Update #3: nets, calendar saves, custom character opponents, new palettes!

Greetings, tactics fans! I'm here with another update full of balance improvements, fun new stuff, some extra quality of life, and some important bug fixes. This is a much meatier update than the past two (which were fairly minor), so I've taken the liberty of jumping the version number ahead to v. 1.0.10.

Without further ado, let's get to the changes!

[h3]Let's start with a big quality-of-life feature:[/h3]

when playing with manual saving enabled, you can now access the save menu on the calendar screen at the beginning of each day in addition to the start of each turn during battles! This allows you to save in alternate slots (and later, to reload to a recent point) even if something goes wrong on a day without a fight.

[h3]I'm also continuing to tweak balance among the game's classes based on player feedback, including a promised addition to the barudit repertoire: nets![/h3]

added Weighted Nets to the game! These equip to the off hand, granting a 5% Dodge boost and the skill Throw Net; usable by characters with net mastery.
new skill: Throw Net. It has very low damage and only a 75% chance to hit, but possesses a 100% base chance of causing both Immobilized and Disarmed if it does. Furthermore, it doesn't end the turn.
proc gen barudit now have a 1-in-3 chance to spawn with a weighted net in their inventory.
the Wyrm advanced class now gets +1 range on Throw Net, giving them a bit more flexibility in locking down enemies to make up for their comparative lack of defensive bulk.
buffed promoted bronze golems to make them more competitive with their stone bretheren. Titans now gain an extra 10 bonus health (+36, up from +26), +3 to Strength (up from +2), +2 to counterattack limit, two different counterattacks (Spin Saw and Spin Saw 2), and can use Hold for a mere 1 energy. This allows them to lock down areas, soak damage, and retaliate against held enemies. As for Colossi, they now gain +9 Strength (up from +5) and can use Engine Boost for only 3 energy, making them more viable as offensive front-liners.
Berserkers now learn Berserk, giving them a fun new tool to make up for the added masteries they pass up.
new skill: Berserk. Buffs the user's movement by 25% and strength by 20% for the turn.

[h3]We have more options for custom characters![/h3]

created six new skin tones usable for custom human portraits (but which will never be chosen in proc gen portraits): green, red, blue, purple, black, and white.
created eight new skin tones usable for custom lissit portraits (but which will never be chosen in proc gen portraits): seafoam, blue, violet, red, yellow, white, gray, and black.
created three new colors for lissit spines in custom portraits: pink, light pink, and light blue.
new dialogue lines are now customizable in the custom character creator: info response lines (i.e. lines responding to new information about an ally), sad info response lines (used when an ally reveals something sad about themselves), and hobby info response lines (used when an ally talks about their hobby).
added new hat, glasses, and face mask layers to character portraits in anticipation of adding a bunch of glasses, masks, and hat options to the custom character creator. (There's more to come on this front--stay tuned! 😉)

[h3]Next, we have more miscellaneous additions and improvements![/h3]

the biggest news on this front is a new arena condition: Custom Character Enemy. When this condition is chosen, one of your unrecruited custom characters shows up on the enemy team to fight you!
at the Trainer, the cost to train a character's health at any given stat level now reduces relative to their current overall level. (For instance, a level 1 character with 24 Health will pay full price to train Health; but a level 20 character with 24 Health will pay significantly less.)
further reduced the difficulty of the Monkey League Qualifier on sub-Brutal difficulties due to the frequency with which new players were still getting absolutely creamed by it.
when randomly challenged in the streets, you can now inspect the challenger before deciding whether or not to duel them.
the stand-in values that the game uses to boost Strength for generic units in weapon-dependent classes not spawned with an equipped, droppable weapon are now more granular, smoothing the ramp-up in enemy strength among basic physical classes in the arena.
added an eighth riddle for caverns.
added little extra blurbs to the good ending based on the player's final choice.
increased the minimum healthy roster size for the smuggler's den event to potentially get chosen from 6 to 8.
added a bit of extra text to the objectives screen in Battle in the Smuggler's Den to reiterate that this is a battle where you're expected to retreat at the end.
added a bit of extra text to the event narration in Battle in the Smuggler's Den to emphasize that the escape point is the exact same point your characters spent the first 8 rounds of the fight dropping in on.
reduced the intensity of the point light over the escape point in Battle in the Smuggler's Den to make the objective reticle stand out more.
in the Battle in the Smuggler's Den, when an enemy says "Ahaha, here we come! I hope you're ready to die," the game now follows up by explicitly telling the player that a whole lot of enemy reinforcements are about to flood into the cavern.
adjusted the AI somewhat in the final battle to ensure that the final boss doesn't recklessly move far out ahead of their minions.
new dialogue line type: hobby response! Characters are now generated with one of more than two dozen new dedicated response lines reacting to dialogue about another character's hobbies. (This is the first of a few planned steps intended to make character response lines more reactive to what they're being told.)
if a character says something that demands a response line of a type a character doesn't have, the game now attempts to generate an appropriate response line for the responding character on the fly.
created a new Unlock Door skill button graphic that makes it more obvious what the skill does at a glance, without having to read the tooltip.
wrote a few more loading screen tips.
added detailed descriptions of all the game's status effects to the in-game glossary, cross-linked with entries to relevant stats and related status effects for easy reference!
for version 1.0.10a: the character screen now shows the specific number for a character's morale in lieu of a text description.
for version 1.0.10a: reformatted morale effect descriptions with symbols to replace most of the text.
for version 1.0.10a: fleshed out the explanation of morale contained in the game's glossary.
for version 1.0.10a: tweaked changes the game makes to the witness protection battle on Brutal difficulty. (The witness now retains his medicated bandages rather than being swapped to regular ones, and one of the enemies for the later stages of the battle is buffed instead.)
for version 1.0.10b: when moving onto the stairs down during cavern exploration, the game now prompts the player before moving to the lower floor.
for version 1.0.10b: if the selected control scheme is mouse and keyboard but a gamepad is plugged in when the title screen comes up, the gamepad cursor now starts off hidden until the player presses a gamepad button.
for version 1.0.10b: if on the title screen with a gamepad plugged in, if the player hasn't used the gamepad (or deliberately changes the controls to Mouse and Keyboard) before entering the character creation screen, the game will now assume that the player doesn't want gamepad controls and won't display the virtual keyboard.
for version 1.0.10b: spirits now have their own distinct group practice narration.
for version 1.0.10b: increased the intensity of rain particle effects for the Storm weather type in cut scenes.
for version 1.0.10c: added +3 to starting Health for assassins to make them a bit more survivable in the early game and reduced assassin salaries to make them a bit more competitive with other classes on a cost basis.

[h3]We have a bunch of bug fixes![/h3]

fixed: a scripting mistake in the first event in the Vindictive character quest chain was keeping the second character's portrait from showing up, and potentially causing the game to throw an error and lock up when it tried to move the portrait.
fixed: due to a scripting oversight, winning the championship fair and square was leading directly to a bad ending.
fixed: if payday occurred on the same night as a scheduled evening plot event but the player didn't make payroll, it would cause the game to skip over the evening event in favor of having their characters react to not getting paid, potentially locking the player out of continuing the main investigation.
fixed: an invisible raycast-blocking layer in the character inventory subwindow of the reserve supplies screen had not been adjusted to account for the window's reduced size as of version 1.0, meaning that players could not click the fourth row of reserve items or drag items into the reserve supplies in that area so long as the character inventory window was open beneath it.
fixed: enemies in Battle with the Steel Bandits would continually attack their own furniture and castle walls to try to clear paths to the player.
fixed: due to me forgetting to turn off a special condition used for testing custom characters, custom characters were appearing during recruitment at higher-than-intended rates. (Their current chances of appearing in recruitment are now 90% for one custom character and 45% for two.)
fixed: spirits could be generated with the Religious personality trait despite not being generated with any bio details (including religion and deity), ensuring that their various lines were not generated correctly.
fixed: main gauches were pulling their attributes from the Shields pool instead of their own.
fixed: golems and spirits could be chosen as partners for certain two-character activities (most notably playing sports and playing games).
fixed: Grape Shot was not alerting the guards in the Blacksmith Rescue map.
fixed: the game was never bringing up the objectives screen at the start of the Battle in the Smuggler's Den.
fixed: when playing in roguelike mode, even though the restart battle button was grayed out, clicking it would still restart the battle.
fixed: the army-wide danger zone function (a.k.a. the Q key) wasn't accounting for offensive knockback skills without baked-in damage (like Shove or Kinetic Gust) the way that simply clicking individual enemies was.
fixed: when playing with gamepad, if a character wandered into a snare trap and became stunned, the character could still be rotated.
fixed: when playing with gamepad, if character dialogue was initiated during camp, opening a different menu would cause the game to not return focus to the dialogue window afterward.
fixed: when playing with gamepad, the gamepad would lose focus upon winning a game of Psy Clash.
fixed a graphical issue with human nose variant 14.
fixed in version 1.0.10a: eyedrops held by certain enemies in the final battle were not spawnng correctly due to a typo.
fixed in version 1.0.10a: skills that swap positions (such as Twirl and Trade) could change the facing direction of the unit swapped with.
fixed in version 1.0.10a: due to an incorrectly set default army palette color in the character sprite shader, the lightest shade of secondary army colors (light red) was not being palette swapped properly for sprites in the new palette-swapping system.
fixed in version 1.0.10a: the game was inappropriately using forward slashes appearing within generated dialogue noting the ends of formatting tags (such as

, , and [/CAP]) as delimiters if they appeared within a block of alternate phrases, cutting off the relevant portion of dialogue.
fixed in version 1.0.10b: the AI could get stuck in a loop when running path-clearing behavior if a unit was stuck behind scenery and the game decided to have them charge an obstacle unreachable due to them being blocked by other destructible objects.
fixed in version 1.0.10b: spirits would participate in group practice and lose morale.
fixed in version 1.0.10b: the treasure map event was no longer checking the player's current level of aura correctly.
fixed in version 1.0.10b: during deployment in cavern exploration missions, the game would say that the maximum deployment was 6 even though you could send no more than 5 characters.
fixed in version 1.0.10c: after the blacksmith rescue mission, the game was skipping straight to the calendar screen, ensuring both that payday could not occur that evening and that characters scheduled to return to camp that evening would not return.
fixed in version 1.0.10c: under certain circumstances, the game could still get locked up if a MoveUnit script action was unable to complete successfully.
fixed in version 1.0.10c: a handful of events were still missing animations where a character visibly walks up to the player from offscreen.

[h3]And finally, we have fixes, improvements, and new capabilities for the campaign creation suite![/h3]

the map editor now allows direct, one-click placement of destructible objects onto other objects with a passability of "All" (e.g. puddles, rugs, and so on), so long as the object being placed doesn't also have a passability of All.
new script actions: IfAggroRun and IfAggroGoTo. If the named character is free of Passive, Immobile, and Inactive tags, then either run (a) script(s) or go to a specified dialogue branch.
new script action: SetValByAvgLvl. Gathers all of the characters in the specified roster (or, if in battle, the specified army) and uses it to set a custom integer variable. Parameters: variable name, operation type, and roster or army number.
new script action: LoadBark. Like LoadConv, but instead it initiates a combat bark for a specified unit.
new optional parameter added to the end of ShowRecruits: Custom Character % Chance, an integer from 0 to 100 representing the percentage chance of a single custom character appearing in recruitment. (The chance of a second custom character appearing will be half that amount.) This allows you to let the player recruit custom characters during recruitment in your own campaigns!
new tag added: Guard. The tagged character, when controlled by AI, will stay close to and try to protect a second, named character as if that character had a Protect Char condition attached to them. (Note: this feature is in alpha and has not been thoroughly tested yet.)
the stand-in values that the game uses to boost Strength for generic units in weapon-dependent classes not spawned with an equipped, droppable weapon are now customizable on a per-class basis in Classes.xml (via the new defaultStrBonusesAtLvls attribute).
completely rewrote the game's palette-swapping code to extract the game's various army and sprite palettes from hard code and make them moddable as part of XML.
fixed: deleting an action on the second page of a dialogue branch's actions in the dialogue editor would inappropriately affect the corresponding action slot on the first page.
fixed: the map editor could inappropriately register mouse clicks when using the dialogue editor as also affecting the tiles beneath the dialogue editor.
fixed: the character creator in the campaign creation suite was not saving certain, newer character attributes (relevant in cases where they were edited by hand and the character was loaded back up into the editor).
fixed: StripItemsFromUnit was causing a "key not found" error when used in battle and transferring items to reserve supplies for a roster that had not yet been established.
for version 1.0.10a: added villagers to the list of universally available default units for custom campaigns.
fixed in version 1.0.10a: adding actions to scripts in the dialogue editor had been broken by a different bug fix.
fixed in version 1.0.10a: when flushing the actions queue for actions stuck behind a Wait command, the game would run subsequent Wait-type commands normally, sticking some of the actions to auto-execute behind a second Wait behavior and failing to execute them as intended.
fixed in version 1.0.10a: ending a dialogue (whether by script action or otherwise) was not auto-executing remaining script actions stuck behind a Wait command.
fixed in version 1.0.10a: switching a cutscene's narration frame (whether by script action or otherwise) was not auto-executing remaining script actions stuck behind a Wait command.
fixed in version 1.0.10c: certain script actions were still missing checks to ensure that they possessed the minimum number of required parameters.

[h3]79 reviews! 🎉[/h3]
Three weeks in, and we're continuing our steady march toward our goal of 500 reviews. A big shout-out and a sincere thank you to everyone who's taken the time to leave a review so far--it really does help! If we keep this up, we'll eventually hit a threshold where Steam's algorithm starts showing Together in Battle to a much wider audience. If you're enjoying the game and you haven't left a review yet, please don't be shy: every store review helps! 🙂

[h3]Yet more coverage![/h3]
Speaking of reviews: since our last update, we've received not one, but two massive reviews of approximately one hour and five minutes length each!

The first of these comes from strategy RPG Youtube luminary Titanium Legman, who looks back on 80 hours of playing Together in Battle in roguelike mode, noting that he's still mastering the game's mechanics dozens of hours in. He says: "I think anyone who enjoys a deep, robust turn-based strategy RPG, turn-based tactics, however you want to call it, style game--whoever wants to enjoy an experience that actually has meat on its bones in this genre--owes it to themselves to check this one out."

The other review comes from Coffee Potato, a Tactics Ogre Youtuber of some reknown. CP also had some very nice things to say, such as: "It is incredible how much they packed into this thing." "The amount of systems interacting here is beautiful!" "I love that this thing even has its own card game. They just decided one day to take a look at everything someone would have wanted in an SRPG and they were just like, 'Yes, check every box.'" "It's just a work of art, frankly."

Going forward, Titanium Legman has announced his intention to stream the game--and in fact, he's put out a call for folks to contribute custom characters toward his run, so feel free to send him some of your fun creations! 🙂

And while we're on the topic of streaming Together in Battle: the Nihil SRPG channel will be starting a Thursday-night series streaming Together in Battle beginning this week at 7 PM Central Time! I'll be joining these streams as a cohost, which should be a fun time for all involved. I encourage folks to come by and say hello!

[h3]What's next?[/h3]
I keep mentioning a new game mode; that didn't quite make it into this update, unfortunately, as I needed to push the update earlier than intended due to a few more serious bug reports this past week. That said, it is still in the offing for the near future! I also have plans to expand the available clothing and accessories for custom characters, add support for sprite palette swapping on lissit characters, and more.

As always, please let me know what you liked in this update, what sort of things you'd like to see more of, and any issues you might run into here on the Steam forums, on Discord, et cetera.

Until next time, folks!

Tactically yours,

Craig