Together in Battle News

Greetings, tactics fans! I'm still putting out updates at a rapid pace here: today's update adds more variety to the arena fights, with faster progression between leagues and more variation in the types of fights that can occur, as well as a new league: Snow Leopard League!

There are other changes too, but let's start with the additional battles and battle variation changes:

- Snow Leopard League is now in-game! You can now progress through Snow Leopard League all the way up to the Tiger League Qualifier.

- new arena match type: Defend the Idol. This spawns a golden statue about 2-3 turns away from the enemy's spawn points and tasks you with defending it from destruction.

- new arena match type: 4-on-4. This limits each team to only 4 characters! Enemies are a bit stronger than normal, there is an accelerated timer, extra destructible objects (like tall grasses, spiked barricades, and traps) are dropped around the arena, and bonus chests are dropped as well (at least two of which are guaranteed to contain money).


On top of this, this update offers a variety of changes to improve balance and pacing:

- perhaps the most noticeable alteration is a change in the game's pacing: the number of league wins it takes to progress to the next league's qualifier has been shortened from five to four. This means quicker access to the next league qualifier's prize pool, easing the economic difficulty somewhat; shorter time in which to grind up levels, increasing the combat difficulty in the later leagues somewhat; and in general, less time to get bored of any one league. 😉

- experience scaling is now 15% per level of difference in both directions (as opposed to being a 15% per-level bonus when lower level and a 10% per-level penalty when higher level), making it a bit harder to blast past the game's experience curve.

- team leaders are now more likely to spawn with extra items in arena fights.

- the cavalier skill Charge was proving a little too oppressive in the game's tight arena maps, so I dropped the damage on Charge from 1.5x strength to a more reasonable 1.25x strength.

- fixed: traps and holds were not interrupting self-move skills (like the cavalier's Charge) as intended.

- added a new skill: Mega Charge. Deals 1.5x strength and has two 75% chances to inflict stun. This one is learned exclusively by cavaliers after promoting.

- buffed the swordsman's swordmaster promotion to make it more competitive with the blade dancer:
swordmasters now get Hold added to their skill progressions.

- buffed the cavalier's mantis knight promotion to make it more competitive with the mant lancer: mantis knights can now use another skill in the same turn after using Lance.

- you can now train accuracy at the trainer, making status-effect builds more reliable and offering more options for addressing enemies with high Dodge.

- added in 0.2.05a: increased the uses on Eye Drops, Caffeine Pills, Lead Ointment and Thermal Paste to make consumables more economical as a counter to enemy status effects.

- added in 0.2.05b: the elevation tutorial now spells out the formula for how much damage is caused by falling.


And what would an update be without bug fixes? I already mentioned the fix about cavaliers charging through traps unaffected, but there are more:

- fixed: the game was inappropriately treating scripts containing the SetNextScene action as if they actually contained NextScene, which caused the game to stop updating the dialogue menu, effectively glitching out the game. (This would occur most consistently at the trainer.)

- fixed: the trainer was inappropriately including stat modifiers granted by equipment when determining the level of certain stats for purposes of calculating training costs. This was making strength, especially, much more expensive to train than intended.

- fixed a bug in the game's battlefield generation logic that was causing counterattack-possessing objects like Spiked Barricades and Fire to always cluster within two spaces of the player's deployment spots instead of being scattered around the map.

- fixed a typo in the class requirements for bowmen that made positive psy growth a requirement for the class instead of positive strength growth. This led to the game generating bowmen with no strength growth at all.

- fixed: characters in classes that normally have two skills at level one would start off missing their second level-one skill if they had Motivate.

- fixed: characters could get activity narration forbidden by their biographical details in camp (e.g. religious characters offering prayers belonging to the wrong religion).

- the game's calendar system now distinguishes between actual events and simple reminders (e.g. about characters returning or shops not being open); the game will now schedule exclusive events (like league qualifiers) on days which contain reminders.

- fixed in 0.2.05a: the game would sometimes throw a range error during character promotions.

- fixed in 0.2.05a: the game would throw a range error during recruitment if the total number of initial recruits was not neatly divisible by 6.

- fixed in 0.2.05a: in rare instances, 2D particles could cause the game to throw a null error.

- fixed in 0.2.05b: changes to the scripting in the last update made it so that fighting pickup matches while waiting for the Monkey League Qualifier would cause the game to reschedule the Monkey League Qualifier.

- fixed in 0.2.05b: the Protect Char condition was not working on destructible objects, resulting in the Defend the Idol loss condition never triggering.

- fixed in 0.2.05c: Defend the Idol matches were being chosen much too often in Monkey League.

- fixed in 0.2.05c: the game was not taking minimum distance rules into account when spawning the idol for Defend the Idol.



Finally, we have improvements for folks using the campaign creation suite:

- objective reticles may now be placed and removed using a character name (or ID[] tag) instead of just x and y coordinates.

- RemoveSpawn may now take the loadID parameter "Deployment" in proc gen maps to remove procedurally generated deployment spots.

- added in 0.2.05a: updated the default introduction scene so it's more useful right out of the gate.

- added in 0.2.05a: characters created with the character creator now have an appropriate babble voice set assigned to them.

- added in 0.2.05a: new reply type, cut scene only: Next Frame. Ends the current dialogue and proceeds to the next frame of the cut scene.

- added in 0.2.05a: updated usable skill icons with the new Mind Domination and Mega Charge icons.

- fixed in 0.2.05a: "duplicate dialogue branch" functionality was not working correctly in the dialogue editor.

- fixed in 0.2.05a: moving a branch downward within a dialogue tree would produce a range error.

- fixed in 0.2.05a: the game would not recognize premade characters for purposes of the AddPortrait script actions if the game hadn't already saved loaded characters at least once.

- fixed in 0.2.05a: the game did not clear the New Roster tag when hitting New Scene in the cut scene editor, resulting in an already-open scene's new roster carrying over to the new scene as well.

- fixed in 0.2.05a: typing the letter 'L' in the cut scene editor would still trigger the game's "save log" functionality.


That's it for this update, folks! I was originally planning to wait a bit longer and include some new main plot stuff, but I don't want to delay dropping an update with critical bug fixes, so the new plot stuff will be coming in the next update instead. I hope you enjoy the new content--I'll see you in the next update!


Tactically yours,

Craig

Hey folks! This is another update with some balance tweaks and loads of bug fixes. First, the non-bug stuff:

- arena battlefields now grow slightly larger with each successive league. (Non-league battles are still 12 x 8; in Monkey League, they are now 13 x 9; in Gharial League, 14 x 10.) As noted here, in-battle saves in Monkey League and Gharial League are going to be scrambled by this--I recommend falling back to a non-battle save file, or else using Restart Battle (if playing in save scumming mode).

- the game now saves the current map width and map height for proc gen battles, then uses those values when reloading the battle instead of using whatever the most current values are. (This will keep battlefields from getting scrambled if their dimensions shift again in future updates.)

- league match scheduling is now weighted; you have 50% odds of the next league match being in 3 days, 33% of it being in 4 days, and only 17% of it being in 2 days.

- boosted the heat and cold resistance modifiers from insulated armor from 15% to 25% each.

- boosted the light and shadow resistance modifiers from lead-lined armor from 15% to 25% each.

- added footstep sound effects to the game when going to the docks.


And now, the bug fixes:

- fixed: the "total battles fought" variable used to determine enemy level scaling in the league fights was not being reset upon entry into Gharial League, resulting in enemies being massively overleveled.

- fixed: the game was not correctly detecting the new defeat scene after players surrendered in league matches, instead sending them directly to camp and thereby preventing a new league match from being scheduled.

- fixed: the arena manager was skipping his "tough break" dialogue after the player lost a league bout.

- fixed: match scheduling logic was sometimes not selecting the correct day when trying to pick the scheduled date on the calendar, resulting in league matches not triggering on their scheduled dates.

- fixed: the game was bypassing the victory screen when the player won big league qualifier matches, resulting in no money or morale being awarded. (Since this is fixed, the regular arena matches now each give slightly less money to keep things balanced.)

- fixed: bonuses in camp were providing a smaller morale boost than intended.

- fixed: instead of having a 15% chance to spawn in Gharial League, royal chests had a 100% chance to spawn but only a 15% chance to contain an item, resulting in loads of empty royal chests showing up in these fights.

- fixed: on lower AI settings, the game was actively valuing lethal blows lower than non-lethal blows (as opposed to merely not valuing them any more highly).

- fixed: skills like Overheat could drop a character's energy into the negatives, in some cases outright preventing energy-regaining moves from increasing it to positive values.

- fixed: destroying fire did not remove its environmental damage effect from the space.

- fixed: flying characters who had been Gravity-Spiked into water or lava and then swam back onto land would reemerge at the wrong elevation, and would appear inside the terrain when moving thereafter.

- fixed: when using a Book of Power in camp, the user's already-open character screen was not auto-updating with the new information following the promotion.

- fixed: lead-lined armor was providing heat and cold resistance instead of light and shadow resistance.

- fixed: you could shoot your own units with bowmen and crossbowmen in Psy Clash.

- fixed: looping crowd noises would continue upon returning to camp from the Festival of the Ascendant Lights.


I also have few fixes and improvements for the campaign creation suite's map editor:

- the map editor can now successfully save and load battle backgrounds with maps (i.e. images that track with the battlefield when panning the camera, like the arena).

- you can now assign a percentage spawn chance to all army and object groups for proc gen maps in the map editor.

- fixed a null error in the map editor when loading a map with a global lighting condition as its first condition.

- fixed a range error when cycling through permitted integers using a number picker in wrap-around mode via the "previous" button.

- in version 0.2.04a: the game now checks for duplicate tags when generating a new skill progression for a character upon promoting or reclassing.

- in version 0.2.04a: new skill added to the game: Mind Domination. It's the same as Mind Control, essentially, only Enthralled has a base 100% chance to take effect and the skill costs 6 energy instead of 3. Mentalists now learn this as part of their skill progression.

- in version 0.2.04a: made the Mastermind and Thoughteater advanced classes stronger; the Mastermind can now continue their turn after using Mind Control, and the Thoughteater now gets +6 damage on Mind Shock instead of +5.

- fixed in version 0.2.04a: you could click on the main text box during character selection branches of dialogue and it would progress to the next branch of the tree with no character selected. If done during a one-on-one, this would cause the game to show a blank black placeholder portrait and call the character "FNAME"; or if done at the docks, would simply glitch the game out.

- fixed in version 0.2.04a: the game would inappropriately send players to the Gharial League Qualifier in place of the Snow Leopard League Qualifier.

- fixed in version 0.2.04a: the monetary reward for strikebreaking was being granted twice: once as a battle reward, and again in dialogue.

- fixed in version 0.2.04a: some of the dialogue variants for a character asking another character out on a date were getting clipped.

- fixed in version 0.2.04a: the game was displaying the wrong names for the Gharial League and Snow Leopard League qualifiers within save game slots.


That's it for version 0.2.04, folks. Thanks again for all the feedback and diligent bug reporting! Due to your efforts, I'm whipping this game into shape in record time. In the next update, I'd like to introduce some new variations to the arena battles and a new main plot event or two. Until next time!


Yours in tactics,

Craig

Greetings, tactics fans! Before I sign off for the weekend, I wanted to leave you all with another update. I fixed a whole bunch of bugs and created another league qualifier boss battle, this time to cap off Gharial League. Here are all the changes:

- created the Snow Leopard League qualifier battle.

- thieves in the arena should now focus exclusively on opening chests and should ignore player characters.

- Gharial League matches now have a 15% chance to spawn a royal chest with rare loot.

- changed the potential earliest timing of certain events.

- the Robber Boss is now scripted to stay perfectly still until turn 7 during the Thief Attack event (unless attacked).

- the aggression on the Greedy AI profile has been lowered further.

- the "reputation boost" from 10 morale has been replaced with a +20 accuracy bonus.

- fixed: the game wasn't casting characters for late-night random events, resulting in the second apparition event spawning a blank character.

- fixed: it was possible to click another character and select them mid-combat animation, thereby messing up the game's tracking of who the current character was and causing the original attacker to get another action.

- fixed: the game would cease to display the effects of morale in the character screen if morale-altering equipment temporarily pushed the total value above 10 or below -10.

- fixed: the Sick Parents event would freeze if a character who was raised by both their aunt and uncle was chosen for the event.

- fixed: the pyrokineticist boss of the Gharial League qualifier spawned with a blank, invalid item in their inventory.

- fixed: the Robber Boss was spawning without a weapon during the Thief Attack event.

- fixed: the game wasn't picking portraits for promoted generic units correctly.

- fixed: on lower settings, the AI would not consider lethal blows against destructible objects a viable move.

- change in version 0.2.03a: increased the available uses for throwing axes, javelins, and throwing knives.

- change in version 0.2.03a: doubled the chance of wrenches spawning in the shop.

- change in version 0.2.03a: improved character vocation background dialogue a bit.

- change in version 0.2.03a: increased the minimum energy cost to hire out from 3 to 5 so it's less of a free "print money" button.

- fixed in version 0.2.03a: dialogue calling for a last name with spirits was causing the game to lock up when applied to the random-event apparition.

- fixed in version 0.2.03a: when renaming a proc gen character, the proc gen character's own dialogue would have their old name baked in and left unchanged.

- fixed in version 0.2.03a: swimming onto a land tile with a trap would not trigger the trap.

- fixed in version 0.2.03a: when hiring out, the game was determining eligible characters inconsistently between the start of the scene and when asking if the player wanted to hire out someone else.

- fixed in version 0.2.03a: hiring characters out would cause the game not to count those characters for purposes of predicting payroll until their return later in the evening.

- fixed in version 0.2.03a: there was still a line on Monkey League qualifier fight where it said (incorrectly) that the kineticist was paid monthly.


That's all for this one, folks. I'll be adding in Snow Leopard League fights in the next update. Enjoy your weekend!


--Craig

Greetings, tactics fans! I've been working hard to improve Together in Battle based on your feedback (and to address the worst of the bugs you reported).

A fair few of you piped up to say that you felt limited in your ability to address shortfalls in your resources while also earning enough money to make payday, and so I wanted to address that as soon as possible. User "peeper keeper" offered a couple of suggestions in his review of the game that I found quite insightful; I've taken it upon myself to implement them, along with some other things, in order to give players greater flexibility in managing the economic side of the game.

Without further ado, here are the changes:

- created a new time points system for the daylight hours. You have two points to spend, and activities can cost one or two points. You can spend the day on a single 2-point activity (e.g. going to the arena) or on a selection of two 1-point activities (e.g. shopping and training).

- new daytime activity: Labor. For 1 time point, you can go down to the docks and hire out characters as laborers for the day in exchange for aura (with the payout scaled in part off of each character's base strength stat). This will consume some of the character's remaining energy; they will leave your group to work, but will return that same evening.

- if you don't make payroll, the game now accounts for how far short of making payroll you actually fell when calculating the morale penalty. The morale penalty can now be as small as -2 if you missed payroll by a relatively small chunk (as opposed to a shortfall of any size producing the full -10 drop). This makes missing payroll by small amounts far less dangerous and less prone to producing economic death spirals.

- further increased Cheap Novel availability in the shop, and further decreased its price.

- increased the morale-boosting power of regular Novels.

- took Sprint out of the cavalier skill progression, as it was producing enemies that could cross the entire arena and charge down characters in one turn.

- Stone Golems now start with Toss at level 1, allowing players to have fun throwing enemies around right from the word "go."


We've got some significant bug fixes, too:

- fixed: the game was grabbing the wrong date for league matches in monkey league after the first league match, effectively preventing any and all forward progress in the campaign after that first Monkey League league match.

- fixed: if a character attempted to use a self-move skill like Stick-and-Drag or Pull while subject to a Hold effect, it would leave the attacker in place while telling the game that they were in the process of moving, eventually freezing the game as it waited for expected character movement--which wasn't actually occurring--to complete.

- fixed: the game would reset a character's wound level to zero upon reapplying equipment effects--and opening the character overview screen in camp would reapply equipment effects, essentially auto-restoring wounded characters to normal with no recovery time or risk of death.

- fixed: the game was failing to give stone golems the tag that reduces the cost for Shove 2, and was instead giving it to them as an invalid skill at level 2.

- fixed: Throw appeared twice in the Stone Golem promoted class skill progressions.

- fixed: Trade, Twirl, and Juxtapose worked on objects, not just characters. (The game now gives you a message explaining why it didn't work if you try this.)

- fixed: Trade worked on enemies, not just teammates. (The game now gives you a message explaining why it didn't work if you try this.)

- fixed a couple of typos in camp narration/dialogue.


And a couple of goodies for campaign creators to use:

- new supported text sprite: Time.

- the game now recognizes Health Left and Energy Left as stats for most stat-related script actions.


That's about it for this one. I put in a lot of work over the past 24 hours to get this update out so fast--I sincerely hope that this improves the experience for you all! If you have any feedback on any of these changes (or suggestions for entirely different changes you'd like to see), please don't hesitate to email me or post about it in the forums. I check both regularly! 😉

Barring the appearance of any new bugs that require immediate intervention, I'll be making a content push for the next update, including new random events and the Snow Leopard League qualifier battle. Until next time!


Tactically yours,

Craig

Greetings, tactics fans! Together in Battle just launched to early access yesterday--but since I've already received helpful feedback and bug reports from many of you, we already have our first update here on day 2!

To start, there were a few bugs reported to me over the past 24 hours that have now been mercilessly squished, including a couple that were eradicated via day one hotfixes:

- fixed: the game would treat voluntary surrender on roguelite mode as a normal defeat and delete the player's saved game.

- fixed: the game could cause a qualifier or league match to occur on a day where other events were scheduled, even after pushing the event back on the in-game calendar.

- fixed: golems could take a morale penalty from falling in battle.

- fixed: you could change a spriggat's innate elemental type via training. (Spriggats can now be class-switched to different psy user classes instead.)

- fixed: the Sick Parents event would freeze if a character who was raised by both grandparents was chosen for the event.

- fixed: flickering was occurring in the Dry Mounds tutorial battle due to z-fighting between the low ground and the battle background.


I've received a lot of feedback on various aspects of game balance for Challenging and Brutal difficulties, most notably on the economic side of things. As such, I have implemented a bunch of tweaks to make things less difficult:

- Brutal difficulty now has a minimum first-day recruitment of 4 units rather than 6 (meaning that you can now deliberately forego overly expensive recruits and low-man the early fights).

- increased the starting aura for Challenging and Brutal difficulties by 500.

- reduced food costs for Challenging difficulty by 1/3rd; reduced food costs for Brutal difficulty by 1/4th.

- reduced salary costs on Challenging and Brutal difficulties.

- reduced item costs on Brutal difficulty.

- training costs are now scaled with difficulty. Relative to their prior values, they are now: 70% for Relaxed, 80% for Challenging, and 90% for Brutal.

- paradigm training now takes five days instead of a week.

- increased the number of uses Bandages have from 2 to 3 to make teams lacking a psy healer or gasul more viable.

- increased the availability (and massively decreased the price) of Cheap Novels in the shop, and doubled the morale effect of Beautiful weapons and armor from +1 to +2.

- imposed a hard cap of 5 on the morale penalty a character can take for falling in battle without dying.

- beating the tournament qualifier now gives the player 200 aura.

- further increased the monetary rewards for beating the league qualifiers.

- increased the monetary rewards for beating the last battles in "Gundhi Bug League."

- increased the team-wide morale boost for beating the Gharial League Qualifier from +2 to +3.

- on Brutal difficulty, toned down the potential added enemy types for the second non-league battle and removed added enemies from the other arena battles entirely.


And finally, we have a few miscellaneous changes:

- laid some groundwork for an eventual custom difficulty selection mode.

- new possible modifier for especially high-quality weapons and armor: Gorgeous. Grants the wearer morale +4 while equipped.

- adjusted default expressions tied to a couple of personality traits.

- new script action available to campaign creators: SetValByEvent. This lets you create or edit an integer variable by reference to the day upon which a scheduled calendar event will occur. The game will pick the first instance on the calendar by default; set Find Last Instance to true to find the last instance of the named event on the calendar instead. Parameters: Variable Name; Operator ( = + - * / etc); Scheduled Event Name; Find Last Instance (true or false -- optional).


I have more changes I'm planning to experiment with in the coming days! I'm considering replacing the "choose one activity per day" system with a more flexible "time points" system that will let the player either visit the Arena or partake in up to two non-Arena actions (e.g. shop and train, or train and recruit). I also quite like the idea of a daytime action that lets you hire out your characters to make some extra money at the expense of some energy, giving the player some economic breathing room when the team is injured from a fight.

A big thanks to everyone who's reported bugs or left suggestions in the forums thus far; and an especially big thanks to folks leaving nice reviews. This game has been an absolutely incredible amount of work to make so far, and your support makes a huge difference.

Keep on playing, and I'll see you in the next update!


--Craig