Greetings, tactics fans! Lest you think I've been anything less than extremely busy following the launch of Together in Battle to version 1.0 these four days past, allow me to dispel the notion.
With an influx of new players has come an influx of new feedback (and an influx of bug reports), so I've been working quite hard to push out a quick initial update to address those bugs, tweak balance, and make some quick improvements. Let's get to the changes!
First, we have balance tweaks:
- gave the Barudit class an additional early proficiency in Health or Dodge.
- Blackguards now gain +8 bonus Health instead of +5.
- Wyrms now gain +6 bonus Strength instead of +5.
- increased the Prophet's Dodge boost from +25 to +30, making them a bit more reliable at dodging attacks.
- Protectors now learn Far Shield in addition to their other bonuses, allowing them to fulfill their healer role while staying farther out of harm's way.
- the quality of item sacks thrown by fans in the crowd now gets better and better as the player advances up the leagues, making nabbing them a more worthwhile side objective.
Second, we have miscellaneous improvements:
- item tooltips for weapons now always list the uses left out of the weapon's maximum uses, making it easier to decide which weapons to use repair kits on.
- AI improvement: the game now factors in space damage on all AI levels, not just the highest one, meaning that enemies will wander into damaging spaces less often on all difficulty levels.
- AI improvement: the game now considers Disarmed, Slowed, and Sick status effects less valuable when scoring moves.
- new loading screen tip: "Buy good armor for your characters; this will more than pay for itself in reduced casualties."
- new loading screen tip: "Golems are expensive to buy, but it's a one-time cost: they don't draw an ongoing salary."
Third and most importantly, we have bug fixes:
- fixed: novelists and toymakers had a formatting mistake in their camp activities that caused the game to throw a fatal error when choosing them for a one-on-one in camp and giving them orders.
- fixed: when playing with gamepad, the recruitment menu was off by 1 when disabling character portraits upon recruitment, causing certain recruits to become unselectable.
- AI fix: the AI was not recognizing chasm tiles as potentially damaging units who moved over them (even while temporarily levitating).
- AI fix: if a unit moved after attacking, the unit would not rotate defensively to guard its back regardless of the AI handicap level.
- AI fix: the AI valued actions applying Disarmed status to targets who were already disarmed.
- fixed: in some circumstances in caravan defense missions, it was possible for caravan guards to spawn already submerged in water.
- fixed: golems and spirits could react to an ally cooking dinner.
- fixed: the dialogue upon destroying training dummies in the Qualifier was no longer firing due to continued use of OnCharDeath triggers instead of OnObjDeath.
- fixed: tutorial text on health and resistances in Battle in the Overgrown Garden had begun to exceed the available dialogue box area.
- fixed: a text overlay removed via script action could inappropriately reappear after closing a dialogue menu, provided that a text overlay had previously been hidden due to the objectives screen or another UI element temporarily hiding it.
- fixed: due to a scripting change, it had become possible to hire out guards or explorers more than once in a day.
- fixed: item tooltips could say "1 uses left."
- fixed: unique portraits with poseable mouths but no support for skin or hair hue-shifting could get their mouths "stained" in their Actions Bar portrait in battle if the last proc gen unit to be selected before them had a mouth-layer mask.
- fixed some graphical errors with hair layering for generic male kineticist, generic female cryokineticist, generic female psy healer, and generic assassin portraits.
- fixed a graphical error with the masking for generic female photokineticists.
- fixed: Secret line 17 could be generated in a variant too long for the dialogue box.
- fixed: unintended species could be generated with Secret line 03.
And last, an improvement for campaign creators:
- when using script actions to spawn units within a randomized range of spaces, the game will now check ahead to ensure that an environmental hazard tile is not chosen for the spawn location. If it is, the game will shift to the closest non-hazard space to spawn the unit on.
And that's it! Not too shabby for a few days of work, eh? Now, then, on to a bit of news...
We're past 50 reviews! 🥳
I want to give a shout-out here to all the lovely people who've left reviews for the game. Thanks to you all, we're now past the 50 review threshold! This means that Steam shows Together in Battle not just as "Positive," but "Very Positive"--which might sound small, but it's quite important to boosting discovery on Steam.
Our next milestone to reach is 500 reviews. If we can hit that, it'll really kick things into high gear and help ensure the game gets shown to a wide audience of players. If you've played Together in Battle and enjoyed yourself, please contribute your review--every little bit makes a big difference! 😃
Coverage!
I'd also like to call out some of the nice coverage the game has been getting: reviews from CSH Picone and Grid Commander; some great ongoing LPs from Bumpy McSquigums, Special Caesar, and White Falcon; and a frankly hilarious PVP tournament stream I did in collaboration with the Nihil channel. And I have it on good authority that there's more to come, too!
So what's next?
I have some really fun ideas for ways to further expand upon Together in Battle: new skills, new portrait graphics, new random events, even an entirely new game mode...keep an ear to the ground. There's more to come!
Tactically yours,
Craig