this would always be enough damage to K.O. a character).
created new sound effect that plays when a character takes environmental damage from being in lava.
added portrait animations to all of the advice events.
the "asking for advice" events will no longer end with a character saying "never mind"--if that's about to happen, the game will now simply find a different event to run instead.
shuffled around the timing of certain random events.
wrote 44th and 45th loading screen tips.
new in version 0.6.30a: reduced the greed constant for arena AI, reducing the score the computer assigns to moves that involve destroying chests and fruit trees. AI units will now only sometimes attack chests and fruit trees when out of attack range of the player's units.
new in version 0.6.30a: AI improvement: the game now scores the destination-and-facing back cover factor for a move relative to how dangerous the destination space is, preventing situations where the game overvalues a move because it protects the unit's back in a spot where no enemy is near enough to reach it.
new in version 0.6.30a: the two enemies playing Psy Clash at the start of the dissident's den battle now actually drop Psy Clash cards when defeated.
new in version 0.6.30b: added a safeguard to prevent duplicates of the same character from ever appearing in a roster.
new in version 0.6.30c: updated the description of Place Stone Barricade to make its utility clear (it can stop flyers).

We have a ton of bug fixes!

fixed: the Sick status effect had started making skills cost 2,000% their normal energy cost instead of 200%.
fixed: after introduction of the new, more efficient parabolic arc code, objects thrown via skills like Toss and Throw were no longer getting parabolic arcs (and consequently, could end up lodged inside the ground and invisible to the player).
fixed: the game was not allowing Stone Golems to throw objects over other objects of the same category. (They would simply smash into them instead.)
fixed: it was possible for inorganic destructible objects to get the Poisoned status despite having 100% Poison resistance if the skill conferring the status was not itself of the Poison element.
AI fix: due to a quirk in how C# handles integer division, the AI was not applying any scoring penalty at all to attacks that would draw a non-lethal counterattack--even if the counterattack would leave the attacker with 1 health.
AI fix: due to a quirk in how C# handles integer division, the AI was not applying a penalty to attacks against targets with non-lethal on-death attacks (such as explosive charges), meaning that enemies could still sometimes decide to attack--and detonate--explosive charges while in range of the blast.
fixed: golems and spirits could acquire moods of types that made no sense for them (e.g. Starving or Sick).
fixed: if movement speed was set to instant, doors that AI-controlled characters moved through would not be opened and scripts triggered mid-move via the MoveOver trigger would not be triggered.
fixed: equipment-modifying items (such as repair kits and whetstones) were not usable in camp.
fixed: the game was freezing whenever a player-controlled (non-AI) character used Defensive Stance.
fixed: attempting to use an item in a character screen during deployment at the start of battle would fail without providing a pop-up message.
fixed: the rear horn in a spriggat's portrait would appear incorrectly scaled, positioned, and colored if the prior displayed character portrait possessed a hair accessory.
fixed: on certain occasions, item sacks on top of bridge tiles became non-interactable.
fixed: due to a formatting error in the new, modifiable item attributes table, poisoned and blazing weapons were bugged and could freeze the game upon being equipped.
fixed: with equipment that would replace a filled slot, the shop interface was still only showing a comparison of one stat maximum (rather than the intended 1-3), and could display a stat penalty as a reason for wanting the equipment.
fixed: on-death attacks were being applied twice, resulting in double damage (and double application of status effects) from explosive charges.
fixed: adding support for finding characters by load ID in a past update broke the Unlock Door skill, causing the game to think the character was attempting to unlock whichever proc gen character was first recruited because they happened to have a blank load ID.
fixed: the game was still showing the actions bar and portrait when AI-controlled characters hidden in fog of war moved.
fixed: the game could show incorrect actions bar information for AI-controlled characters who acted after an ally hidden by fog of war.
fixed: characters using Light attacks and Staggering weapons could attack spiked barricades and fires without taking damage.
fixed: if an AI-controlled character blinded a player-controlled character in a fog of war map, the game would suddenly treat the AI army as if it were player-controlled for purposes of updating the fog of war, thereby revealing most of the map.
fixed: fog of war tiles would not update when unequipping a torch or other Perception-affecting item.
fixed: the bathing event did not add a follow-up event where one character asks the other on a date to the hopper.
fixed: in the witness protection battle, even if the kineticist on the stage was already dead, he would still give his "close the fist" dialogue.
fixed: due to a scripting oversight, it was still possible to get the information from the documents in the dissident den raid even if they were destroyed.
fixed: the AddStatus script action was no longer announcing the applied status effect.
fixed: the Challenger and Brutalist achievements would only trigger if starting a playthrough on roguelike mode.
fixed: when multiple scripts were attached to the same skill or item, the second script would have its first action run out of order.
fixed: if OnVictory dialogue was spawned for the enemy army, using a WinBattle action or reply to change it to a player victory would not prevent the game from showing a "Defeated" pop-up regardless.
fixed: the game would still show the dialogue menu in the very first branch of dialogue even if that branch contained a HideDialogueBox action.
fixed: the "Black" cutscene background was not usable.
fixed: the CastleSandstone tileset's transitions between other tilesets were not working.
fixed: in games of Psy Clash, no sound was playing when minions switched lanes as part of their built-in abilities.
fixed: Religious characters' greeting responses were inappropriately referencing the god of their dialogue partner rather than themselves.
fixed: you could visit the trainer with 0 characters in your roster.
fixed: the game would throw an error if the player reached the Festival of the Ascendant Lights with no characters in their roster.
fixed: the game would get caught in a loop if the player received Manbir Raksha's summons after the festival with no characters in their roster.
fixed: the game was skipping over the "alone in camp" narration on evenings where no one remained in the roster.
fixed: the game could still display buttons in custom menus twice if they were preceded by hidden buttons.
fixed: the game wasn't counting the Festival of the Ascendant Lights toward the days that characters were out training, working, vacationing, or in the infirmary, resulting in them all returning a day late.
fixed: it was sometimes possible for characters involved in a Talk activity to have their own, independent activity later in the same evening.
fixed: the camp activity generator's infinite loop break code was incrementing the iteration number in the wrong scope, and so was not working correctly.
fixed: strings typed in by the player during dialogue could end up not displaying properly (or at all) if they used commas or quotation marks.
fixed: the text sprite for Drowning Res. was missing (most noticeable in shop interface explanations for why certain characters want aquatic armor).
fixed: with Vindictive and Vengeful equipment that would replace a filled slot, the shop interface was still failing to display the sprite for additional counterattacks granted by the equipment.
fixed a typo in the dialogue when deciding whether to report to Prince Ajit after the witness protection battle.
fixed a typo in the armorer interrogation.
fixed a typo in the extended Architect class description.
fixed a typo in one of the rest narrations for flirtatious characters.
fixed: the description for Place Timed Charges contained the wrong after-attack behavior.
fixed: the description of Feedback was ambiguous in relating the skill's self-healing effects.
fixed: the romantic compatibility check function hadn't been updated since the game gained the ability to generate NPCs as full characters (meaning that blood relatives were not being automatically excluded from romantic compatibility).
fixed in version 0.6.30a: the game could spawn a pop-up asking to auto-equip weapons or armor during the enemy's turn too, not just the player's.
fixed in version 0.6.30a: in some rare cases, a counterattack could be processed twice (causing double damage).
fixed in version 0.6.30a: the Transfer and Transfer 2 skills were causing screen shake.
fixed in version 0.6.30b: the game was displaying narration about Wailling inappropriately during the investigation due to a scripting mistake.
fixed in version 0.6.30b: if the Babble script action ran after dialogue text had finished animating (or after its animation was manually skipped by the player), then the babble sound effect would continue without end until the player continued to the next branch of the dialogue.
fixed in version 0.6.30b: the Halberd skill was using a "pierce" visual effect to accompany the attack hitting instead of a slashing one.
fixed in version 0.6.30b: it was possible for a heatwave event to trigger midway through the day, not just upon first arriving in the city.
fixed in version 0.6.30c: in some battles, the game could spawn two copies of the same character if a teammate was out wounded.
fixed in version 0.6.30c: characters learned alternate skills from earlier on in their base class skill progressions upon promoting, resulting in characters having too many skills (and reducing diversity among promoted members of the same class).
fixed in version 0.6.30c: the character screen always displayed 100 as the experience characters needed to level up even when characters had traits (such as Eidetic Memory) which reduce that number.
fixed in version 0.6.30c: the game was not letting Stone Golems throw item sacks over spaces containing other item sacks.
fixed in version 0.6.30c: item sacks would not collide with other units.
fixed in version 0.6.30d: the AI could throw a range error when processing swim-back-to-land moves under certain circumstances.
fixed in version 0.6.30d: sometimes in recruitment, the game would not revert to the current selected character's information upon mousing over to the left half of the screen if the selected character was from the right column.
fixed in version 0.6.30d: the Birthday Fan event did not remove itself from the hopper after running, but rather removed the Enthusiastic Fan event instead.
fixed in version 0.6.30d: due to a formatting mistake, a few two-character random events could proceed even if a second character wasn't available to appear in them, causing errors.
fixed in version 0.6.30d: the maharaja funeral event could trigger twice in the same day.
fixed in version 0.6.30d: a typo appeared in Ishita Svaamee's dialogue in her second visit event.

And of course, we have additions and improvements for the campaign creation suite:

new script action: AddCharDialogue. Adds a line of non-combat dialogue (i.e. one used during camp activities) to the character's repertoire. Parameters: Character Name,Dialogue Type,Dialogue String,Facial Expression (optional),Response Type (optional). Supports an arbitrary number of miscellaneous properties after Response Type as well--anything used in CharAttributes.xml will work (in the format mor1=1, hp2=-10, etc.)
new script action: RemoveCharDialogue. Behaves much like RemoveBark, but is intended to remove non-combat lines of dialogue (i.e. those which are used during camp activities) instead of combat barks, and the "All" parameter will only affect those camp lines. Has one additional, optional parameter which, if set to true, will make the character "forget" having spoken dialogue of this sort before in camp.
new special character supported: -GOD2-. Gets changed to the name of the deity worshipped by the secondary character in the conversation (if any), or to "no one" if they are atheist.
new special character supported: -BIO2:X-. Gets changed to the appropriate bio detail of the secondary character in the conversation (if any), with 'X' being the bio detail type (region, hometown, hometownSize, raised by, siblings, worships, and religion).
new sound effects: Crowd Booing Muffled and Lava Burn.
new, optional third parameter for the OnTalk dialogue trigger: Enforce Positions. If set to true, this specifically requires the triggering character to be as described in the first trigger parameter (rather than letting the second talk partner take on the role of triggerer).
new optional parameter added to SpawnUnit and the Generate-Unit-type script actions: Drop Unit. If set to true, causes the unit to drop onto their space from somewhere above the battlefield when they spawn, a la an item drop.
added minimum parameter checks to about a half-dozen portrait-related script actions that were missing them.
added minimum parameter checks to the game's unit-spawning, unit-generating, door manipulation, change dialogue character, and roster manipulation script actions.
camp activity narrations can now be tagged with a reqsRomanticCompat attribute.
fixed: the "Neutralized" status effect was missing from the localization file and causing the game to throw a null error when applied.
added documentation for ShowDeckButton and HideDeckButton to the in-game reference.
added missing in-game documentation for the Move Over unit trigger.
added missing documentation for the pitch range parameter in the PlaySound script action.

Phew! That was a lot of stuff. Not gonna lie, I am pretty exhausted from getting all that done in in two weeks of development time--so rather than continuing to yap at you here, I am going to go to sleep. I hope you enjoy all the changes! I'll see you in the next one. (Or, you know, on Discord.)

Tactically yours,

Craig