Slaves of Magic
Demo 1.4.11 patch note
This is a very small patch, mostly to fix a crash that I found:
- Now it is possible to cycle through unit descriptions in the barrack (same as in the team builder) without the need to close it constantly.
- Changed the flag that represents a base to make it more noticeable.
- Fixed a crash that occurred when closing a window while hovering over a skill.
Demo 1.4.10 patch note and release date change
I know I promised no new features to the demo, but I had a few ideas that I really wanted to implement that affect the early game in a meaningful way. This, of course, doesn't mean to stop sharing your feedback with us, it will still help us shape the full game, and will still fix game-breaking bugs if found in the demo.
Considering our plans for the future, we are aiming to have a feature-complete game by the end of the year, but we want to avoid releasing it during the Christmas season. So we delay our release until the start of next year, sometime after participating in the February Steam Next Fest. Now onto the patch note itself!
1.4.10 patch note
Visual changes:
- Bloodrage condition (and it's level) is now visually represented on the character if active.
- Stunned condition is now visually represented on the unit while active.
- Units will actually visually raise shield when affected by the raised shield condition.
- Ranged attacks firing animation has been modified to improve clarity.
Gameplay changes:
- New Inquisitor enemies:
- Inquisitor recruit, which replaces the shielded redeemed. This unit provides a more smoother transition for the player toward the more armored Inquisitor variants.
- Inquisitor archer and arbarest, which replaces the two-handed sword using soldier, and the two-handed hammer using soldier. This adds a bit more variance to the Inqusitor enemies, as the last Inqusitor can be either a ranged threat or an armored two-handed axe-wielding soldier, forcing the player to adapt.
- Inquisitor recruit, which replaces the shielded redeemed. This unit provides a more smoother transition for the player toward the more armored Inquisitor variants.
- Reworked Assassinate mission. The 2 leaders will be more vulnerable with fewer bodyguards, and they will be stationary till they see a player unit. Their location will be revealed after the combat phase if the player has not found them in the planning phase. The other pods will patrol as usual. This should help to make this mission more distinct from a simple kill of every enemy with guaranteed 2 leaders that was previously.
- Teleport sickness mechanics added. This means every unit after a combat mission will receive the teleport sickness debuff for a few days. This doesn't prevent them from going to further missions, but the penalty for not letting them rest will mean they will get some injuries after the mission (even if they did not suffer any damage). Two new traits have been added as well, Teleport phobia which increases the teleport sickness time, and teleport resistance which completely eliminates it. One of the reasons for including this feature is to make sure the player needs to manage at least 2 teams worth of soldiers improving the importance of training and recruiting soldiers as a result. The other is to better balance the XP spread between ranged and melee troops, as ranged combatants generally take fewer wounds, meaning they could go on more missions.
- Stunned condition has received a mini-rework. Now, it will cancel the target's raised shield, the affected unit has no threat range nor can use any reaction (like attack of opportunity). It will be removed at the start of the unit's next activation. Won't stack.
- Removed the cooldown from the one-handed hammer's stunning strike skill as it is no longer necessary as the stun no longer stacks.
- Increased the minimum damage by 1 and the maximum damage by 2 for ork weapons.
UI changes:
- In the combat layer planning phase, when a unit is selected, the unit's basic commands will be seeable instead of the scrying command.
- When hovering over enemy units while a friendly unit movement command is active will now show the enemy movement range.
Bugfixes:
- Fixed that the scrying command was not being selected when pressing the 1 key.
Demo 1.4.9 patch note
This is a very small patch, that sadly removes the official machine-translated Japanese translation. The reason for the removal is that we do not want to get into the murky legalities of using AI-generated translation.
Demo 1.4.8 patch note
This patch brings two new features to the demo:
- The first one is that a new camera drag has been implemented that is usable while holding down the middle mouse button, both in the campaign and in the combat map. This should make it a lot easier to play the game by only using the mouse.
- The other one is adding support to add new fonts to the game per language file. We had a request in our Discord to make it possible to support Japanese, at least with machine translation, this has been added. Known limitations at this time are that the line breaks do not follow the Japanese line-breaking rules and that inputting characters with the Japanese IME is not supported.
There are still no plans to support languages other than English and Hungarian officially at the moment, but the language files are made easily accessible and fonts changeable, so if that changes we only need to focus on the translation itself as the game will be able to support it. Plus this makes it easier for the community to create fan translations if there is a demand for it.
Demo 1.4.7 patch note
Another small patch, fixing some bugs and doing some slight tweaks.
Balance changes:
- 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.
UI changes:
- 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.
Bugfixes:
- 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.
Demo 1.4.6 patch note
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.
Demo 1.4.5 hotfix
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.
Demo 1.4.4 patch note
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.
Demo 1.4.3 hotfix
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).
Demo 1.4.2 hotfix
Another small hotfix has been released that corrects these problems:
- The VIP distance from the escape tile goal in the escort mission has been corrected. Previously, the VIP spawned too close to the escape tile.
- Fixed the missing summary of the exact amount of resources provided on the built buildings in the resistance base.