Gladiator Guild Manager News

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.

We got feedback about the recent Drummer and Rhino nerf. Some players liked to build their damage as well and did not like losing that option. This makes sense to us, those gladiators are not the best damage dealers but it’s nice to have an option to play with increasing their damage as well. So we revert the previous nerf of those two units and they are the same as before now.

Fence Wielder is buffed. You can see my thoughts on it in this video:
https://www.loom.com/share/b33e59fa4c7a44989304004748d01007

Necromancer's main quest had an issue with a new quest reward that is now fixed. Also few main quests were not giving boss type rewards and now that is fixed as well.

We started working on a system that will allow enemies to have items as well. On last update I did not disable this work-in-progress feature and some enemies were appearing with very basic low level items making first fights a bit harder than they should be. Now this system is disabled and enemies do not appear with any items.

Thank you for all the reports and feedback!

Drummer and Rhino gladiators are nerfed to deal minimum damage. Compared to other tanks like Knight or Marauder, Drummer and Rhino are so much superior because of their Taunt ability that it made no sense to ever play with other tanks. But now those two gladiators are nerfed and deal barely any damage, making other tanks a good option as well. But even with small damage those two are extremely powerful units because of taunts. In future we’re planning to add additional ability to one of those units to differentiate them from each other. All suggestions about their new abilities are welcome.

Enemy teams have certain randomization in the way they are made. So any fighter in enemy team can be replaced by another random fighter. Using Drummer and Rhino in these randomizations was already bad idea because sometimes there will be a team with 6 Drummers which is a terrible team. Now with low damage it is even worst having a lot of them in team. So they are not going to be randomized in those situations unless the team is specifically made for one of those units to be in there.

Difficulty of Ring of Death is increased by 10-15%. It can feel grindy as those fights are easier than Quest or Championships. So they offer a bit higher challenge now.

We’re thinking of new modes for Ring of Death to keep it fresh as you progress through the game. One idea we're considering is a battle where you need to select X gladiators to fight X enemy gladiators, but they will fight 1vs1 one by one.
To further explain, let’s say it’s 3vs3. Enemies have Knight, Berserker and Hunter. So you need to select 3 units and each of them will be faced against each of the enemy units. Your first unit will fight Knight. Second unit will fight Berserker and the third unit will fight Hunter. So you need to find a counter for each, but won’t be able to use only your most powerful gladiator for all of them but will have to utilize more of your team. Then some of those battles will be 5vs5, so you’ll need to have 5 gladiators that are up for the challenge. I’m still thinking about what it will take to win those. Maybe we allow 1 defeat.
I’d love to hear if you have any feedback on this, or if you have ideas for what other battle types you’d like to see in the Ring of Death arena.

Thanks you!