Holy moly there is a lot going on with Gargadusa right now. So much, in fact, that I'm going to skip Live patch today so that the Beta can get some more miles before I flip the switch.
I know, I know. I'd usually just rip it, but I am growing as a person.
Today, the Beta is updated with the below, but the big ticket item is the Hex Battle System (HBS) + the NEW math (Math v2).
I sadly shipped the HBS without the proper math on Monday, so today's Beta patch fixes that.
BUT -- that means proper testing hasn't really been done on the balance side of things, so I'm holding off on the Live patch until I get a few more days of play before pushing it.
To that end, if you feel like helping out with those balance efforts, swap to the Beta version in Steam and hit me with your thoughts on Discord!
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NEW FEATURES
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Fights
- The Crown Cup is now a four-team single-elimination bracket — seed 1 vs 4, seed 2 vs 3, then the final — with every bout fought out in the hex arena instead of one four-way melee; a finalist's box score and knockouts sum across both fights, and MVP, All-Tournament, records and the coronation all read the bracket.
- Mid-season Rival Challenge matches are fought as a real hex bout in the arena, replacing the ten-round scalar simulation. Wagers, seeding and league isolation are unchanged; Escape during the fight jumps to the result instead of forfeiting.
- Spar a party against a training dummy from the Party Training screen: the same seeded hex battle every real fight uses, with no XP, injuries, gold, or save changes. Pick a dummy preset — Bruiser, Squishy, Boss, Pack or Mixed — or build your own with sliders for HP, toughness, how many foes, one big multi-tile foe, and which damage type it resists.
Battlefields
- Ten new battlefield layouts join the quest, raid, tower and garrison pools: a broken causeway span on rivers and bridges, open dune flats, twin mountain ledges, a pillared cavern hall underground, reed-marsh bog pools in the swamps, rubble scatter, boulder garden, emberfield, sunk ford and pillared rise.
- Cover tiles now read as terrain rather than bare stone — trees and staved barrels stand alongside rock outcrops.
NOTE: A lot more is coming on this front.
Guild
- Reorder the Workshop crafting queue: ▲▼ arrows on each queued job move it earlier or later within that crafter's own backlog. A job already underway stays locked at the front.
- A retired veteran holding a single-slot post (bartender, receptionist, quartermaster, treasurer, astrologer, tactician) can now be reassigned to any other open, unlocked post instead of being released — the panel lists each available role with the skill they'd bring, and their contract and tenure carry over.
- Reforge is now a re-roll: sacrifice one quality tier to roll a crafted item's base stats fresh, keeping improvements, synergies and specialization intact and restoring full durability. Crafted gear only, F-Tier excluded, and the button names the exact material cost up front.
- Founding a standard online league now seeds a five-hero, role-covered bridge party of low-rank guild-loyal adventurers, so an outbid opening week doesn't leave you unable to deploy.
Records
- The Registry gains a Guild Historian tab: confirmed kills by enemy family (Undead, Beasts, Humanoids, Constructs, Dragons, Elementals, Aberrations, Fiends, Fey), the guild's top slayer of each family, and a Realm Slayers top-25 leaderboard that ranks your heroes against rival guilds' heroes.
- Every real kill in a quest, raid, or tower floor is credited to the hero who landed the killing blow and filed by enemy family — a lifetime ledger separate from the old contribution-based kill count.
- Adventurer dossiers show a Slain record tile, with the per-family breakdown on hover.
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QUALITY OF LIFE
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- Battle Presentation (Always / Big moments / Never) now lives in Settings ▸ Gameplay next to Quick Advance, and turns up in settings search under terms like "battle visualizer", "arena" and "auto open".
NOTE: So you can turn off the new Battle System if you'd prefer to just sim through things without the visuals,etc.
- Settings search also finds Fullscreen, Portrait Status Pins, the End of Week hint, Force X11 (XWayland) and the Rebalance Ruleset.
- A region you take this week plants with a one-shot gold flourish, and a supply convoy that lands pulses a claim ring at the drop. Both are suppressed under reduced motion.
- Raid tiles on the Quest Board carry the same warcamp-banner mark the War Table stamps on raids, and sponsor faction emoji are gone from raid cards and Tactical Intel.
- The Training Yard's class-match badge now reads "+50% XP" with a tooltip spelling out what it does, and the old "Expected Stat Gains" panel is now "Training Focus: shapes your next level-ups" with an explainer that the Focus biases level-ups from any XP source.
- Set a party to auto-train and its members immediately show a "Training this week" badge, and they're no longer auto-deployed that week — even if enrollment stalls on training slots or gold.
- Your commander stops re-suggesting patrols once you hold or are patrolling a region, instead of nudging you to blanket every territory.
- Your commander counts academy trainees toward a Tank or Healer gap — excluding dismissed or graduated ones — so a prospect in training quiets the request, and in academy-only runs the "recruit a role" ask never fires at all.
- Guild Legends chips now print what each retired commander's bonus applies to under its value, instead of a bare "+3%".
- The battle report's Momentum panel now leads with a Fallen count covering combat deaths and near-death forced retirements.
- Battle screens now show gear-inclusive HP, matching the number on the dossier.
- Practice bouts now show your uploaded portraits and announce a charged class active by its own name.
- Guild Value Added is now one number everywhere: gold earned plus quest bonuses, minus wages, injury costs, lifetime signing fees, training spend and performance-bonus payouts. The career column sums all activities regardless of the activity filter, the season view stays a per-season operating margin, and rival rosters use the same formula.
- A new Perf Bonuses line in the Economy ledger shows lifetime performance-bonus payouts to an adventurer.
- Tower level-ups now appear in the end-of-week Leveled Up review.
- The sealed-bid signing window now shows how much gold your already-queued bids this turn reserve, and warns when they exceed your treasury.
- Auto-sell rules that can never fire now say so: a rule whose stock sits at or below its reserve shows an "Idle" warning naming the stock and the reserve.
- The quest board's bounty panel explains healer behavior — healers treat whoever is most wounded within reach, and tanks hold enemy attention, so they usually draw the first cast.
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BALANCE
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Combat Math
- Damage is now attribute-driven — the attacker's offense against the defender's defense, with diminishing mitigation — replacing the old overall-rating-gap formula on quests, raids, tower floors, garrison holds, the Crown Cup and Rival Challenges.
- Damage types resolve per hit: 1.4× into a weakness, 0.6× into a resistance, so counter-picking your party shows up in every blow rather than as a pre-fight fudge.
- Every hit rolls ±15% variance and a 10% chance to crit for 1.5× damage.
- Monsters now live on the adventurer HP scale: a Floor 100 Boss fields roughly 12,000 HP, with floor bosses ramping from 3× a rank body's HP on the shallow floors to 7× at Floor 90 and 11× at the apex.
- Tower floor fights now run up to 40 rounds, up from 30, giving the apex boss phase room to be more badass.
- Enemy numbers come down now that they hit for real: quest packs are roughly half their old size and garrison reclaim waves field 6 bodies instead of 13.
- Holding a garrison at even power is now a costly, contested fight rather than a bloodless stalemate — you are overrun below about 85% of the floor's power, and a clean repel needs roughly 115%.
- Raids at even power now resolve on the board instead of grinding to a draw behind the healer, with named raid bosses at 1.8× body HP against single parties and 1.2× against massed heroes.
- Quest critical success now means a flawless fight that ends with the party above 78% health, instead of simply finishing within 12 rounds.
- Hazard tiles drain 12% of a unit's maximum health per round instead of a flat 8.
- Charged class actives no longer count twice in quest, raid, and tower power: they fire as real casts on the board instead of also inflating the squad's folded combat power. Passive-ability strength still folds in as before.
- Practice dummies are rescaled to live combat's HP range (Squishy 200, Mixed 280–620, Bruiser 900, Boss 1800) and now fight on the same combat math as real deployments; the custom dummy HP slider defaults to 400.
- Cautious raid strategy, protective provisions, and guild injury/death prevention affect raid casualties again: the advertised multiplier is applied as a per-member spare chance at the casualty step (Cautious's 0.70 injury risk really means 30% of selected injuries are spared), capped at 50%. The hard difficulty death floor stays un-sparable.
Training
- Completing a program in an adventurer's own class grants +1 Training Focus charge on top of its XP bonus, still capped at the Focus maximum.
- Focused and Disciplined now each grant +1 Training Focus charge on a completed program, alongside their +5% training XP.
- Party training aimed at Trust and Loyalty now merges into an existing individual training focus instead of being dropped — you no longer have to burn solo focus charges first to get those gains.
Academy & Market
- Academy-only runs certify at half the usual renown requirement for each guild tier, and every certification display reads the reduced number.
- Signing an academy graduate in an academy-only run grants renown equal to 5 plus 0.3 per point of their overall rating.
- A released academy graduate enters the free-agent pool asking a full market wage priced off their OVR, potential and age, instead of the flat ~100g that let strong graduates be re-signed for a decade on the cheap.
- The open market no longer stocks magical-tier materials — magical essence, mithril ingots, silk thread, stabilized essence and the magical raws — without the Merchants' Rare Imports favor.
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BUG FIXES
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- Death memorials no longer break the news before the fight that caused it — the memorial, plus level-up, ascension, limit break, Hall of Fame, retirement and year-end c eremonies, wait until every battle report and arena has been dismissed.
- Escape no longer silently discards a memorial, ascension, limit-break, level-up or Hall of Fame announcement waiting behind a battle report; they appear once the fight is dismissed.
- Every hero who falls in a week now gets their send-off: memorials queue instead of overwriting each other, and returning to the menu waits until pending send-offs are dismissed.
- The Crown Cup spectator modal's "Watch the Crown Cup" and "Skip to Results" buttons work again; both silently did nothing before. The Watch label also drops its trailing 📺.
- Cup and Rival Challenge box scores now credit each hero only from the leg their party actually fought, instead of folding in their mirror opponent's damage, knockouts and survival.
- Crown Cup appearances, KOs, and MVP tallies are no longer doubled for player and rival members when the finale is committed.
- Battle replays show each adventurer's real face: portraits no longer swap to a different age bracket after a member ages, and uploaded custom portraits now appear in the arena.
- A battle report carrying a corrupt or incomplete replay record now opens report-only instead of crashing the arena when you press Watch.
- A pending rival tower observation saved before a game update now narrates its stored outcome instead of replaying a fight whose verdict no longer matches.
- Garrison fatigue, veterancy, outpost, manning and doctrine bonuses now strengthen the defenders in the skirmish itself instead of only showing on the readout.
- Tower floors now count toward ambition progress for everyone who fought, and level-ups witnessed in the tower — and in raids — credit the "watch your comrades level up" Callings.
- A commander's request for a Tank or Healer now resolves as followed when an academy trainee fills the gap, instead of expiring and costing trust.
- In Academy-only mode, recruiting advice you structurally cannot act on closes out with no trust penalty, and the renown certification notice fires at that mode's halved tier requirements.
- Reassigning a retired hero or staffer to scout, astrologer, or tactician now rolls a specialization for the new post, so their readings and analyses work.
- Reforge previously left an item's stats and its tier badge untouched; it now re-rolls stats, updates rarity, name and sell value, and refuses items it can't legally downgrade.
- League free-agent bids are now judged on what a signing actually costs you now (signing bonus plus any buyout) rather than the full contract value, so a well-funded guild is no longer told "not enough gold this turn" for bids it can easily afford — and winning one auction no longer disqualifies every later bid that week.
- Equipment stat abbreviations are correct: ATK, SPD, LCK, LDR, and Arcane Resistance now reads RES instead of colliding with Arcane Attunement's ARC.
- The Deepforge Compact's crest art now ships with the game instead of being dropped in transit.