Author Topic: Skyward Collapse 1.501-1502 "Itami no Bushi (The Samurai of Pain)" Released!  (Read 4020 times)

Offline x4000

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Original: http://arcengames.blogspot.com/2013/08/skyward-collapse-1501-beta-itami-no.html

If you've not yet read about the general changes in the 1.4 beta line, now is a good time to do so. It's expected that we'll stay in beta for the new features until we release the 2.0 version of the game in late August, alongside the new Nihon no Mura expansion.  A lot is different in the base game since 1.4, so we want to make sure and give this time to mature before we put this out to everyone.

This one has a bunch of handy stuff for both the new expansion as well as the base game.  Almost all of it is balance work and housekeeping in general.  Now that the basics of the expansion are out, I felt like I needed to spend a bit of time on cleaning up the bugtracker list a bit before moving forward with more from the expansion.

The title of this release comes from the rebalancing of the Bushi unit in the expansion -- holy smokes are those guys beasts now!

More to come soon.  Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the  in-game updater itself, if you already have any version of the game.  When you  launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time.
« Last Edit: August 02, 2013, 05:10:11 pm by x4000 »
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Offline nas1m

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I finally got some time to try out the new Japanese faction. The toll? One fatal error and some very cosmetic stuff :D. See Mantis for more info. Aside from that - having fun so far! Just keep 'em coming!

PS: It also occurs to me that Torii might be too cheap in terms of negative point cost and/or have too low a cooldown for the insane usefulness it has in terms of negating the bandit threat for a full 5 turns. You might even limit it to a single turn, now that I think of it - even then it would be useful as heck...
« Last Edit: August 02, 2013, 04:43:37 pm by nas1m »
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Offline x4000

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Awesome!
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Offline x4000

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New version 1.502 out, with a fix to those two things.
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Offline nas1m

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Thanks!
BTW: Should I create a Mantis issue for the Torii balancing mentioned above?
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Offline x4000

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Ah, I missed your edit on the Torii -- I actually already made it tons nerfed thanks to Misery's suggestion, heh. But it certainly could be narrowed to 1 turn if that makes more sense.
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Offline Misery

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Ok, couple of quick things....

First of all, troll change, that one looks pretty darned good.  Makes sense for the Norse to have a myth unit specifically set to kill and defend against other myth units.   This guy should be quite helpful now. 

Bushi looks downright nasty, I see why you named the patch after them, hah.  Komainu looks muuuuch better for that cost with the burst effect, I can see some interesting (and probably risky) uses for this guy.   Overall it's looking like the Japanese faction has some important uses for diamonds as a whole here, too. 

Torii looks much better, actually.   I dont think this one is too OP myself (beyond the problem it had with the cost).  It kills all bandits, but considering that the bandits spawn literally every single turn, it truly does only act as a delay, as it cannot harm the buildings.  Not to mention that using it at the wrong time could be quite wasteful.  I will suggest a couple of small changes though to nerf it just a little more.  Change it's diamond cost to jewelery.   Shouldnt be a bad thing for a token from this faction, as it's looking like they're going to need high amounts of diamond production to really shine anyway.  Incense cost should go up yet further as well.   2. Up it's cooldown a little more.  I see a cooldown of 20 on Expert (those are affected by the difficulty level, yeah?).  30 or 40 turns would make more sense with this token (probably 40 is best).       As for it's effect, I would say to leave it as the 5 turns that it is;  if this were to go down to just one or two turns I think it's usefulness would drop quite a bit. 


There, just a couple of quick things... I'll have more after I've had a real go at it later.   

Offline Misery

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A couple more things:

Otoroshi:  These guys can attack and obliterate ally camps that dont actually have a unit on them.  Pretty sure they're supposed to target units specifically, not attacking buildings that have no units on them?

Kirin:  Havent used them much yet but the couple that I have used have had this odd tendancy to just waddle around aimlessly and not really fight much....  I even had one that I dropped right next to a horde of enemy units, and then when it's turn came around.... it waddled randomly away from them.  Next turn it moved back but didn't attack.  In the end it died without doing any damage other than counterattacks.

Maikubi:  Holy chaos, Batman!  The description on this one says that it's effect "happens after one turn", which implies that it's a one-shot ability, but it's actually set to happen every turn for 5 turns.... which can quickly devolve into total and utter chaos.  And that's just in the FIRST age, so that's not counting the myth camps.

Wako:  GAH TOO MANY HORSES!!!  27 horses for a human unit cost is probably much too high.  Even myth units that want horses or horse meat arent that crazy expensive.  Too pricey to really use.

Shinigami:  Increase the incense cost of this one by alot. Up it by 50 or 60 maybe?  It's effect is basically Heimdall's horn except that it happens over and over for 5 turns.   Incredibly useful and powerful effect that can get the player out of all sorts of bad situations while creating a delay as well.

Also, some things could probably be explained a little better...  the Shinobi for instance, the player wont know about their immunity to counter attacks until AFTER they are summoned, as this ability of theirs is not listed anywhere in the unit list for the barracks. Similar with something like the Jubboko token;  the Onryos that it creates all give 5 souls when killed, which is a pretty important effect, but the player would not know this at all by the token's description.   They wouldnt know what kind of stats those have either. 


Something else I just noticed:  The cooldown on all of the Japanese myth tokens is much lower than that of the Norse or Greek.... is that supposed to be the case?


EDIT:  Ok, I also noticed now:  The Japanese have no use at all for Moon & Sun stones?  It's looking like the funky god creatures just want absurd amounts of other things instead?  They seem to mostly want a gazillion diamonds.   Definitely some funky units here.  Some initial thoughts on them:

Basan:  This, this is a fire-breathing chicken.  It wins just on that alone.  Yeah, it's got this uber-regen thing it does, but who cares about that, it's a FIRE-BREATHING CHICKEN.

Nue: Wow, this one looks strong.  He's got a glitch though:  It says he's got some really silly amount of AP, looks like it's supposed to be over 40 since he's supposed to be able to attack twice, but he actually only has 4 AP....

Hou-ou:  This guy, just.... what.   I really have no idea what I could use him for.   Also he costs about a billion diamonds.  Considering the number of other important uses for diamonds that the Japanese have, this cost might be a bit overboard.


Seeing these though, I think I can see the reasoning behind the low cooldowns on the myth tokens, since the Japanese dont have the "big global strike" or heavy effect god tokens or anything like that, and have rampaging gods that may be in more need of killing than those of the other factions.   So that's probably a good thing.

Not to mention that it looks like the god-creatures are inherantly less risky than the god-tokens of the other 2 factions;  the Japanese can use Shinigami to basically cancel these guys if placing one turns out to be a big mistake.  The other 2 factions, they cant do that once they've placed a token.  On the other hand though, the game itself could decide "NOPE" when you drop one of them, managing to kill it off before it really has a chance to do it's thing... 


All very interesting.  These guys really play very differently from the other two.  Really liking it so far.  Also, that tree thing + Shinigami = LOTS of souls for both sides if they're activated when there's alot of human units around.


One question:  Why does Bamboo cost 2 AP to place?  You need quite a bit of it for it to really do it's thing, unlike mountains or lakes where it only takes a couple of them, or even just one, to cause an effect.


EDIT 2:  I finally caught the damn jump bug in a save file!   Here:  http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=11894  I uploaded the save to that.    This one is reliable and is happening every single time I load that save.  Just watch Njord.
« Last Edit: August 05, 2013, 07:10:03 am by Misery »

Offline x4000

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Whoa, somehow I missed these last few posts!  I'll get to them shortly, but in the meantime -- new version!  http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,13684.0.html
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Offline x4000

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Whew, okay, so that was a lot of stuff, thanks for all the notes Misery!  Sorry for missing those until now.  A few were resolved in 1.503, and the rest are addressed in 1.504: http://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=Skyward_Collapse_-_Post_Release_Notes#Beta_1.504

Some specific responses:

Quote
Kirin:  Havent used them much yet but the couple that I have used have had this odd tendancy to just waddle around aimlessly and not really fight much....  I even had one that I dropped right next to a horde of enemy units, and then when it's turn came around.... it waddled randomly away from them.  Next turn it moved back but didn't attack.  In the end it died without doing any damage other than counterattacks.

That's pretty odd.  It may have been struck with some specific malady, or the situation was otherwise confusing in some particular way.  If you keep seeing it, I'll have to up their AP.

Quote
Something else I just noticed:  The cooldown on all of the Japanese myth tokens is much lower than that of the Norse or Greek.... is that supposed to be the case?

Yeah, I did that because they were less powerful in a lot of cases, as well as being in general less-sweepingly-powerful of a faction.  They have more flexibility, in terms of being able to do more things more frequently... but what they can do often isn't quite so crazy as killing everyone on the board or whatever.  Well... they are actually really crazy, just in their own way. ;)

Quote
Basan:  This, this is a fire-breathing chicken.  It wins just on that alone.  Yeah, it's got this uber-regen thing it does, but who cares about that, it's a FIRE-BREATHING CHICKEN.

For example this. :)  We didn't make up any of the mythological stuff, it was all actual Japanese folklore or what have you.  We made up its function in this game, but the crazy actual base descriptions are from real life.

Quote
Nue: Wow, this one looks strong.  He's got a glitch though:  It says he's got some really silly amount of AP, looks like it's supposed to be over 40 since he's supposed to be able to attack twice, but he actually only has 4 AP....

Yeah, Josh caught that last version too, sorry about that!

Quote
Seeing these though, I think I can see the reasoning behind the low cooldowns on the myth tokens, since the Japanese dont have the "big global strike" or heavy effect god tokens or anything like that, and have rampaging gods that may be in more need of killing than those of the other factions.   So that's probably a good thing.

Right, exactly.  And thanks!

Quote
Not to mention that it looks like the god-creatures are inherantly less risky than the god-tokens of the other 2 factions;  the Japanese can use Shinigami to basically cancel these guys if placing one turns out to be a big mistake.  The other 2 factions, they cant do that once they've placed a token.  On the other hand though, the game itself could decide "NOPE" when you drop one of them, managing to kill it off before it really has a chance to do it's thing...

All very interesting.  These guys really play very differently from the other two.  Really liking it so far.  Also, that tree thing + Shinigami = LOTS of souls for both sides if they're activated when there's alot of human units around.

Glad you're enjoying it. :)  The other gods (now available) have some even cooler stuff, I feel like.  I just implemented the easiest two first, and while those are cool, the others strike me as cooler honestly.
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