First post-release patch & plans for more content in the future

Survivors!

It’s only been a few days since Judgment emerged from Early Access, and oh, what a time it has been. We’ve seen an explosion across global media, with numerous youtube videos and twitch streams from around the world. It’s been a pleasure and a privilege to see so many people enjoy our game. Thank you for that.

Of course, the Apocalypse waits for no man. Today we are releasing our first post-release patch, which includes bug fixes of the most glaring issues that you reported just after release, and a few other improvements that were easy and relative risk-free to make. Below you can also read a bit more about our future plans for Judgment.

Here are the two main issues that were fixed. A list of other smaller improvements can be found at the bottom of the post.

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Hit Chance Bug

This was such a small bug, a simple debugging toggle that we accidentally left on. But with such huge implications. The chance to hit, for both demons and survivors, was +50 than what was displayed. The implications of such a bug are huge:

• The minimum hit chance of 20% suddenly became 70%, making high evasion rather useless.
• The maximum hit chance was 50% instead of 100%, because 50+50 gives you 100% hit rate. Any additional points spent in accuracy that increased the hit chance above 50 were wasted.
• Everyone was hitting much more often, dealing damage much faster, making melee and tanks much less useful, and making weapon range an OP stat, because too much damage was dealt before closing in the distance.
• High accuracy weapons and accuracy improving skills were mostly wasted.
• Automatic weapons were OP due to high attack rate AND high hit rate.
• Cover, which increases both accuracy and evasion, was much less useful than it should have been.
• The penalty penalizing ranged against melee, accuracy penalty at night - all didn’t work as planned.

So we fixed it. But that wasn’t enough. This bug was introduced a month ago, so all our balancing tests were done with it. That meant we had to redo them - and that’s what we’ve been doing mostly, for the past 48 hours since we found this issue. And as expected, some things were off. Evasion and tanks suddenly became OP. So here’s what we had to change:

• Evasion bonuses from skills and items were lowered a little bit.
• The minimum hit chance was increased from 20% to 30%.
• Accuracy of all weapons and all enemies increased by 20%

These fixes make Fallen Angels and Morax a bit less OP than they were, specially against tanks, who are now useful against them once again. But fighting against such enemies with high range still requires a change in tactics compared to the lower tier, lower range enemies.

Kidnapped Survivors bug

There was a bug in the campaign mission where survivors were kidnapped. As soon as you reached this point in the campaign, 2 survivors were removed from your base. If these survivors happened to be in a task force, they were NOT removed from the task force. This caused issues, especially if you sent that same task force to rescue these survivors, and then ended up having the same survivor twice. There was a workaround, you simply had to remove the kidnapped survivor manually from the task force, but now it won’t happen any more.

Note: If you have a save with a kidnapped survivor in a task force, you will still have to remove them manually. The fix will prevent it from happening again, but not fix saves after the bug happened.

Plans for the future

We also wanted to take this opportunity to give you some insights into our future plans and roadmap. We have been asked several times what we are planning to do post-release. Let us be clear that, the development of Judgment’s has not ended. This patch will not be the last one, and in the future we do plan to add more content/mechanics, not just fixes.

Our next patch, unless anything urgent comes up, will be a few short weeks from now. During this time we plan to focus on community suggestions, work on quality of life improvements, balance changes and UI fixes based on player feedback. That is our main focus right now.

Following that, we will start working on a larger update that will include more new content and maybe even mechanics. We’re playing with the idea of other game modes, in addition to campaign and sandbox, but no promises since we haven’t thought it through yet.

In the meantime, you can keep yourself up to date following us on social media, or joining our rapidly-growing Discord server.

Other Fixes

• Warnings will now be shown in the world map as well.
• Geologist moved to tier 3 research. Waiting for tier 4 before you could search for stones and clay was too much, since you could run out.
• Geologist no longer needs bricks, since without geologist you can’t find more clay/stone to make bricks, if you ever run out.
• Companion farms now provide more wheat and vegetables, so a single companion farm is more efficient than 1 wheat and 1 veggie farm. It’s still less efficient than 1 wheat or 1 veggie if you only need that.
• Abilities time to cast now displayed more accurately, with decimal points.
• Taskforce management edit members button now shows + and - instead of just +, so it’s clear you can use that to remove survivors as well.
• Some event rewards tweaked so the reward better fits the game stage
  Added demon scales and hell essense to loot in some tier 4/5 scavenge locations (mostly churches).
• Defenders can no longer start with the weak trait.
• Language mods no longer disable achievements.
• Some fixes to Russian translation.