What are the other 3 on your team? A Healer is always a good idea, as is another ranged attacker or two. For the Golem, giving him +move items early on makes a huge difference. In general, a good yardstick is that once you get the hang of it, on Normal(default) difficulty nobody on your team should die. With my first party, I had at least one casualty per stage. After I restarted with the same team composition, things are looking much better: If someone dies, it's to massed attacks right on turn 1 usually. And always because I overextend and rush right into the fray I tried an all-melee team, too, but that raises the difficulty bar a lot. I gave up before I made it to the first boss. A good team composition can really make or break your game.
Hey guys, Can I get some feedback on what values for Zoom and Pan / Rotate speed make for comfortable camera control? What values do you guys use for these sliders in the options screen? I use Normal for Pan / Rotate and Slow for Zoom. I'd like to adjust the defaults so that new players have a pleasant experience from the get go and don't have to tweak settings in the options unless they really want to. Also, can I get some feedback on the action camera? I'm not super happy with it so I may set the default to off for now. It could be confusing to a new player with the camera constantly jumping around. Also I don't have a way to stop it from being blocked by walls as of yet. I'm currently working on improving it by allowing the GUI to be shown on it as well as disabling touch inputs while the camera is playing. No idea how I'll handle the cases where a wall blocks the camera view .. but I'm sure there's a solution.
A balanced team is definitely a good idea. Going with all the guys that look impressive on the character select screen like the Giant, Minotaur, Golems and so on would be a bad idea. For your first few play throughs, try to to have 2 fighters (Palladin, Iron Guard, Duelist, Assassin, etc.), 1 long reach fighter (knight, mage hunter, tree giant, etc.) so you can form a battle line that is 2 tiles wide but allows 3 melee fighters to attack. Then add 2 mages, 1 shooter and 1 healer or debuffer. Several of the character classes pull double duty though .. for example, the Tree Giant is both a heavy fighter and a healer and the Gnome is both a dedicated shooter and a summoner / mage. There's a lot of variety and lots of abilities / spells will work really well with those from another character so mix and match and experiment. I actually want the difficulty to be a bit higher but I know that will come when I actually give the AI units buff / debut abilities. Right now, only 2 of the Ratmen wizards have abilities and it has a big impact on the difficulty level. I want to release the next version with the new morale system and get some feedback on it. Then I'm going to add a whole bunch of abilities to enemy units and I suspect you guys will see the difficulty spike upwards. Your Assassins will no longer seem so invincible.
I'm not sure if you saw my post some pages back about the camera but I'll sum it up again incase you missed it. The slower you move your finger the faster the map pans and rotates. The faster you move your fingers the slower it goes. Seems like camera acceleration (if it exists) is in reverse and thus the original problem.
Question ... what effect (if any) should being in cover have on morale / courage? Would it increase it? Would it make you more likely to duck your head and hide? Any thoughts?
One more question on morale ... should casualties incurred have an effect? For example, should I make it so that once a faction has fewer than 6 members left, it should reduce its courage? So a faction with only 1 member left would be more likely to lose morale and either panic or go berserk in desperation?
Sure thing Action Camera first: I disabled it after a few minutes. Not because I don't like it (it's great to see the action close up!), but because it seems to take longer until all attacks are processed. I am on Day 4, and with 15+ enemies on the map it can take a few minutes until they all had their actions. I am pretty sure this is subjective perception only though, as the animations play without action cam too. Zoom, Rotate, Pan: I have Zoom on Fast, because I am impatient. Slow/Normal allows for much better precision at the cost of being quite slow. With Fast, I can zoom in/out much faster, and only getting the zoom "about right" is good enough. I don't need millimeter precision for that. Rotate/Pan I have on "Very Fast" . Rotation speed I would like to set lower though: With high Rotation speed, zooming also triggers rotation because you cannot keep your fingers perfectly steady. But even on "Very Fast" vertical & horizontal scrolling (which I think Pan controls) is extremely slow. Rotation and Scroll speed should be separate settings IMO. And I wish for a "Super Extremely Fast" setting for Scroll speed, so I can move the map at a decent rate. That's odd. Doesn't seem to work like this for me on my Air1. I'll pay close attention and see if I can get that too. Which speed settings do you use for Zoom/Rotate?
Thanks for the input. You're right ... there is actually a slight delay caused by the action cam. I may put the action cam as a slider option so you can determine how frequently it gets activated from "Never" to 100% of the time and anything in between. I can split rotate and pan speeds easily enough. Will add that to the list of stuff to do.
I definitely saw enemy Necromancers cast some tentacle-thingy spell, so there is at least one more currently. No worries, I'll come up with something else that's pretty broken Jokes aside, if some units like the Assassin are no longer so overpowered, this will help overall balance a lot.
Difficult question. Depends on the character, I'd say. I can imagine the Minotaur getting impatient: Here he's hiding away like that wimpy Elf over there; when what he really wants is to rush out and bash some heads in. While the Gnome might like it perfectly well, as he can safely snipe enemy spellcasters from behind the rubble pile over there. Same as below, I'd wait a bit and see how the current systems works and what feedback people give. If casualties inflict Morale damage, this ultimately helps the player the most. I'd wait until impressions for the new system roll in. If needed and/or people ask for it, you can always add it in later. A good - but I guess complicated - option might be that only casualties in the immediate vicinity (say, 2 hex radius) cause Morale loss.
Both zoom and Pan/rotation speed is set on fast. Using a Air 1 as well. The speed of my fast swipe would be as if I was playing fruit ninja.
Another question from my side: How much XP does Skill use and killing monsters actually give? Just a ballpark figure is fine, no exact numbers needed. I am trying to figure out how much Skill vs. Kill - and stage completion - gives, but without seeing detailed numbers (as in a detailed overview when completing a stage), I cannot say. Why I ask? I am currently skill spamming, just in case skill use XP are anything substantial. That takes away from the gameplay IMO, as you focus more on the engine mechanics and how to game them. Personal opinion: Completing and surviving a stage should account for at least 80% of XP gained. It's a team effort, after all. Sure, the Assassin and Duelist just nuked a Demon each. But without the Healing and Support from the others, they wouldn't be able to do that. And the Ranger and Stormseer grilled all those little pests that were blocking the way to the Demons in the first place, to allow the Fighters to get through. Skill use and kills should at most make up 20% XP, combined. The more you get for completing the stage, the better. If skills and kills only account for, say, 5% XP each, both skill spam and kill feeding are no longer necessary. On top of that, adding the "skill & kill" XP to the overall pool, and then distribute them evenly between the team members would further reduce the incentive to skill spam / kill feed.
Cool ... thanks guys. Another general question ... and one we've touched on in the past. I'm thinking of changing the name again! What do you guys think of going back to "Demon's Bane"? I'm a little afraid of including the word "Saga" in my game title in case I incur the wrath of King's legal team.
Uploading the next version now to iTunes Connect. This has the following updates: - Disabled camera input during action camera - Disabled camera movement and input when bringing up the ability tool tips (by holding down on an ability button). Also ability tool tip bigger. - Fix for crash bugs (seems to have addressed them ... no crashes on my side in the past 3 days) - Tweaked default zoom / pan speeds - New morale system that replaces pinning rules. - Minor UI fixes Hopefully it'll go through App store validation quickly. Hoping to get some feedback on the new morale system and then if that all works, I plan to add more abilities to units. Also, there is a bug on the first level where an elf archer is walking around the first dungeon for no apparent reason. I was doing some testing and forgot to remove her. So ignore her for now.
Great job on the update! Fingers crossed for Apple being fast. That sounds hilarious. You should add more of those: random survivors of other patrols, wandering the dungeon shell-shocked
I intend to .. just need to figure out how to have them there and work appropriately. At the moment, any pre-existing units in the faction that are placed before hand take up the lower slots of a list that stores the player's units. That causes all kinds of issues since the XP / Level system and item system applies XP and Item stat changes to those low members of that list. So I need to either undo that in each system or find some clever workaround. I'd prefer the latter as my code is horrible and the less time I spend muddling through it, the better.
I haven't looked at the formula in a while but I think you're right. The most important part of the XP system is actually surviving. The majority of the points come from stage completion ... but I don't recall what % exactly. I don't think skill spamming should matter because you get more points for casting higher AP cost skills. So you can get just as much XP by saving up the AP and casting a big ability rather than popping off an unnecessary low-AP skill each turn.
Playing in beta right now and loving it. Is there a way to add a toggle/prompt for next character, to switch from character to character? I like that I can choose the order of action but a toggle would make navigating/switching through each character action a bit easier- especially if they are spread out in the room. Looking forward to the camera update, had some frustrating moments with the camera during combat, and trying to zoom in and out.
