Gargadusa's Tower · build 24658819 · published
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NEW FEATURES
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After 10 weeks of building a new battle engine and slowly sneaking the backend logic into the game over the last month, it's now ready for beta play. The math is mathing, the sim is simming, and it just looks cool.
As always, this is a new feature that is ready for feedback and testing, so I of course put it into the game too soon ;)
In turn, I'll be iterating and editing the experience rapidly over the coming weeks to get it fully dialed in. Numbers will change, balance will be tweaked, obstacles and terrain will be developed. The key takeaway here is that this fundamentally changes the player combat experience and shakes up how battles even work. I'm very excited for it, but I'm also looking forward to hearing your feedback on how to get things feeling as good as possible.
Additionally, while the art/vfx are vanilla today, the foundational code is in place so that once I have better art assets, it will be very easy for me to upgrade later.
- Raid, quest, tower and garrison battle reports gain a "▸ Watch the Battle" door — replay the fight you just resolved, or any fight still in your report history; multi-party raids name each company and give it its captain's face.
- New Battle Presentation setting: Always, Big moments (default) or Never decides when a fresh fight opens the arena before its report; the manual Watch door is never gated by it. A quest that kills someone or ends in critical failure, a fresh raid with a death or disaster, your first raid, decade boss floors and any tower death present fight-first — arena, then the finale stamp, then the Battle Report as epilogue — while routine deathless fights lead with the report.
- Every beat draws who hit whom: an arc from the actor to each target, arrowheaded and side-coloured, with a ring on each struck or mended unit that holds for the whole beat. Heals draw dashed green, killing blows draw heavier.
- Click a company card to open that hero's dossier: portrait, live HP and OVR, and their ledger of damage dealt, damage taken and healing given. The focused hero — or every member of a focused enemy kind — is ringed on the board.
- Click any foe — its mark on the board or its row in the rail — for a focus card with the creature's full-colour illustration, live alive/total, OVR and per-unit HP, plus attrition pips.
- First watch keeps its secrets: the timeline charts only as far as you've actually watched, future turning points stay dark, the total length is withheld, and seeking clamps to where you've been. The finale lifts the fog for the rewatch, and the banner offers Battle Report and Rewatch.
- The garrison replay starts playing the moment you open it and paces itself by what's happening: marches and trades batch into single beats while casts, deaths and affix turns keep the full breath, so a roughly twenty-minute tower assault watches in a few.
- Garrison skirmishes now land on the same tabbed battle report as quests and raids — Overview, Debrief, Chronicle and the Watch door — instead of the old bar-graph results screen.
- The victory banner's Battle Report button opens the debrief instead of just closing the arena.
- Tag adventurers and parties with organization labels — presets (Mentor, Top Performer, Keep, Sell, Bench, Project) or your own text, up to 8 tags of 24 characters each. Tags show on roster rows, filter the registry, and match in search.
- Adventurers pick up automatic tags with no upkeep: Newbie at level 3 or below, Awakening while they stand at an ambition crossroads.
- Export the visible roster or your parties to a CSV spreadsheet — the roster export carries every stat, contract and tag column; the parties export lists members, average OVR and each party's active synergies.
- Show or hide roster registry columns from a new Columns picker; your choice persists across saves.
- New custom-difficulty slider, Elite Talent Frequency (5%–100%), throttles how often A- and S-tier potential is generated — and, at half strength, B-tier — across both the free agent pool and Academy graduates, handing the removed chance down to C/D/F recruits. Free Agent Quality is renamed Free Agent Pool Quality and now says plainly that it only governs walk-in applicants.
- Right-click a recruit row for quick actions: Recruit, Scout and Dismiss on free agents, Scout and Make Trade Offer on Guild Block rivals, Scout and Enroll on Academy prospects. Actions you can't afford or aren't allowed are greyed rather than hidden.
- Rival adventurers now open as a proper dossier — Profile and Career tabs under a Guild Dossier masthead — with a direct "View dossier" button on the rival roster card. The free one-click Scout still gates what you can see, and no player-only actions appear.
- Quests and raids now post a letter grade instead of a number until your Scouting Post reaches tier 3: F below 40, D 40-54, C 55-69, B 70-84, A 85-99, S 100 and above. Building upgrades provide ways to reduce the fog on this, but the thinking here is failure and fatalities will be turned up over the coming weeks and obfuscating the danger (and upping the value of your scouts and tacticians, in turn) is a big part of that.
- Raids now sit under the same intel fog as quests — the bounty list, the selected-bounty stats, and the launch panel's risk and injury estimates all read the ranked estimate instead of the true number.
- Grades are read off your scouts' estimate, not the truth, so a mis-ranked contract can happen.
- Six new contracts fill out the thin biomes: Tide Watch and Wreck Salvage on the coast, High Pass Rescue and Peak Hunt in the mountains, Rift Seal and Warp Survey in the planes.
- Coastal, mountain and planar work now comes up twice as often on the board's open draw, so environment-hungry ambitions like The Wanderer's calling are reachable.
- The Deepforge tab is rebuilt as a masthead over two columns. The standing meter grows a tick per band and names how many points remain to the next rung and which commissions it unseals.
- Service cards sit in a two-up grid with a fact strip apiece — fee, grade or quality, cadence, open bare slots, in-town headcount — and the whole card toggles the service, not just the switch.
- Commissions render as parchment tiles with their gear art; locked entries name the standing band that unseals them.
- A right rail carries Brunnhilde's letters and a Forge Log of every Compact transaction, filterable by Work or Coin.
- The Gear Autopilot master now reads Off, Part or On, and the masthead counts how many services are running.
- The tab wears a drawn forge crest and a forge-seal watermark in place of the anvil emoji, and Brunnhilde's crew card shows her portrait when the art is present.
- Reserve an equipped item and it never loses durability on quests — it still gives its full stats, and Strip All, Optimize and the weekly auto-upgrade all leave it alone, so a soul bond can't wear out while you wait for the right crafter.
- With no Blacksmith, Armorer or Jeweler on staff for that slot, any available crafter can now emergency-patch the item for the normal cost, repairing at half their skill.
- All 21 soundtrack songs have been added to the game ;)
- A standard-mode new game now inherits a guild in decline: 2 or 3 random level-1 buildings from the tier-1 pool (workshop, tavern, granary, reception, trade routes, armory, training yard, warehouse), each seeded at Shoddy quality with one effect at -30%, plus a founding note from Oaken explaining the state of the grounds. They can be fixed with the usual Shoddy repair.
- A `?` sits at the right end of the nav strip; click it to open Sage's Wisdom already turned to the guide for the tab you're on.
- The Tower landing page carries a "Your Holds" strip above Raid Readiness: one row per active garrison with its front floor, the company on the wall, fatigue band, manning, weekly upkeep, and an amber flag when it's under-supplied, exhausted or under-manned. Clicking a row opens the Garrison tab.
- Portal Resonance now names the company freezing a held floor and what the watch costs per week, and on an unheld floor it says garrison is the counterplay with a button to station one.
- The crown correspondence view shows Aldric's Favor — the current value, its standing label, and a bar.
- Desktop: drop any PNGs into the portraits folder and they join a pool your new adventurers draw from — no fixed slot layout needed. Put files in a subfolder named after a class, or end the filename with -Archer, to prefer them for that class.
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QUALITY OF LIFE
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- The Star Chart Ledger gains Group (Constellation, Party, None), Sort (Urgency, Name, Progress) and Show (All, Actionable, Near & Urgent) controls; bench heroes group under Unassigned.
- The commander's read on a recruit — portrait, verdict line and 0–100 score — now sits on the negotiation screen itself for both new signings and contract extensions, instead of surfacing only after you pass the turn.
- During a hiring freeze the Recruit option is greyed out with a "Hiring frozen" reason instead of silently doing nothing when clicked.
- Faction contract cards, contract details, raid bounty cards and bounty details now list the per-member XP payout, matching the estimate the War Table already showed for the same raid.
- The market's buy panel gains a Bulk button that fills the quantity to the largest amount that stays under the bulk-premium penalty, and "Buy to bulk limit" now tells you why it can't act — out of stock, warehouse full, bulk band already used up, or not enough gold — instead of silently setting the quantity to 1.
- Routine Front Desk notices roll up into a single digest instead of listing one by one.
- The week summary gives raids their own section.
- The seminar picker's caution triangle now explains itself: hovering the Distant Master's Tutelage option states the 20% chance of returning only +1 skill with tuition charged in full.
- The Requisition Shop's earn hint is always visible and names the real source: win Crown Contracts on the Quest Board, which require Reception II and War Room II. The faction board's "Crown Patrol" contracts pay renown, not tokens.
- A Crown Contract that ends in partial success now posts a Live Feed line saying no Requisition Tokens were awarded and that full success is required.
- The Tier Certification denial dialog now labels the payout "Tribute Refund (95%)", matching the gold you actually get back.
- The Tax Relief Writ can no longer be bought when your guild pays no weekly overhead — the button reads "No Overhead" — and the Treasury's overhead projection now shows the reduced figure while the writ is active.
- The Lethality slider now explains what it actually multiplies: death chance on failed quests and rough wins with unmitigated setbacks, with a pointer to Death Floor if you want a minimum risk on every quest.
- The protector's presence label now reconciles: garrison + frontier work = total, and it names the home-ground multiplier while one of your patrols is stationed there.
- Hovering the region race line breaks the leader's presence into garrison and frontier work, states that territory is won by quests and raids rather than the CCL table, and repeats the hold threshold.
- Unequipping an item clears its reserved mark along with its lock, so a pooled item can't carry a reserve you can no longer reach.
- Russian material text updated — workshop names now match the ones used in-game.
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BALANCE
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- Adventurers can now die on quests you win. Each unmitigated in-quest setback — an ambush the Watchtower couldn't warn off and the captain couldn't reroute — adds a death chance on partial and success outcomes, scaled by the quest's threat rating and damped for overpowered parties. It runs through every existing mitigation, the save ladder, and the Lethality multiplier, so a clean dominant win stays near zero while high-lethality games finally bite. Flawless critical successes are never fatal.
- Death saves work in the Tower: Death Defier, Temple Divine Protection and a stocked Chirurgeon can now convert a lethal blow into a critical injury on a floor fight, firing before the miraculous survival and Salvation Grimoire checks so those aren't wasted. Aegis of the Absolute still overrides everything.
- Dual-class members now satisfy every role they carry. A Tank/Healer in the healer slot no longer triggers the "No Healer" injury penalty, the ×1.4 recklessness multiplier, or a ✗ in party readiness, and Lone Wolf, Team Player and tank-conditioned traits read both roles.
- Slotting a dual-role hero into the Crown Cup Healer slot now fields them as a Healer — for both the slot label and the per-member combat modifiers — matching how rival guilds build their parties.
- Top Performer, MVP, Hero of the Day and the raid standout now weight role output by OVR, so a sub-60 healer no longer tops a party of 100+ heroes. Peers of similar strength are still decided by role contribution.
- Tanks are now credited for damage absorbed, scaling up with their defensive stats. The old formula rewarded taking more damage, punishing the better-defended tank.
- Academy graduates now sign 3-year entry-level contracts instead of the 1-year minimum, so a graduate hired late in Winter no longer expires within weeks.
- A new game's opening free-agent pool now honors the Free Agent Pool Quality setting, and the setting's description explains that higher values push more of the pool into higher tiers, A/S included.
- The experimental crafting technique's discovery roll now resolves whether the craft succeeded or failed, delivering its advertised rate. If the crafter's profession has nothing left to discover, the roll yields a rare component instead, and the technique's tooltip says "Discovery: no new recipes" rather than advertising a chance that can't pay out.
- Rival material offers arrive about half as often at every trust tier, and each rival now sends at most one caravan offer a week until tier 8 (two at tiers 8–10). Pricing on those offers is unchanged.
- Higher difficulty presets no longer inflate territory presence. Rival frontier-work presence is now divided by the preset's rival-activity multiplier, so the slider keeps raising league competition without turning every region into a fortress. No change at default difficulty.
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BUG FIXES
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- Quest deaths respond to setbacks and the Lethality slider again — the unmitigated setback fatal window and the difficulty death multiplier were being ignored on the engine-resolved path, and are now layered back on top of it.
- Rival guilds no longer keep climbing the Tower after you conquer Capricorn and sever the portal. Their attempts stop under the same seal as yours, their floors freeze at the high-water mark they reached instead of decaying, and the weekly feed stops reporting rival tower progress.
- The Tower's Prepare view no longer reports impossible Death Risk figures like "-2710647991767% someone dies · 372.2% each" — each member's previewed death chance is clamped to 0–100%.
- The raid intel tab's Known Opposition block never rendered for any raid. It now lists the boss, the elites with their counts, and the minion tally.
- The tactician's pre-deployment read no longer claims you have no healer or no tank when the party's roles come from their classes.
- Clicking a constellation header did nothing in the Star Chart's list mode; the Ledger now honors that filter in every grouping.
- Enemy kinds with no shipped art, such as the Ridge Drake, now show their drawn family silhouette in the rail and on the focus card instead of an empty icon slot.
- Equipping an item now clears any lock or reserve flag left over from a dead or departed previous wearer, so a reassigned item can't be silently skipped again.
- The Deepforge landmark on the frontier map is legible again — it was inking near-black and disappearing against the dark map table, and now uses the pale landmark ink (or the Deepforge crest once that art ships).
- Aldric's Quest Excellence letter asked for "five contracts" while the objective counted quests; it now says quests in every language.