Announcing Major Update 0.18!

Hello everyone!

We have an exciting update coming to Escape the Mad Empire this week!

Update 0.18 will be released tomorrow, September 4th, at 7a.m. PDT/4p.m. CEST.

This is our largest Early Access update to date and comes with numerous additions and tweaks, to improve your experience going mad, in Escape the Mad Empire.

List of changes and additions in Update 0.18:

New Content

• Over 50 new armor (cloth and robe armor) and magic weapon items (wands, staves and scepters), mostly based on mental stats (wis, int, will) and introducing new armor set bonus concepts, like elemental damage bonus, single target spell damage bonus, AOE spell bonus and crowd-control bonus. The new ranged magic weapons won’t require ammo.
• Over 50 new Steam achievements with custom icons, ranked by 4 levels of difficulty
• 3 new monsters of challenge rating 5 (Vampire, Fire Ghost, Acid Shambler), with unique behaviors.
• Vault device to add stash inventory space for the base

Balancing

• Instability revamp: instability will now be tied to wearing a high amount of total rarity gear, instead of character level. This means that the average player won’t experience this mechanic until they play for a longer time.
• Party level cap revamp: instead of having to bring a fixed party level cap to a dungeon, depending on the dungeon tier, the players will now be able to bring any party level to any dungeon, up to a party level cap of 21. This is meant to give the players more flexibility about how they compose their parties and how they use their characters.
• A new character level cap of 7 will be introduced.
• Revamped the skill upgrades cost, to make it more fit with skill level and allow high level skill upgrades more easily.
• Buffed the Blood Priest to make it stronger: level 1 spells now use 1 blood mana instead of 2, its skills cooldown were reduced and level 1 Blood Ritual now drops blood 100% of the time, to help make the blood-mana based ‘engine’ turn quicker.
• Calibration pass on Randomator / Enchanting device recipes.
• Increased the odds of finding an identification scroll already identified
• Characters won’t crit fail on ‘support’ spells anymore.
• Calibration pass on Overlord and Necromancer monsters
• Added a series of new resistance / weakness to monsters
• Tweaked Blood Shield so it can be wielded in parallel than the ‘normal’ shield
• Nerfed Int effect on skill damage, but lowered the 'positive' output range to 10+ instead of 14+

Onboarding / difficulty changes

• Re-introduced the old tutorial, and gave the players 2 choices when they start the game, to either start with the older, slower and step-by-step tutorial, then transit to the current tutorial, or start directly to the current mini-quest based tutorial.
• Revamping the dungeon of the current tutorial to make it more punchy and fun
• Introducing a new activable AI button, which allows the characters to automatically hunt their target.
• Now displaying all classes in the Recruit Tower device (even the locked ones), so the players can realize sooner how many classes there are in the game.
• Base tutorial flow revamp: the player will now only be able to unlock and recruit a single new class on the first day instead of 3.
• Guided Light interactions are now ‘on click’ rather than automatic.

QoL / Visual Feedback

• Added new monster skill icons on their tooltip
• Added new visual effects when we click on a monster
• Changed the visual look of the selected character circle, so we can spot more easily which of our characters are selected.
• Changed the visual feedback when we block physical/magical damage with physical/magical armor, to make it more obvious.
• Added new attack speed buttons. The game now has a setting to play at 75/100/125% game speed, and there’s a ‘super speed’ x5 button to easily pass time when needed.
• Fixed the hurt red animation to make it smoother to the eye
• Added new blood splat animation on hurt
• Added missing ground object sprites
• Added a new save game backup system to help prevent saved games from being erased issues.
• Integrated a series of new visual effects for Empire items skills.
• Tons of bug fixes and minor QoL tweaks.

Your feedback has been incredibly helpful during our Early Access so far! We appreciate any suggestions and ideas you have to share, and would love it if you could also join our Discord to tell us more!

Discord Link

Look forward to more updates coming to Escape the Mad Empire!