The Hand of Merlin News

New features / content:
• Improved ambush scenarios by adding an element of danger while the party is not yet revealed to enemies. Instead of standing still, the enemies will now wander about, possibly revealing the party. In addition, there is an auto-reveal timer: the enemies will grow increasingly wary as turns progress.
• Added several new encounter illustrations.
• Added sounds to all skills in the Mystic's Elixir line.

Quality-of-Life improvements:
• Added aura information to small unit tooltip.
• Units spawned in waves will now focus the camera on their position upon spawning. This should help players notice new enemy arrivals.
• Improved the appearance of several skirmish maps on ultra-wide / triple-monitor setups.
• Improved the tooltips for Morgana's spells that reference the Hexed status effect, to make it clear what the effect does.

General fixes:
• Morgana's Spire (Tier 3 spell) can no longer be cast underneath units making them unable to move.
• Warrior's Judicious Cleave skill (upgrade of Cleave) no longer targets allies, as intended and described.
• Warrior's Stand Fast skill and its upgrades will no longer stack with itself.
• Ranger's Trail Blaze skill (upgrade of Sprint) is now blocked by low obstructions, like the other Sprint upgrade lines. This avoids units being locked into place.
• Mystic's Flash Hallow skill (upgrade of Hallow) should now be usable even if there are no immediate targets in the aura's range.
• Mystic's Thunder Brimstone and Brimstone Shards skills (upgrades from Explosive Brimstone) can now be used even if there are no units in the target area.
• Quarry status effect no longer describes that it has a decay rule, since it does not.
• Bad Omen and Expurger status effects should no longer trigger from Damage Over Time effects such as Poisoned.
• Fixed a bug where Pylon of Rendering would start with no stacks of Ethereal. Now it should start with 5, as usual.
• Fixed a bug preventing existing profiles from being able to get the Al-Andalus Tourist achievement.
• Fixed a bug that prevented the blacksmith from generating the shop state in Camelot if the player abandoned the run on that node.
• Fixed a bug where guardian encounters could not be continued if the player closed the game during the guardian encounter.
• Fixed a bug where if multiple notifications were created in the map state, they would overlap in the center of the screen while one is animating.
• Fixed a bug where the card hover tooltip wasn't correctly removed in some cases.
• Fixed an issue where aura radius got truncated when showed as part of status effect description in ability tooltips.
• Fixed a bug where moving a unit while undo is happening would spend the AP and not undo the action.
• Fixed a bug where the action bar indicated the wrong hotkey ([10] instead of [0]) for the Dimensional Restoration spell.
• Fixed a bug where geometric particles could be targeted by decals (auras could get ground effects stuck to them).
• Fixed an end of run report bug where abandoning the run before choosing the grail showed an incomplete "You chose the .' sentence.
• Fixed a bug where the world map could be scrolled while menus are open.
• Fixed a bug in the lobby when changing the active Core but canceling the run before starting it would cause inconsistent Core model to be shown.
• Fixed various typos in several tooltips and encounters.

Gameplay balancing:
• Salim's Measuring passive status effect is now capped at 6.
• Zahra's passive no longer deals its extra damage to allies in the case of friendly fire.
• Cockatrice's Wail aura now applies Rejuvenation instead of Mending, allowing it to heal Health as well as Armor.
• Roland's Horn relic no longer has a warm-up period.
• Francisca relic's damage now scales with attacker's Power (instead of dealing a static 4 damage).

Hey folks!

For a while now, I’ve been aware that our ambush scenarios have a problem.
As a reminder, an ambush scenario is one where either the enemy starts unrevealed and you can sneak up on them or one where the enemies ambush you (based on encounter choices) and start first. Today, I’m talking about the former case.

A Warband that has no revealed units essentially has every unit skip trying to think about what to do. In other words, we skip the AI calculation for unrevealed units. Until fairly recently (maybe two patches ago), this was happening instantly and was hard for anyone to discern what was going on other than “I can press the End Turn button constantly and nothing happens”.

The first part of the solution was to make the AI units telegraph what was happening. They were skipping their turn because they weren’t revealed, so I made them raise a combat message (the scrolling text) saying “Unrevealed”. I still knew there was a bigger issue at hand and last week I’ve decided enough is enough, when our designer Mia posted a message in our internal bug tracking channel.


I’m happy to report that this is a thing now. In every ambush scenario, you will have 3 turns before the enemies are automatically revealed and start attacking you after your 4th turn.

We then also had another idea - have the unrevealed enemies randomly move around, increasing the danger of accidentally revealed them if you’re not careful. This is how it looks like in the current version and is going live in the patch today.



The movements are fully random so you won’t be able to memorize the patterns in order to prepare a flawless ambush by abusing restarting the fight.

Thanks for reading, and if you wanna ask questions or pitch suggestions, join our Discord server or post in the Steam forums.

MarkoP

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New features / content:
• Added new VFX for all aura abilities.

Quality-of-Life improvements:
• Units now show their passive status effects on the map state portraits (as opposed to just during skirmish).
• Mystic's Explosive Brimstone skill and all its upgrades now explicitly show their effect area in the description.

General fixes:
• "Heal Half Armor" effect, associated with Rana and Zahra's passives, should no longer miss.
• Warrior's Bash skill now allows you to push away Mandrakes before they trigger their Xenopollen ability, even if the movement was blocked. Meaning, it is now always safe to Bash a Mandrake to avoid its on-death effect.
• Fixed an issue where Warrior's Bash skill would sometimes not deal full damage to the blocking unit.
• Fixed an issue that would sometimes prevent Mystic's Caustic Coating skill (and its upgrades) from applying its effect.
• Fixed an issue where Mystic's Raise Tall Totem skill (upgrade of Raise Totem) would raise a low cover instead of a high cover.
• Fixed Bayard's Bits relic to not destroy all cover when moving.
• Redcap's AI should no longer gaze at a target gazed by another Redcap, which was never intended. As a benefit, this also helps avoid confusion.
• Dire Toad is now immune to knockback, as it is a large unit.
• The action bar now has space for up to 16 AP; which is the soft cap of attainable AP per turn.
• Fixed a bug where auras that did not affect any unit did not show their unit tooltip description.
• Fixed an issue with the epilogue saying Roland always survived, regardless of actual events.
• Fixed several typos in ability and effect descriptions.

Gameplay balancing:
• Mystic's Delphic Elixir+ skill (upgrade of Aeolic Elixir) no longer targets the caster, just their allies.
• The aura granted by Mystic's Holy Totem skill (upgrade of Raise Totem) now scales with Aura power properly, making Holy Totem significantly stronger.
• Restoration spell's strength has been reduced from 8 to 5.
• Translocation spell cooldown reduced from 3 to 1.
• Stasis spell now affects all enemies in the map, rather than just a single target. Additionally, the Stasis effect now works similarly to the Stunned effect, where 1 stack equals 1 turn stalled.
• Thunderbolt spell no longer deals damage. Instead, it now has one of two effects: a) for armored foes, it removes all armor, b) for unarmored foes, it kills them instantly.
• Warp spell no longer affects speed. Instead, it now changes AP draw per turn: -1 to enemies, +1 to allies.
• Halo spell is now renamed into Starfall. It deals more damage (20, up from 15), and no longer has a minimum effect range.
• Black hole damage is increased to 15 (up from 8), and the duration of its Maim effect is increased to 3 turns (up from 2).
• Hexed, the status effect associated with Morgana, now has healing properties, granting innate healing opportunities to the second core.
• Wither no longer requires the target to be unarmored to be killed.
• Wraith now deals 15 Health damage, up from 10.
• Covenant has a different mechanic. Now, it increases the stacks of Hexed of all enemies with at least 1, by 2.
• Pylons now always have 25 Health (up from 1), and have their stacks of Ethereal reduced from 8 to 5. Ethereal now makes pylons immortal, and restore +1 to both armor and health per stack. The intent of this change is twofold: a) to make bleed builds effective, b) to reduce downtime between being able to eliminate Pylons.

Hey folks!

Today I’ll be talking about auras.

When we first introduced auras, they had a very simple visual representation that simply highlighted all tiles under its influence with a transparent tile overlay. When I received requests for making the auras have nicer visuals, I added two separate controllers: one for the center tile and another for each affected tile.

At that time, all we could do for auras was plonk a particle emitter to these two controllers, which is what you will have seen when using Hallow or seeing Thorntoad's Miasma. During development after that, we added some extra capabilities for general visuals which include something we call geometric particles. This is a fancy name for saying "a static model with a shader on it that animates over time", but it's shorter and more to the point.

One of the issues we saw reported during early access so far was that tiles were too hard to see when there were multiple auras in play. Examples are Hallow and Miasma and maybe Rolands Horn auras at the same time in the same area.

image by brubie from our Discord

It is impossible to see anything under those tiles because the auras are using per tile particle emitters which are drowning the tiles in too many particles. It was also impossible to see the edges of cast or effect areas when using Abilities in the tiles covered by auras.

One of my ideas (that I never really had time to implement) was to add a hotkey that either hides the particles while pressed or makes the waypoint lines and area outlines visible through the particles.

Thankfully, Robert proposed a much nicer solution.
We're removing particle emitters from all auras and replacing them with geometric particles. This should neatly solve the visibility issues, which makes auras that much less of a pain to look at. It also makes it clear where the auras are originating from.
new Hallow

Abominations will have their own separate aura visuals, and there are separate visuals for buffs (like the gif) and debuffs for human auras.

Mechanically, auras are in a bit of a weird spot. The way they work is by calculating the tiles they affect, then find all units inside those tiles, then filter out units that they cannot affect. The remaining units get a status effect that is controlled by that aura.

One issue we had at launch was that the status effect creation didn't properly account for existing status effects which weren't aura controlled. This could result in the aura "creating" a status effect that was actually merged with an existing status effect on that unit which wasn't aura controlled (due to i.e. content reuse). This didn't update the state of that status effect to being aura controlled, which caused the effect to potentially decay and expire, leaving the aura with an invalid status effect reference.
This issue was found soon after release and fixed the following week.

The other issue (which makes me say they're in a weird spot) was created only recently when we made auras have power that can scale the stack count of applied status effects. When a unit uses a skill that creates an aura that the unit already has, the second aura gets merged into the first one (otherwise, you'd have two auras of the same type). This means it's possible for the second aura invocation to increase/decrease its power, depending on how the unit attributes affect the power of the aura.

Unfortunately, we don't update the status effects applied by the existing aura. If a unit leaves the aura influence and comes back, it would get a new status effect that is updated for the new aura power. I plan to change this in the future so that auras don't actually create unique status effects on each unit in the area, but rather link the unit to being affected by the aura directly. The aura would be a single source of information about what it is doing. This also prevents any possible cases of an accidental merging of status effects from different auras or merging status effect with mismatched "aura controlled" state.
This will essentially remove the snapshotting aspect of auras (use this information as you will until I fix it) and prevent issues like the first one ever happening.

The visual updates to auras will go out in the patch today. The mechanical fixes will be done as soon as I get to it.

Thanks for reading, and join our Discord server if you wanna chat with us.

MarkoP