Patch 2.5.0 is here!

"Son, let me tell you something. Either you can move the wooden block, or you get fired." - John the Butcher, Arena Champion I

True story, the real life John the Butcher was my first boss as a teenager and he said this to me. I got fired, so I've dedicated this patch to him. Here's a long overdue update with tons of game balances, bugfixes and finally, achievements! Obviously not everything can be fixed in one hit but I've done my best to fix a bunch of the long standing issues many were having with the game.

Let me know what you think of this patch in the discussions - if more things need tweaking, I shall keep at it as obviously I can only test it so far. I've made some interesting tweaks to skills and stats that hopefully keep the game fresh and interesting.

Please note, this patches only the Windows build of the game. I need to source a new Mac machine to recompile the game for Mac - hopefully early January!

Balancing / Game Changes

• All battle skill essence costs have been HALVED
• Increased the base hit chance of all arcane offensive skills by 15%
• Reduced the difficulty of enemies on hard/ironman and sprint modes ( they have less total stat points etc)
• Halved the distance gladiators can be knocked back / pushed in a single hit
• Halved the rate at which strength affects knockback power ( to mitigate unfair 'straight into spikes' attacks )
• TAUNT attack and defend hit chances now properly scales with Charisma instead of Magicka stat
• Increased the chances of successful TAUNTS doing physical damage (instead of enraging/stunning etc)
• Increased the damage of successful TAUNT attacks to 8-16 HP per Charisma point put into taunt
• Reduced the stats for the Maximus Armour so its slightly above the second tier armour set ( was too powerful and took a bit of the fun out of the early game )
• When offered Maximus armour, you no longer have the option of receiving 5,000 free starting gold ( made the early game a bit too easy and boring - was essentially an enticement for users on the mobile version of the game )
• Reduced hit chance of any one single attack to 90% (down from 99%) unless stunned/resting etc
• Resistance values now max out at 80% (down from 99%) unless a gladiator has 100% resistance ( which means they are IMMUNE)
• Changed elastic tween animations in game to more subtle tween ins.
• Enemy gladiators can now no longer be of equal to / higher level than the reigning Arena Champion's level
• Increased the chance of gladiators falling into spiked pit to 10% per turn spent (while standing near spikes).
• Ghost Tournament Champions now have unlimited Essence as an added challenge
• Damage to enemies now is cumulative. If an enemy has 25 armour and you do 100 damage, not only does the armour go down to 0, you also take an extra 75 points of damage. Previously if your armour reached zero in one attack, it absorbed the rest, so you couldn't one-shot enemies even if you were way more powerful. (This new way is how it works in classic and medieval)
• Added a shake screen if you one-shot your enemy.
• Gold rewards for rolling a 20 when resurrecting have been reduced to 50 gold + 25 gold per level
• Made damage splat image popups smaller
• Removed knockback effect from Molten Death spell
• Reduced damage of enemies in all difficulties except normal
• Reduced max health of enemies in all difficulties except normal
• Magic Missile cooldown improves with each point spent on skill
• Removed error logging for most users as it throws up too many 'false flag' errors that do not affect the game but still show up in error reports
• Removed 'More S&S' button from Town
• Removed elemental resistances. These were stats introduced in S&S V that ended up affecting gladiators in S&S 2 ( because they use the same engine/codebase ), so gladiators would be immune to some of your spells and you had no way to combat it. (You only have 'magic' resistance in S&S 2.
• Changed how magic resistance works. Spells that fail to hit now show a "MISS" icon (instead of RESIST). Successful spells damage is *reduced* by whatever your magic resistance is. (A fireball spell that hits for 200 damage against a character with 50% magic resist will only do 100 damage, for example)

Bugfixes

• Fixed a bug where Falcon Eyes skill used melee damage instead of ranged damage values
• Increased damage power of Winters Core per point spent on skill
• Fixed a bug where the game forced you to start up in Fullscreen mode even after you had chosen Windowed mode.
• Fixed a bug where gladiators did not play their special 'spiked' death animation when falling onto spikes
• Potential fix for enemies sometimes receiving 2 turns in a row
• Fixed a bug where enemies appeared to half leap/half fumble (then get cut off) randomly during the battle
• Fixed a bug where choosing the helmet of a defeated Ghost Champion would give you the next champion's helmet
• Fixed a bug where Arena Champion Gaiax appeared to have two eyes instead of one
• Fixed a bug where duels were reported as being deathmatches and yield animations were not playing
• Fixed a bug where arenas sometimes scrolled past where they should and sky was visible behind
• Fixed some jittery camera bugs while in the arena
• Fixed a bug where the first fight after a loss to a Ghost Champion would be against a ghost regular gladiator
• You can now choose Redux backgrounds or classic backgrounds *seperately* from redux / classic shopkeepers to customize just how you want your game to look. Just toggle these from the Settings screen ( you may need to set this manually the first time you load the game again.)
• Fixed a bug where the game would tell you it was nighttime but the town background showed daylight
• Removed black bar border images and made game backgrounds wider on fullscreen