Slaves of Magic News

Hello everyone!

Another small patch, fixing some bugs and doing some slight tweaks.

[h2]Balance changes:[/h2]
- Rebalanced XP gains in a way that increases the time to level up by killing lower-level enemies. This means that over-leveling the enemy by more than 1 level will be harder than before.
- Disabled melee units (for example when netted) do not threaten tiles anymore. This means there are no movement penalties moving next to them, and they do not block skills that require no engagement.

[h2]UI changes:[/h2]
- For the charge skill, clarification was added in its description that it can't be used when engaged.
- When choosing skills, the school the unit already has in his/her skill bar will always be visible, even if there are no more valid skills to choose from that school.
- Removed the blue border on passive skills, it feels like it created visual clutter without much benefit. Passive skills still don't have keys associated with them on the skill bar in combat, retaining the information that they can't be activated with a much smaller footprint.

[h2]Bugfixes:[/h2]
- Fixed the demo ending base defense mission not properly starting.
- Fixed the blood rage skill counter not respecting the maximum counter limit.
- Fixed that player unit mustache from its profile picture could be lost by reloading a saved game.
- Fixed a visual bug for units that used attack of opportunity with rotation, and did not rotate back to their original facing.

Hello everyone!

This is just a small patch, tweaking and rebalancing some things:

- Tweaked the AI to respect player's archers more, and to not show their backs to them when they are adjacent.
- Modified the 2 weapon skills for the hammers to make them more distinct. The one-handed hammer got the stunning strike skill, focusing on CC but losing the ability to shred armor from the enemy. The two-handed hammer lost the ability to stun, but increased its armor shredding capability from 2 to 3, making it more focused on removing armor.
- Shield bash has been modified to provide a knockback that the unit does not follow up and distraction, rather than damage and "half a stun".
- Fixed a visual bug that occurred when an enemy helped their teammate to remove the throwing net. Previously, it was possible that the removal animation did not happen.
- Fixed cripple background missing the -10 range attack modifier.

Hello everyone!

This is a small update to fix some issues that were added in the latest patch and to improve stability.

- Fixed a crash that could occur when generating a map which was introduced in the previous patch.
- Fixed a rare crash that could occur at the end of the month.
- Fixed that typing was not registered when trying to change a character name which was introduced in the previous patch as well.
- Added an autosave after combat as well, not just before combat.
- Added a clarification for the steal supply mission to remind the player that only 1 chest can be stolen per turn.
- Increased enemy squad aggressiveness when the player starts to steal the chests in the steal supply mission.

Hello everyone!

This patch besides the usual bugfixes, focuses on reducing the "grindiness" of the demo. Resource costs have been rebalanced, the starting gold amount has been increased, and XP gains have been improved to provide a faster progression for the player.

Combat maps got some attention as well, we felt that too much time was spent searching for the enemies, so the map sizes have been reduced by around 30%.

Balance changes:
- Increased the Redeemed health by +2. The reason for that is they are the first enemy type the player meets, and while it is intended to be easy to defeat, previously any hit would guarantee kill it. This change means 1 handed weapon and bows do not guarantee 1-hit kill them, so the players are properly rewarded when they learn and use one of the many ways that increases damage against them. This hopefully better prepares them for the harder enemies, lessening the gap between the Redeemed and other enemies.
- Increased the goblin's health by +2 for similar reasons.
- Improved the our-of-combat AI to prioritize player units to engage, which it already saw. This avoids the unlucky situations, that when the AI is closer to the player's not yet seen unit's spawn location than their actual units, they will go towards that, instead of the player. This should eliminate the end-game hide-and-seek that sometimes happened previously.
- Reduced the map size by about 30% for the same reason as above.
- Modified the Mizumori starting roster, as the previous one was a bit weak.
- Increased player's starting gold to 1000 (up from 600).
- Rebalanced resource costs of most projects and research (mostly reduced the etherglow costs).
- Reduced the time until the player's units healed after returning from a mission with an injury.
- Increased the amount of XP the player unit earns. In addition, there is a small bonus XP for successfully completing the mission, and a bit bigger one for completing it in time.
- The invader's main base generates 75 science (up from 25). The smaller bases still generate only 25 science per month.

Ui changes:
- Added 2 arrows to the unit description while setting up a team for a mission. Those arrows make it possible to change units without needing to close the unit description. Units can be changed with the arrows + A-D keyboard keys as well;

Bugfixes:
- Fixed a crash that occurs in certain situations on the inventory screen when no utility items are available.
- Fixed leaving a random skill in a unit's skill bar if ESC was being used to close the skill selection.
- Fixed the tooltip of the Combat maneuver skill not mentioning it only works with melee weapons.
- Fixed multiple typos in the base building screen.

Hello everyone!

The 1.4.3 hotfix includes the fix for the missing text on certain video cards that were caused by a not compiling shader (mostly Radeon and Intel HD cards were affected).