Gladiator Guild Manager News

Fixed guild issue where upgrade button was available before building was built.
Added safeguards to new save game variables.

I hope you're all doing well and having a blast during the holidays. We have finished most of the functionality of the After Battle Stats and had a lot of fun testing it. So, even though we want to polish up a few more things and do not have localization in other languages yet, we figured it would be really nice if we shared it in Beta, so you guys can have some fun with it while you're enjoying the holidays.

The After Battle Stats feature is now live in the Beta branch (v0.939 or higher)! It's very easy to enable with just a few clicks, and I'll explain how at the bottom of this post.



We wanted to add some sort of end statistics and were asking our community for feedback. Then we got an amazing suggestion from one of our players, saying that instead of just adding some statistics at the end of the game, why not add actual battle stats at the end of each battle? These would show the damage dealt by each unit and other useful stats. As soon as we heard the suggestion, it was clear that this was a super important feature that the game was missing, and we knew we had to make it. Battles can be chaotic and this is a much needed feature to help us understand how gladiators are performing.

Now, once the battle is finished, you'll be able to open the After Battle Stats panel by clicking on the Stats button on the top left side of the screen.



You'll be able to see:

• Total damage that the unit dealt.
  
• Total damage that this unit has taken.
  
• Total damage that this unit has blocked, either for itself or for allies, by using magical shield abilities.
  
• Total healing that this unit has done, either to allies or itself.
  
• Number of units killed.
  
• Damage per second.
  
• Healing per second.
  
• Total time that the unit spent in battle alive.
  
• Percentage of time spent in battle while lacking stamina for an ability and waiting for it to restore.
  
• Score is a sum of: Damage Dealt, Taken, Blocked, and Healing. (This last stat is not implemented yet)
  

You are able to sort the list of units by any of those stats, either ascending or descending.

For us, this feature was so much fun to play with. I continued my previous playthrough with this feature and was very curious to see which of my units were really the highest damage dealers or how effective my tank was by comparing how much of the enemy damage he was actually taking. Then, as I kept upgrading my team, I loved adding a powerful item to my main damage dealer and comparing how much her Damage Per Second improved.

A little more about the functionality of this feature: Each time you start a new battle, it will calculate the stats for that battle. But if you're playing a championship, the stats will accumulate through all the battles of that championship, so you can see how your units are performing during all those battles in summed scores. But there is a Clear button if you want to reset the data in the middle of the championship, and also auto-clear that will reset the data after each of those battles.
The same functionality works for Tournament mode.

There are a few minor things that still need polishing or fixing that I'll note here:

• Damage per second and healing per second are not calculated for summoned units (warlocks or necromancers units).
  
• The final score is not being calculated yet. The idea is to add all main stats just to give you an idea of the overall usefulness of the unit in battle. But this is not a crucial stat, just a calculation of other stats.
  
• And we want to do a few visual polishes.
  
• Being in beta we do not have localization for other languages for this feature.
  

Overall, the main functionality is here already, so don't let this hold you back from trying it out.

[h2]How to play beta?[/h2]

Find Gladiator Guild Manager in your Steam library. Right click and Properties.

Then click on Betas tab, then on Beta Participation, and select: after_battle_stats_beta.

Once you start the game it should be v0.939 or higher.


We’d love to hear your opinion about this feature. How do you like it? What did you find most useful? Did you encounter any issues?
Let us know here in the comments or join us on Discord.

Thank you so much for being with us on this journey of developing this game! We wish you amazing holidays and a very happy New Year! ːsteamhappyː
- Entertainment Forge

We went through all the bosses and made sure they are better adjusted. Some of them had huge amounts of damage once they are very high level. They were manageable, but you'd have to have a team with powerful tanks, and they were too hard for more offensive and fragile teams. Now, some of them have a trade-off with more health and lesser damage. Also, the movement speed of all bosses went through the roof once they got to a very high level. So now, they all have fixed movement speeds that are appropriate for each of them. And other adjustments and fixes regarding boss units. Overall they are not that much easier, but their stats are better balanced so different types of gladiator teams have a chance.

Balanced game to adjust for enemy level scaling. They will scale a bit slower so it’s easier to follow with your own gladiator levels. But difficulty settings will have a bigger effect so you can still make the game pretty hard if you want.
I will soon go through all bosses and adjust their damage. Idea is to get them to allocate a bit more points into health and less in damage so more fragile teams have a chance.

Best Friend and Undergrowth Pet items are buffed to summon higher level units.

Went through all quests and made sure all boss fights are giving boss rewards including Universal Item.

Also we’re getting close to finishing the After Battle Stats feature. Once it is ready we’ll release it in the Beta Branch for anyone who wants to check it out.

We had some bugs with difficulty before that was preventing it from working effectively. And now that they are fixed that game might get too hard. We had reports from people and I am doing another playthrough to test it out and noticed difficulty getting too steep at some points. But it takes a long time to finish playthrough as a developer as I keep stopping to fix and tweak things so I’m still at Deep Mines Arena (8).

This is how difficulty works. Finishing each arena makes enemies harder. In arena 1 (graveyard) the difficulty of the average enemy gladiator that you’ll be fighting is level 1. And by the time you reach last arena 12 (Mana Tower) the difficulty of the average enemy gladiator is level 30. Your units usually don’t get as high level but you have the advantage of using items, assigning skill points manually, and taking advantage of knowing the enemy team, being able to plan and counter their team.

Then we have difficulty scaling. These are current difficulty scaling numbers.

• difficultyEasy = 0.75f;
  
• difficultyNormal = 1.15f;
  
• difficultyHard = 1.30f;
  
• difficultyNightmare = 1.80f;
  
• difficultyHell = 2.25f;
  

So on Easy, the average enemy at arena 12 will not be 30, but 30 x 0.75 = 22.5 or on Nightmare 30 x 1.8 = 54.

This might have been too hard so I scaled back to these numbers that we did use at some point:

• public static float difficultyEasy = 0.75f;
  
• public static float difficultyNormal = 1f;
  
• public static float difficultyHard = 1.15f;
  
• public static float difficultyNightmare = 1.4f;
  
• public static float difficultyHell = 1.7f;
  

I’ll do more testing and adjustments today. But I'd love to hear from you if it already got better or needs more tweaking.

Also few boss quests were not giving boss rewards that are now fixed.