Shieldwall Chronicles: Swords of the North News

The next patch will include several quality of life improvements. One of them is a full breakdown of hit chance and critical chance to explain why those values are what they are. In addition, the counter attack information will now give the player the % hit chance of the counter attack, the damage range it will do and the critical chance on it.

In addition, the unit summary displayed when hovering over an enemy now includes more useful infomration. The counter attacks, unit's morale and remaining action points are also displayed.

The next update should land tomorrow and includes several other improvements and bug fixes.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug where critical damage was always set to maximum damage multiplied by 50% instead of a straight 50% increase to melee damage.
  
• Some minor UI bug fixes.
  

Changes

• Reduced the range of damage from melee and missile attacks to reduce the randomness of attack damage values during combat.
  
• Increased the starting life of the melee-focussed character classes by 4 points.
  

This is a minor patch that fixes a bug introduced in the previous update. It also makes some changes to arrive at the correct value of armour and critical hits.

New Content:

• 3 new random encounter levels added for the northern forest regions. These levels feature large, randomly appearing enemy patrols.
  
• New background music tracks added. These tracks replace most of the previous background music tracks used at launch.
  
• New circular indicators added to replace the life / AP bars for each character.
  
• Replaced the huscarle in the camp site menu with a higher resolution character model.
  

Game Balance Changes:

• Changed the minimum melee and ranged attack damage for all player characters and enemies to have larger range. Most attacks have a minimum attack value of 1 - 3 and a larger maximum damage value. This is to make the armour stat more relevant in the combat mechanics.
  
• Critical hits no longer ignore all armour. Instead, the armour stat is reduced by half for that attack.
  
• Critical damage multiplier now ranges between 25% to 75%. This is to reduce the effectiveness of melee fighters such as the assassin that relies on critical damage.
  
• Abilities that increase melee or ranged attack damage now only increase maximum damage rather than minimum and maximum damage values.
  
• Lowered the bonus armour value derived by several abilities that increase armour (such as Shieldwall). This is due to the fact that under the updated combat mechanics, armour has a more prevalent role.
  
• Increased the range of hit chances for melee and ranged attacks from 15% to 85% to 5% to 95%.
  

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed a bug where text would appear blurry on screens with resolutions of 1920 x 1080.
  
• Several minor bugs fixed.
  

Future patches will include more random encounter levels. Eventually, there will be 12 random encounters in total that will be unlocked as the player completes more levels in the campaign.

Here is a preview of the upcoming changes to the character life indicators. The existing life and AP bars will be replaced by these circular rings that will indicate remaining life. Please let me know your thoughts.

Also, the screenshot shows one of the new random encounter levels that will be in the next update.

Changes:

• Added a new bonus for surrounding a target with 3 or more enemies. If attacking an enemy while it has 3 or more enemies in adjacent tiles, the attack receives a +25 attack skill bonus.
  
• New cinematic scene added before the level where the player confronts the mountain dragon.
  
• Various minor game balance changes.
  

Bug Fixes:

• Fixes a bug where on some levels the game would lock up during the enemy turn.
  
• Fixes a bug where cancelling the option to overwrite an existing save game would bring up the load menu rather than the new save menu.
  
• Fixed various minor bugs.