v1.1.66
New Skill - (D)ominate - Evil clerics can temporarily bend an evil creature to their will, causing it to turn on its allies for a short period of time. This skill is fairly expensive at 30 mana per cast, currently, though this may be rebalanced in the future. Also, it is currently tier 2.
BUG FIXES to Dominate: You can't dominate immobile enemies like flame turrets; fixed a message bug when you dominated an emeny and it reported the wrong name.
Slight changes to how heals are calculated.
v1.1.64
New skill - (F)ire Elemental - the tier 3 fire skill, summons a ranged fire attacker to help you out on your adventure. You can only have one elemental under your control at a time. Grows in power as the hero does, based primarily on Intelligence.
Worked on a MAJOR retooling of the combat system, though it will largely be invisible to the player. Originally, armor played a factor in whether you hit an enemy or not - meaning, your damage had to overcome the enemies armor rating to do meaningful damage (with a little bit of random fate added in as far as your damage and their damage reduction per hit.) A 'miss' simply occurred when your damage was less than their armor (and vice versa). I ended up disliking this for several reasons. First, weapons were far more important in landing a hit than they should be, and second, you get into sort of an 'arms race', where armor HAD to increase on a monster to make it more challenging, and monsters damage had to massively increase to hit the player at higher levels. As a result, low armor classes would take massive damage, and always get hit.
The new system has been reworked with the player and creatures actually having attack and defense(evade) rating. Now, whether you hit or miss is largely a matter of your level and your skill. You ALWAYS have a chance to hit, and there is ALWAYS a chance you will miss, the hit/miss ratio actually being a comparison of the attackers skill to the defenders skill. So while a creature may be 10 levels below you, there is always at least an infintessimal chance it will hit, or you will miss.
Armor, now actually serves it's intended purpose - damage reduction. If an attack hits, the damage it does is reduced in a linear fashion by your armor rating. However, a hit is always a hit, and will do a minimum of 1 point of damage.
Added a 'miss' animation to the graphics. When you hit a target, you'll see a red slash appear across them; now, you will also see a blue swipe appear when you miss the target. If you actually hit, but their armor absorbs all the damage, you will get a message, but no animation.
Removed 'Miss' messages from the message log. If you don't like this change, PLEASE let me know - it will take 2 secs to reinstate it.
On a different note, added more information to the player screen. Pets/summons were slightly tweaked due to the change in the combat system.
Please bear with me, as the difficulty due to the changes is still only a day old, and will take me a while to get it balanced, but on the whole I feel a lot better about it.
Sorry there wasn't more fun, transparent stuff added today, but this work had needed to be done for a while, and had always been sitting in the back of my head as I mulled over how I wanted to do it.
Thanks for your time and patience,
B
v1.1.61
In direct response to some nice feedback I got I have added the following changes:
More detail to the character screen. Weapons will list their damage range, and armor will list it's defense bonus. The basic combat stats should be fairly transparent now.
New skill - conjure (A)mmuntion - As the name implies, this skill, for a small cost in mana, will magically create more ammo for your equipped ranged weapon. This begins the new 'archer' line under the rogue skill tree, which will be followed with 2 more archer specific skills to follow.
The character select screen now display a new little bit of flavor text. You class and alignment selection will now display a title which should give the player a little bit a foresight into what skill they will start with. I will probably add an explicit list of starting skills somewhere, but this adds just a little bit of flavor to the character selection process.
Got a comment about how certain monsters acted. The AI was already in place, so I made a few changes to the monster tables. Mindless creatures will move and act randomly (eg, slimes), while undead (and other creatures) will now attack relentlessly, regardless of their wounds. Other creatures remain the same, and will flee when they are greatly wounded (the level at which they flee being based on the creatures 'courage').
Summon skeletons have been reworked a bit. Now your raised skeleton will attack mindlessly more in line with the above changes - they no longer flee at low hp. This, in addition to the fact that you can constantly summon more, helps to distinguish this and the wolf pet, which is a bit stronger and smarter. Reworked the summon skeleton stats so they scale a little better as you level.
Small change so game would show up in windows taskbar.
Reworked poison (again), both against friendlies and enemies.
Other bug-fixes.
More to come!!
v1.1.57
New monsters
New items
New skill - Chain (L)ightning - an upgraded lightning bolt which jumps from target to target, diminishing in power each jump. Tier 3 Mage Neutral
Yet another reshuffling of the skill trees. Quickness is now a tier 3 fighter skill, and has been buffed slightly. The cleric tree has been reshuffled - turn undead is obviously not an evil skill, and should be higher in the tree. The rogue tree is still not solid in the direction I want to go. Stealth is sort of ambiguous as to being good or evil; however poisoning a weapon is not. This tree is going to see more changes as I implement some of Mr Seckingtons skills, and fill in the gaps.
Changes to monster AI in regards to stealth. Previously, monsters that you had already attacked could still see you when you restealthed. I have made some changes to remedy this, though I'm not yet sure if this is exactly what I want. Nonetheless, it's a better implementation than before.
More refinements; more warning messages (eg, not having enough mana for a skill) so that you don't wonder why a skill isn't working.
Please note that the key mappings have (again) changed, hopefully a little more intuitively now. Please check the in game help file for commands. Also, the skill tree has the keypress indicated in parentheses.