When you level up, the stat boosts are kind of random except that fighters get more life bonus, mages get more action point bonus, and archers / hybrids get a roughly equal life and action point bonus. Also, some stat boosts are more likely to happen to fighters and some are more likely to occur to mages and so on. I'm probably going to tweak / refine this a bit more but not planning any drastic changes. I'm pretty sure there are some magic wands that increase missile hit chance. Certainly, there are rings, amulets and so forth in the new magic item batch that do that. So it should be possible to have wizards be reasonably accurate with their missile attacks. I'll see how it goes. I need to do a new end-to-end play test to see how all the new changes really work before making more changes to the game balance. I just thought that increasing hit chance but increasing enemy life totals would net out to zero real effect on game difficulty but provide a more rewarding player experience. It's more fun to hit and do some damage than miss and do nothing.
Also, added a quick tweak to difficulty. Rather than adding a Very Hard mode ... I just made Hard mode more difficult. I did it by making enemy units have 75% more hit points than normal on Hard. That should do a lot to amp up the difficulty as enemies will survive much more punishment and be able to hit back. This is on top of some other stat boosts they get on the hard difficulty.
Another minor bug - in the inventory screen min damage for illusionist is 99 (!), max damage 8 for ranged. During combat it is 8-31. Also could you explain how damage reduction works? Do you just subtract it from the damage and when it is less then 1 you show "missed"?
I like the idea of a HP boost for hard mode. Right now I've been running the new wizard into the middle of the screen on the first round (11+ move with centaur buffs) and killing about half the map with an arcane explosion. Getting the HP over 50-60 for most enemies will make that a much more dangerous maneuver.
Thanks for the picking that up. Fixed it. Damage reduction reduces incoming damage down to the attack's minimum damage value. So very high damage reduction will generally mean you will only suffer the minimum damage from an attack. The caveat though is that if you suffer a critical hit, then all damage reduction is ignored. The idea is that damage reduction represents mundane armour and a critical hit would be an attack on a sensitive spot that isn't covered by that armour. Therefore, if you really want to build a tank character, you need to boost damage reduction, critical immunity (to reduce the chance of getting a critical) and have loads of hit points.
That spell is probably a tad overpowered too, I suspect. Anyway, hard difficulty increases all units hit points by 75% and Normal now increases them by 30%. Also, not sure if I mentioned it earlier but I added new voice clips to play when the characters pick up a collectable (potion, gold, scroll, etc.) [EDIT] Just checked the effects on the Arcane Implosion spell, and yikes .. that is a powerful spell. I might have gone a little overboard on that one. Probably will have to tone it down. I'm doing a run through with the High Wizard so once I level him up, I'll be able to see for myself how that spells works.
Everything else is ready for the next patch release (1.6). Just need to test it all and make minor corrections based on testing. I started to work on the in-battle save and good gravy ... it is complicated. If I do get it working, it is going to take me a heck of a long time to build and test.
Didn't have time to translate what I got from Niels yet As a lot of his advise depends on the data model you use for saving: When you have time - and want to, of course - can you send me your current model, via PM or email? Basically, he recommends: 1) 2 integers for each object position. Look e.g. here http://www.redblobgames.com/grids/hexagons/ for 2-dimensional arrays for hex grids. 2) 1 integer for each unit's facing, with values: West, East, North-West, North-East, South-West, South-East. 3) This part will be difficult for you, I guess: Saving each unit on the field with only the minimum parameters needed. As in DH a lot is random, I think you cannot use Class Templates (which is possible when the values are fixed, e.g. you always get the same amount of HP on levelup). I imagine you'll have to save all current values (current HP, current AP, skills available/used, cooldowns, etc.) . The "fixed" attributes like maxHP, maxAP, level should be saved somewhere else, as they do not change each turn. 4) Saving Items: Not sure how you do that right now. Niels wrote that he only needs two parameters for each item. But the items in his games are all fixed, and not randomly generated like yours. I bet this won't be easy for you, either Sidenote: Less randomness for the next game, will make your life much easier Just read your comment about now having 350 base items. I consider this pretty insane. Sometimes less is more. Look for example at http://www.winterwolves.com/seasonsofthewolf.htm and http://www.winterwolves.com/lorenamazonprincess.htm (available on iOS) for games with similar overkill in amount of items. Couldn't find it again right away, but quite a few players commented on their forum that there are way too many different items.
Thanks for the tips. What I'm doing is similar to what you describe. Most of it is already built with my existing load / save system ... so things like loading magic items and loading stat boosts from level ups are already taken care of. What i need to do is load / save the unit's positions, health, action points, ability usage, ability effects in play, ability effects duration, etc, etc. It's still really complex. I'm working through it and it seems very tough. Hopefully I can do it, if not ... it'll be something I revisit much later. I don't want to delay the next games by spending 3 months on this one feature.
Always welcome I wouldn't spend too much time on it either. Better tackle that with your next game, and then backport it if possible. I wonder if there aren't any good savegame routines/modules on the Unity Store. You'd still have to adjust them, but better than starting from scratch. Wouldn't surprise me if you need to redesign some stuff for the next game(s), just to make savegames easier to handle. From what I understood from Niels, the fact alone that he uses fixed increases at levelups and thus can calculate all "max" values (e.g. max HP, as opposed to current HP) from the class templates makes savegame handling a lot simpler.
Spent the day working on the in-battle save and it's just horrific. I really don't know if I'll ever get it working properly so I'm going to have to put it on the back burner. The underlying code base is just so complex and because I didn't code all of it myself, trying to get this working just leads to all kinds of issues. That being said, the rough design I put together is a separate module that I can keep working on and then port into this or any other game. Therefore, it shouldn't be too hard to back port it into these games when I do (if ever) get it working. I'm going to work on the next game and continue polishing up this game for the 1.6 patch update.
A suggestion, maybe for your next game - right now there is no place I know of that shows all the information on your characters. The shop shows most info, but not the abilities. And in the battles you cannot see for example AP recovery rate. I would like to have abilities in the shop for sure to know whom to give that great +14 AP item. Or did I miss something?
Hhmm ... with all that complexity, you cannot approach it from the other side, and easily blackbox the saving action into an API, I think. I'll be terribly busy for at least the next week, and I have some other things I really need to do, and soon. But when/if I find a quiet hour or two, I can dig around a bit and see what I can find about savegame implementation. Would savestates (like DOSBox has on PCs) work? Instead of creating what is essentially a mini-database for storing the savegame data, you dump all relevant memory contents (no idea what that'd be, would need to research) into a file. And restore them to RAM when you load a savestate. My extremely basic and limited knowledge of what savestates do, let alone how on a technical level, unfortunately isn't enough to judge their viability.
Reading this thread I now am coming to understand the complexity of trying to implement a mid mission save. It may well be too difficult to implement into Demons Rise at this late stage in its development and not worth putting so much effort into. But please try to have it in any future games. I am much more eager to fire up a game on my iPad that I know I can save at any point rather than starting a game that I need to commit myself to for a determined amount of time. For those type of games I prefer to use my pc.
Yep, I guess you're right ... there isn't a way to bring up the abilities in the shop screen. I'll have a look and see if can add that option somehow.
I don't think so ... I basically have to save all the data elements needed at the end of each turn to recreate the scene. It's possible ... just complicated. But as I said, it should just be one giant piece of code that I can plug into any of these styles of games. Probably won't be ready for the next game but when it is, I'll just back-port it to all of the games built on the same core code.
Agreed but gotta balance it out. That spell also never fails so it's sort of a no-risk venture. I'll play around with it and see if anything needs to be changed. I'm playing a team with a High Wizard so should be able to get first-hand experience on it.
Made some improvements to the AI today. The AI should now no longer huddle around walls and cover positions that do not provide cover from the direction of the player units. Instead, they'll move towards the player instead. Seems to be a good change.
Fixed the bug where patrols that arrive wouldn't be visible until you ended your move. Well not entirely ... they now show up when you click any of your characters. Not perfect but good enough for now. I think I've addressed all remaining bugs. Should have the 1.6 DLC / patch ready by the end of next week. Since I have what looks like a good core game with bugs fixed, I'm going to start work on the next games this week as well.
