Gladiator Guild Manager News

The new update had an issue with the save game. If you continue the game you played, it would break and show you an empty gladiator market. Now, this is fixed. Thank you all for quickly reporting this!

First of all, happy holidays everybody! We hope you’re having a great time! ːsteamhappyː

We have just updated the game with the main quest chains (v0.759). Once you reach a Friendly reputation with any faction, they will offer you an alliance with them. You will still be able to do all side quests with any faction, but you’ll get main quests only with the faction you chose for an ally, helping them achieve their goals.

In addition to that, you’ll be able to hire their units.



[h3]Join Baroness to help her stabilize the Deadwoods district[/h3]


[h3]Join Necromancer by helping him with his dark magic projects[/h3]


[h3]Join Peasants and assist them in their struggle for their rights in this harsh region[/h3]
If the rebellion is successful, in addition to higher wages and lower taxes, they will also get approval to form a witch-burning council that you can join.
Make sure you ask them about their rebellion plans to start this silly side quest chain where you’ll be presented with facts about the captured witch and be able to decide if she’s a real witch or not. Then bear the consequences of your decision.



[h3]In some of those quests, you’ll:[/h3]

• Discover Baroness’s secrets and what caused the conflict between her and High Necromancer.
  
• Learn a few things about the history of the Deadwoods. How it earned its name, and about Crimson Desolation.
  
• Fight two new boss monsters.
  

The first main quest chains will start at the Ancient Temple arena. The second part will start either in Iron Town or Hollow Mountain. Depending on the faction you have chosen.
There will be more main quests coming as we add new arenas.


[h2]Changes:[/h2]

[h3]Cleric[/h3]
There were some issues with his behavior that we fixed. He’s also significantly buffed with a much stronger heal and a larger area of effect.

[h3]Healthy And Powerful - Quirk[/h3]
This quirk was so OP that it became a meme on our Discord ːsteamfacepalmː
Now it’s significantly nerfed, so it increases main gladiators stat three times less than it used to. It’s still a pretty good quirk to have but no longer broken.

There are also many minor fixes and tweaks.


[h2]What is Next?[/h2]
We hope you’ll enjoy the new content! New gladiator quirks are coming soon after this update. After that, we’ll be focusing on the endless game mode.
We’ll talk more about its design, so be sure to join us on Discord, tell us what you’d like to see in the game, or follow up the development more closely.



Thank you and happy holidays! ːsteamhappyː

We wanted to share our latest plans for development of the game. We do have a roadmap on our website but as we said there, we might adapt it as we move along.
You can read about it in this post or check out a video where I’ll go through our plans. Video might be a bit longer but I’ll try to be brief about the main plan at the start. Then longer part of the video will be explaining the endless mode that we plan to make and we’d love to hear your feedback about that.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
(Btw you can jump to 7:27 timestamp if you want to hear only about Endless Mode idea)

We had a lot of people asking if we’ll make some sort of endless mode for the game. This mode was in plan only after we finished all 12 arenas, but that will take some time as we need to add a lot of new gladiators, items, quirks and quests for each arena. So we decided that making another mode of playing sooner would be a better thing to do. Especially because each time we add new content this mode would be expanded with these new features as well.

[h3]But first we need to do few other things:[/h3]

• Add new gladiator quirks. This is a huge part of what makes the game fun and gladiators unique.
  
• Implement main quest chains. Currently the game has only side quests. Even though they are connected to the main theme of the game, we really need to add the main ones where you can choose one of the 3 factions to make allegiance and get deeper into the story. Each faction will reveal different things. Also growing reputation and choosing allegiance with one of the factions will allow you to purchase gladiators from that faction.
  
• Make gladiators inventory expand with their level instead of building upgrades. At the moment you can upgrade a few gladiator buildings early on, put a lot of items on those gladiators and beat the game with less tactics and more brute force. This also encourages you to play only with gladiators whose buildings you have already upgraded to max, instead of experimenting with new gladiators that show up after winning each championship. Since new gladiators will have only 2 item slots, they will alway be worse then the ones you already have. Now gladiators will have 1 additional slot per each 5 levels. Then when a new gladiator type appears in some later arena, you are encouraged to buy them as their number of slots will depend on their levels. Overall encouraging to try new gladiators, and to use more tactics instead of brute force.
  

[h2]Tournament Mode[/h2]
Once this is done, we’ll start working on the endless mode.
Here you will not have guild or wages to manage. You will start with a certain amount of gold and with permadeath turned on. After each few battles you’ll be able to buy new gladiators and items. Your goal is to win as many battles as possible, as they keep increasing in difficulty and get the highest score that you can. We also plan to connect this with Steam Leaderboards so you can compare your scores with your friends or other players.
We’ll also have boss fights, rewards and other things as you progress. In the video I explained how this mode will work in more detail. Since we still have other things to finish before we start working on this mode, we’d love to hear your feedback as this is still open for change.

[h2]Join Discord Community[/h2]
You can join our Discord Community and tell us what you think or to chat with us and see what we’re working on currently.


Thank you!

In update v0.746 we have new universal items available. In order to implement them we had to update our code that handles items so they can do new things like cast an area of effect ability and other things that items were not able to do before.

[h2]Here are the new items:[/h2]
[h3]Mantle Of Invisibility[/h3]
Makes a gladiator invisible during the first X seconds of the battle, or until they finish executing their first ability.


[h3]Book Of Holy Light[/h3]
2 second after the battle starts, heals allies for X% of their max health, in the area of X around this gladiator.


[h3]Book Of Fire[/h3]
1 second after battle starts, enemies in area X% around this gladiator get set on fire burning total of X% of their maximum health during 5 seconds.


[h3]Blades Of Terror[/h3]
First melee attack makes enemy lose control and run in terror for next X seconds (or until somebody hits them)


[h3]Book Of Magical Shield[/h3]
Gains magical shield that absorbs a total amount of X damage per each level of the gladiator holding this item.


[h3]Book Of Invincible Shield[/h3]
Gains a magical shield that lasts for X seconds and absorbs all damage during its duration.


[h3]Best Friend[/h3]
1 second after the start of the battle a fighting dog is summoned. Dog gets 1 level for each X levels of this gladiator.
(Note: Currently this item summons a Worg. But we'll replace him with actual dog soon)

[h3]Necklace Of Recklessness[/h3]
Deals X% higher damage, but also receives X% higher damage. (any attack type)


[h3]Necklace Of Persistency[/h3]
Once the gladiator's health drops under 50%, gladiator restores X% of their max health, and enemies in the area of X get pushed away and knocked down for X seconds.


[h2]Quests[/h2]
Additional quest is added for Ancient Temple that has a few follow up quests if you accept to do some shady business with peasants ːsteamhappyː
In this quest you'll have 20 seconds to destroy a door in one of the Ancient Temple's chambers, before an army of imps appears. So it's all about putting your highest damage dealing gladiators.


[h2]Debug Console[/h2]
One last thing. We implemented debug console that you can activate by pressing Shift + F3. This might be useful if you run into any issues. If there is an error in game you'll be able to click on it and press copy button, and then paste the text to us so we can take a better look at what happened.

[h2]Join The Community[/h2]
Join us on Discord and tell us what you think about new items or anything else.

Here’s what’s new in patch v0.743:



[h3]Shaman[/h3]
A melee fighter who summons totems that heal, and shoots fire bolts. During Rain and Heavy Wind weather his abilities are stronger. He is most effective in that kind of weather and in longer fights where he gets a chance to summon as many totems as possible.


[h3]Cleric[/h3]
Tanky/Support gladiator. His shield can block melee, projectile, and area of effect attacks. He also heals allies around him, so he is most effective in crowded melee fights.


[h3]Storm Dwarf[/h3]
A Dwarf’s high tech equipment gathers power from the weather. During Rain and Crimson Mist, his shooting is stronger, and during Heavy Wind weather, his melee attacks also grow stronger. He will then move towards enemies to fight.


[h3]Note[/h3]
Once you play with Shaman or Storm Dwarf, be sure to read how their abilities behave during different weather. And be sure to check weather next to days in timeline, so you can make the best use of these gladiators.

Weather is already influencing gladiators and on harder modes it's advised to be aware of it. For example, if your fight a Troll boss, since his abilities are mostly using Strength, it is good tactic to fight him during Rain when weather buffs are decreasing Strength of all characters in arena, making his attacks weaker.

Also, note that Ancient Tempe and Hollow Mountain arenas have their own independent weather buffs and it won't matter to gladiators what is the weather outside while fighting in there.



The Quirk assignment was fairly flawed. It was assigning duplicate quirks into the list of available quirks. Meaning that you’d be seeing the same few quirks instead of a wider variety of quirks both in shop and on enemies. Now that is improved, and also quirks assignment is less random. So in a shop you’ll always see a combination of positive and negative quirks instead of sometimes running into all negative ones as some players reported.
Also during the championship, green coupons will tend to give enemies negative quirks, blue random, and purple positive. Before quirk assignments were completely random for each gladiator. Now this will make higher reward fights more difficult.



In case you’re one of the players who wants an even higher challenge we added another extremely hard mode called “Hell”. At the start of the game you’ll notice that you get a bit less resources with each harder difficulty. But the biggest challenge is how the difficulty increases as you progress. On harder modes enemies will be higher levels as you complete new arena championships.


[h2]Corrupted Save Game Fixer[/h2]
In very rare situations people would get their save game corrupted and could not launch the game. This happened to some people if they lost electricity in the middle of the game or something else happened that we can’t predict. Overall when this happens the whole save game file gets corrupted beyond saving, and it won’t even let people get back into the game. We had a solution in the Beta branch that would fix this by clearing the save game. Now after being tested in beta, we moved it to the main branch so if this unfortunately happens to you, it will get fixed without you having to switch to beta branch.
We suspect that this might also happen if you exit the game while the game is being saved. Game is saved pretty quickly, but it could happen in very rare cases. Safest way to avoid this is not to suddenly exit with Alt+F4, but to exit using in-game buttons (Main Menu / Exit).


[h2]Bug Fixes / Polishing[/h2]

• Many of the localization issues are solved. Missing text, or misplaced text.
  
• Few gladiator buildings were missing descriptions.
  
• Area of Effect Indicator was not correct because it's shown at the position where the gladiator started casting ability and not where they executed. Now it's fixed so that the circle indicator is following the character's movement. This was not a big issue for previous gladiators, but now that we have Cleric who might move while casting his AoE Heal ability, the problem became apparent and needed fixing.
  
• The End Game Panel used to be above the Options Panel. Now fixed.
  
• Now that we updated gladiator and item shop update costs to start with zero gold we had an issue where if your gold was in minus, you could not update it. Now if shop refresh cost is zero, you can update it even if your gold is in minus value.
  
• The Area of Effect indicator is now thinner and looks much better during the chaos in battle.
  
• Purifier Wings Force effect added among a few other polishing details.
  
• Various other minor fixes and polishes.
  

[h2]Chat With Us[/h2]
Join our Discord Server and tell us what you think about the new gladiators or just stop by to hang out :)