Live Patch: Upgraded Ambition System and Class Evolution (v2.0.0-beta.1811)

This week marks another big step in the Class/Abilities/Synergies rework that I've been batching each week: Ambitions are now properly online. Long story short, focus on the individual adventurer is top priority for me currently (outside of Multiplayer yooooo) and I finally sat down to build the infrastructure I've been dreaming of for the Ambition System and it ties in beautifully with the new Ability pools and new Classes. (I also got all the goods up on the Wiki).

──────────────────────── NEW FEATURES ────────────────────────

The Upgraded Ambition System

This is the big one — the infrastructure I've been dreaming about, finally online and tied beautifully into the new Ability pools and Classes. Class Evolution lets your strongest adventurers permanently transform — changing into a new advanced class with a new ability kit, or becoming a Legend of their existing class. Progress is driven by what a hero does in the field, and the final step has to be earned through a personal trial.

Every adventurer has an Ambition tied to their zodiac sign. It plays out in three tiers:

1. The Drive — A personal goal (an OVR threshold, a quest count, etc.). Completing it brings the hero to a Crossroads. (+10 Fame)

2. The Calling — At the Crossroads, you choose the hero's path. They immediately gain a signature trait and +4 to their primary stats, then have to fulfill the Calling through deeds. (+30 Fame)

3. The Ascension — The final payoff, unlocked by passing The Proving

When you pick a Calling, you decide which kind of payoff the hero is working toward. The hero changes into a new advanced class, gains a newly rolled ability kit, and gets +3 to all stats (uncapped — it exceeds normal stat ceilings).

• To start: 48 Drives (two per zodiac sign), 7 class-evolution lineages with 14 forked roads, and 24 Legend archetypes spanning combat, character, and lore destinies. More are coming in every category — I wanted to get these out the door to get a feel for them and hear your feedback.

• The Proving: a hero's final ascension is no longer handed over passively. When they meet the deed-gate for Tier-3, a road-themed Proving quest appears on the board — and the hero must be in the deployed party and personally complete the trial to ascend. The journey ends on an earned climax instead of a quiet flip.

• A hero can never die at the Proving. A fatal blow becomes a critical injury — battered, but alive. Failure is a real but recoverable setback: a morale hit, a fresh Proving spawns, and the journey is delayed, never lost.

• Ascension grants an evolved class with a new signature ability kit, a prestige Title, and a permanent across-the-board stat buff that pushes past normal ceilings (+3 for an Evolution, +4 for a Legend) — your hero comes out broadly stronger, every time.

• A hero's potential evolution roads are shown up front in their dossier, with live progress toward the deeds that unlock each one — plus a dedicated The Proving stage card during the final trial (target, contestable difficulty, deploy nudge, failed-attempt count).

• Lore Callings unspool a piece of canon into the Lore Archive on ascension — eight new revelations tied to the Crown, the Temple, the Underworld, the Tower, and more.

• Stakes: neglect an active Calling and the hero grows restless, souring their mood and risking abandonment. Abandon a Tier-2 Calling and they return to the Crossroads; falter at the Tier-3 Proving and that road closes forever.

• Two heroes who have both walked the full journey form a distinct "Legends together" party bond.

• The guild's first-ever ascension is recorded as a new Hall of Fame milestone: "A Legend Forged." Ascensions are celebrated in the Week Summary, and milestones/abandonments/obsessions surface in the Live Feed as they happen.

• Class Evolution gives your best adventurers a distinct identity shaped by their record and your choices. A maxed-out veteran still has a major step left to take.

Multiplayer/Online Leagues

The multiplayer build-out continues — here's the full picture as it stands now:

• One shared world. Every player in a league reads rival standings, division ranks, and the other humans' guilds from the same server, so two players never see different placements for the same rival. League standings are visible in-game from week 1 in the CCL Rankings area.

• Shared, contested recruiting. The free-agent pool, support staff (crafters, gatherers, scouts, astrologers, tacticians, and more), and Academy youth prospects are now a single shared pool across the league — every guild browses the same recruits, and they no longer dwindle to empty over a season. Signing a free agent, hiring a staffer, or enrolling a youth means bidding against rival guildmasters — only one guild lands each one, and you can pay a premium to outbid for a prized prospect. Keep me posted on this — if you're not seeing enough prospects (or too many), let me know and I'll tweak.

• The Crown Cup is decided once for the whole league — same qualifiers, same champion, for every guildmaster.

• Scout your rivals. Clicking a fellow guildmaster's profile shows their roster size, average power, and strongest adventurers by class — their full builds, equipment, and economy stay behind the fog of war.

• Dispatches. Write free-text letters to other guildmasters. They travel by weekly courier into your Front Desk inbox with their own League filter tab, unread badges, and read/unread tracking — no shared world state changes hands.

• A real trade composer. Offer materials, request anything from the catalog, and read a fairness meter so you're not negotiating blind. Incoming offers now show proper material names and icons.

• Host Controls (in My League): force-advance a stalled week (absent guildmasters are commander-played), pause/resume, change the turn timer mid-game, kick a member, or hand off the host role — which also passes automatically if the host leaves. Hosts can start a season early with whoever's shown up; empty human slots are dropped. Idle leagues no longer stall — once the timer runs out, the week advances on its own.

• Invite friends with a shareable link. The lobby's Copy Invite button bundles your code, a join link, and instructions; a friend who opens it lands on the Multiplayer screen with the code pre-filled and validated.

• A season-ending victory ceremony plays out as a cinematic with final standings, and founding/joining a league opens a styled welcome card explaining what's different in multiplayer.

Academy Upgrades

• Morale meter (on the dashboard and trainee detail): drifts weekly toward how well a trainee is supported — role-matched instructors, mentors, and a better dormitory lift it; grueling regimens and cross-training drag it down. High morale speeds training, low morale slows it, and a trainee's mood across their years shapes the disposition trait they graduate with.

• In-semester events: small, frequent moments — sharp sessions, festivals, scoldings, homesickness — fire throughout each semester and gather in a per-trainee"Recent Events"timeline alongside the bigger semester-end events.

• Early graduation: once a trainee is 18 with a full year (two semesters) done, you can pull them from the Academy and field them today, trading remaining growth for an adventurer you can use now. A non-binding projection previews their likely class, potential, and estimated overall before you commit.

• Class Affinity meter: shows how strongly a trainee is locked onto their career-track class. It fills as they train on-role, replacing the old hidden weighting — a fully built-up track makes graduating as that class nearly assured.

• Training Commissions arrive from factions and rivals, asking your established Academy to raise a trainee to a target role and potential tier by a deadline — deliver on spec for a renown reward, or miss and take a renown hit.

Tower — Boss Reactions

• Each Tower floor's boss may now react to your chosen combat strategy. A Punishing or Defensive boss makes reckless assaults far riskier and rewards caution; a Cunning or Offensive boss punishes patience and rewards aggression. Balanced is always the safe hedge. The floor's reaction (and how it shifts each strategy's risk/reward) is shown before you commit — so Aggressive is no longer the automatic best choice on every floor. I'm still working on balance here, so it'll evolve over the coming weeks.

Doom Deadline — Now Optional

• Toggle the 1,000-year deadline on/off, or drop it to 50 years to turn up the pressure. Turn it off entirely to play forever. (Crown Cup League mode keeps the Portal sealed, so the deadline doesn't apply there.)

Steam Cloud Saves

• Cloud saves now restore across machines. Start the game on a new PC and your Steam Cloud saves appear and load automatically, even with no local copy. At startup the game adopts a cloud save only when it represents strictly greater progress, so a full local save is never overwritten by a smaller cloud copy after a crash. Steam has broken my heart before, so try this out and let me know how it goes. It should work — but Steam Cloud is a moving target.

Smaller Features

• Ability-ready portrait glow: a subtle cyan glow appears behind a portrait when a hero's signature active is charged and ready to fire on their next deployment — visible anywhere the portrait shows. (Not for you? Settings → Display → Ability Ready Glow.)

• Trophy Room: your Crown Cup pedigree now has its own dedicated 🏆 sub-tab on the CCL screen — podium history, postgame Era of Champions titles, and a Hall of Fame summary in one case. Click any guild to see their Trophy Room too (championships, runner-up/third finishes, total appearances). (I'll make this fancier over the next few patches.)

──────────────────────── QUALITY OF LIFE ────────────────────────

Recruiting & Scouts

• One-click best scout: clicking the primary Scout button on a recruit immediately assigns your best idle scout instead of opening a picker.

• New"Send All Idle Scouts"button on recruitment pages puts all idle scouts on board-watch for that recruit type at once (scouts already on orders are never disturbed), plus a"Stop All Watching"button to return every board-watcher to idle in one click.

• A scout with a watch-priority template attached now keeps a template dropdown in its expanded row, so you can swap templates without detaching first.

• Each Academy instructor now carries a"Teaches " badge (Tank/Healer/Melee/Ranged) at hire time — visible even before scouting, so you know who staffs what before you spend gold.

Training & Roster

• One-click Auto Train: a prominent "⚡ Auto Train (picks best program)" button enrolls a hero in auto-training with the best program in a single click.

• Set auto-renew at hire and extension: a "🔄 Auto-renew this contract" checkbox now appears when hiring adventurers, hiring/retiring staff, and extending contracts.

• The Academy faculty UI now shows which instructor actually teaches each trainee, warns accurately (a strong "losing potential" alert only when no faculty is assigned, a gentler advisory when a role slot is empty but a fallback covers it), lets you swap an instructor in place without clearing the slot first, and shows a clear locked tile for faculty slots beyond your Academy's capacity. The Career Track picker now confirms before charging gold, and the curriculum unfolds by semester (broad foundations early, specialized focuses as a trainee matures).

• Party notes now stay the way you left them (open or collapsed) across navigation and save/load. Party filters on the Training, Roster, and Leaders screens correctly match the selected party again.

• The Gear picker has two new filters — In Training and Locked Out — each with a live count. Bulk-equip rows in the Sets panel respect field-locks (a deployed hero's row greys out with a reason on hover).

Trade & Treasury

• Material trade price trends now ride right where you weigh the deal — an inline weekly trend chip and a Wk%/Now% tooltip on incoming offers (Markets and Front Desk), plus the Guild Trading builder rows — the same numbers you read in the Portfolio, everywhere. No more tab-flipping.

• Accept-All button beside Decline-All bulk-accepts every affordable material-trade offer across all guilds (poaching and incoming-adventurer trades are excluded and handled individually; out-of-resources mid-batch is skipped safely).

• The trade builder no longer shifts under your cursor (source list and selected items sit side by side). The "Trade Complete" toast auto-dismisses and no longer reflows the form; selling a portfolio asset in full keeps it selected; completing a trade clears the rival's lingering counters. The material dropdown keeps a stable alphabetical order, and Portfolio-pinned materials are marked there too.

• Trade offers now stay off the Front Desk inbox by default (handled on the Markets tab so they don't drown out faction/Crown/Sage letters — opt back in via Trade Filters), which also gain a value-ratio floor that auto-declines lowball offers. The Treasurer's auto-decline threshold can be set above breakeven, and a new trade-status banner explains why no trades are happening.

Misc

• Clearer Crown certification: the Crown Admin screen lists every requirement for your next tier — roster, quests, raids, Tower progress, and Crown Cup results, not just Renown and Gold. Apply with field requirements unmet and you're warned that denial is likely (and would start a reapply cooldown). A too-small-roster rejection now names the exact minimum required.

• Draggable Founding Tasks overlay — drag it anywhere, clamps to the viewport, remembers its position (matching the Growth Tasks panel).

• The Tower's Auto-Provision button gains an opt-in checkbox to also auto-source Feast Before Battle, with per-component craft/buy buttons.

• "Don't ask again" on reversible confirmations now survives a reload, and clearing a party is suppressible. The staff contract screen responds to [ENTER] to make an offer. The hotkeys on/off toggle now lives in Settings → Hotkeys (and surfaces when you search settings for "disable"/"turn off"). The deal-assessment banner stays visible on short screens.

Multiplayer QoL

• The waiting banner and lobby member list show who's online — an active guildmaster taking their turn vs. one last seen hours ago — plus an at-a-glance "3/5 ready to advance" summary. Connection trouble is visible now (a persistent "reconnecting" notice keeps your turn safe; a league gone after a server restart shows a clear "can't find this league" recovery message).

• Lost sealed bids explain themselves (outbid / disqualified for insufficient gold / recruit left the pool) and league free-agent results — won, outbid, disqualified, or lapsed — appear plainly in your Weekly Report. A declined/expired/failed league trade now surfaces a toast. Events resolved while you were away (accepted trades, delivered letters, won signings) are no longer lost when the world advances several weeks — a won bid no longer reads as "Bid Expired." A pending Academy claim shows a CLAIM badge.

──────────────────────── BALANCE ────────────────────────

Classes & Abilities

• Several evolution-target classes now have refined abilities: the Reaper's passive grants its +15% crit to the whole party; the Watcher and Spellblade project real party-wide damage/survivability auras; the Singularity Mage slows enemies and shields the party; and the Spellward trades its filler attack for a genuine damage-reduction-plus-healing bastion and a party shield.

• Party combat passives now apply everywhere. Crit bonuses, crowd-control, loot bonuses, synergy crit, and party-bond effects carry into raids, the Tower, and the Crown Cup (with quest-matching caps) — so a crit-focused, control-heavy, or tightly-bonded party finally earns its specialty outside of questing.

• "Clashing creeds": opposed combat philosophies now create roster friction. A Holy crusader and a Shadow-wielder, or a Divine and an Occult hero, pull a party in different directions — surfaced as a chemistry penalty in the breakdown panel.

• Factions react to your party's damage flavor: the Temple rewards Holy and frowns on Shadow; the Underworld is the reverse — adjusting the gold and standing from their contracts, with a feed line explaining why.

• Auto-training class affinities match real classes again (eight programs were silently giving no class bonus), and capped runaway party damage stacking so mono-class aura comps can't manufacture an unbounded multiplier. On Ascension, a hero rolls a fresh ability kit from the new class's full option set with a rarity floor at their current tier — usually the signature, sometimes a pool variant for variety, never a downgrade.

New Game+

• Loyal veterans in New Game+: the party you carry into NG+ now serves at a loyalty rate (~75% off market wage) instead of full end-game pricing that bricked a fresh Tier-1 treasury — they followed you back through the Portal out of belief, not coin. Later extensions re-price at market once your economy can sustain it. The party-select screen previews each party's weekly loyalty payroll and your starting treasury. You can also now deliberately pick your NG+ blessing (the random "Surprise Me" roll is still there).

Academy

• A max-tier Academy now funds a 4th instructor slot, so all four role disciplines (Tank/Healer/Melee/Ranged) can each have a dedicated instructor.

• Academy-Only mode starts with a survivable runway: a founding class of five recent graduates on contract (with guaranteed coverage for every party role), guaranteed fast-track prospects, and a one-time 15,000-gold cushion to bridge to your first home-grown graduates. The whole opening is reframed — more room for stories. Scouting Templates can now target Crafters, Staff, and Gatherers, and irrelevant scopes/recruit chatter no longer clutter the mode.

Economy & Rivals

• The weekly Standing Bonus no longer hard-caps at 5,000 gold. Past the soft cap, renown keeps paying out on a 30% diminishing tail up to a 25,000-gold ceiling — so the late game's headline progression stat keeps rewarding you. Early/mid-game income is unchanged.

• The early recruit pool offers more variety: Paladin, Barbarian, Ranger, and Harmony Druid join the common class pool (doubling early common healer options). Selling gear from the Gear tab now pays the same market-based price as the Market tab (broken/worn gear no longer sells for full value; guild sell bonuses still stack).

• Buffed Rival Guilds a bit 😉 — they climb the Tower more reliably (capable mid-strength guilds actually attempt floors, and hard-won early progress holds longer between attempts).

• New Custom Difficulty sliders: Rival Activity (how many quests/raids/tower runs rivals attempt yearly, to keep the CCL competitive deeper into a run) and Passive Morale Drift (idle adventurers gain/lose morale weekly).

• In a no-timer league, an inactive host is automatically handed off to the most recently active player, so a dropped host can't freeze the whole league.

──────────────────────── BUG FIXES ────────────────────────

Ambitions & Combat

• Fixed a Commander auto-deploy directive grabbing a hero's Proving quest and resolving it as an ordinary contract — which left the hero permanently stuck short of ascension.

• A hero acquired by trade now reflects their Ascension stat boost in their Overall immediately, instead of a stale value until reload.

• The Crown Cup's deciding overtime now respects your party's synergy, chemistry, guild, and captain edges — a clearly stronger party no longer loses on raw averages alone.

• More traits do exactly what their tooltips promise: Charismatic's renown bonus and Vanguard's party-damage bonus now apply, while Giant Slayer, Prodigy, Lone Wolf, and Team Player check their stated conditions instead of always firing.

• Battle animations narrate faithfully — shields render as buffs, heals as healing, and the Necromancer's undead legion as a shadow assault, instead of being shown as enemy attacks.

• The peak-training notification reads "1.5×" to match the panel, and the "Party Time, Excellent" easter-egg synergy shows a sparkle instead of a misleading "+0% OVR."

Renames, Display & Tower

• Renamed adventurers now show their chosen names everywhere it matters — level-up, injury, death, and memorial entries across the Live Feed, Reports, Week Summary, and modals. (I hate this bug.)

• Defeating Floor 100 now ends the Tower for good — no re-fight of the final floor, no repeating "Tower Conquered" message or renown faucet; your run continues in the Crown Cup era. The Crown's Tier-8 certification no longer hands out an impossible "advance 5 floors" task when the Tower is maxed/conquered/severed/sealed.

• Renown and CCL scores no longer show stray decimals (raid-victory renown from quality-boosted buildings is properly rounded everywhere). The Quartermaster's durability warning triggers on percentage of max durability, so full-condition starter gear isn't flagged as cracked. The inventory-overflow warning reads under an "Inventory" header instead of "Armory."

• The salvage result popup no longer re-fires on revisiting the gear tab or loading an old save. The wiki Party Simulator is editable again once every slot is filled. Russian Tower localization is far more consistent (unified Strength/Weakness intel labels, Russian lore + War Room name, translated gear names in tooltips/vault/salvage/market).

Saves, Filters & Trades

• Deleted saves stay deleted — deleting your active slot in-game no longer resurrects it on the main menu, and can't overwrite a new game.

• Guild Block filters fixed: dismiss/restore rivals from the rival detail panel (so the "Dismissed" filter has something to show), and "Won't deal" correctly surfaces rivals who refuse to trade.

• Counteroffers on material-for-gold trades respond sensibly instead of demanding absurd material amounts. Selling an adventurer to an allied guild reports the rejection against the tier shown in the sell list. A rival adventurer offered in a trade routes "View in Rankings" correctly, and the rival recruit panel labels acquisition cost as "Value" rather than "Wage/yr."

Multiplayer

• The Advance Week button no longer gets stuck on "⏳ League…" after you leave a league mid-wait — take your turn immediately, no reload needed.

• Fixed a league wedging when a guildmaster left and rejoined (which spawned a duplicate player + orphan bot and stopped the week advancing); returning players reclaim their original guild cleanly. Fixed a host being permanently pinned one week behind their co-player. Simultaneous joins and ready calls no longer lose data, and malformed world data can't wedge a league into a permanent error state.

• Dispatches to a guildmaster who left/was kicked now bounce back with an "undeliverable" notice instead of silently vanishing. Leagues are hardened against cheating clients — another player can't defraud you in a trade or steal contested signings with gold they don't actually have. In league mode, hired staff no longer reappear in the recruit pool to be hired into duplicates.

• The Treasurer's inbound-offer auto-accept valuation now matches the value shown on the offer card — favorable-looking offers are no longer silently left pending.