First developer diary - Ludus Management and Tactics

Between matches you can now invest directly in your Ludus with four permanent upgrades:

• Scout

• Doctores

• Drillmaster

• Physician

These are long term investments bought with denarii. Each upgrade has its own level cap and gets more expensive as you rank it up. The cost for the next level is always base cost times current level plus one so it scales up as you commit to a path.

Steam post imageBelow is a quick tour of what each one does and how far you can push it.

Scout

The Scout upgrade is all about improving the quality of future recruits and giving you more control over who shows up at your door.

Max level for Scout is 10

What it does: At level one you hire a proper scout for your Ludus This unlocks recruit focus in the Ludus Exchange so you can gently steer the pool toward either female fighters or a specific culture Roman Barbarian Hellenic Egyptian or Carthaginian.

On top of that every scout level gives your future recruits a little more potential.

Each level adds two points to the potential stat cap for strength endurance and agility and one percent extra chance for them to roll a Talent trait. At max rank that means plus twenty to the cap and plus ten percent Talent chance for new blood coming in.

In simple terms, if you plan to live in the Ludus Exchange and constantly cycle your roster the Scout upgrade slowly turns that pool into a much more reliable source of stars. Steam post image

Doctores

The Doctores upgrade is your answer to permanent death feeling a bit too final all the time.

Max level for Doctores is 16

What it does: After each match if one of your gladiators goes down and would normally die your Doctores can step in and attempt to save them. This is a single roll per match day and it only works if you have at least one level in Doctores.

Each level adds five percent to the save chance up to eighty percent at max rank, if the roll succeeds the gladiator survives and you even get a little news item about your Doctores pulling them back from the brink.

Doctores gives you a way to grow attached to your favourites without feeling like one unlucky match instantly deletes your whole long term plan. It does not make death trivial but it makes those close calls feel dramatic instead of just frustrating. Steam post image

Drillmaster

The Drillmaster upgrade focuses on energy and squad rotation, it does not change what happens inside the fight. Instead it changes who you are allowed to send into the arena.

Max level for Drillmaster is 5

What it does: By default any gladiator under fifty energy is considered too tired to field, they are locked out of selection until they recover above that mark.

Drillmaster slowly lowers that lock threshold but only for the player club. Each level reduces the required energy by five points down to a minimum of twenty five at level five.

• So at level one your fighters can step in from forty five energy

• At level three the lock sits around thirty five

• At level five anyone at twenty five or higher is fair game

Practically this gives you more freedom to push a tired star through a rough schedule. You can gamble on a slightly drained hero instead of being forced to field only the fresh bench every time.

Physician

The Physician upgrade deals with the other side of that energy system, instead of changing the lock it improves how quickly your bench recovers between matches.

Max level for Physician is 2

What it does: After every match the game gives resting gladiators on the bench a chunk of energy back, Physician applies only to that bench recovery and multiplies it

Each Physician level adds five percent to the amount of rest energy your benched fighters gain after a match, at max rank that means ten percent more recovery for anyone who sat out.

In other words if you like rotating your squad a lot Physician turns the Ludus into more of a recovery machine. Your key fighters bounce back faster and you feel less punished for long seasons where every match day matters

All four upgrades are meant to pull on different parts of the loop

• Scout makes future recruits stronger and more tailored to your taste

• Doctores protects the careers of the fighters you already love

• Drillmaster lets you push tired gladiators into important fixtures when you really need them

• Physician helps everyone on the bench recharge so the whole squad feels more alive over a long campaign

You can of course mix and match, nothing stops you from going deep into Scout first to secure better long term talent then pivoting into Doctores once you have a couple of favourites you do not want to lose. Or you can play a very intense schedule focused build with Drillmaster and Physician so that energy becomes something you manage rather than something that blocks you.

Tactics

Next up you will see a new Tactics panel has been added as well. For now it allows you to setup the starting positions of your Gladiators as well as who start where. You can have up to 5 different ones saved at a time which should provide players with more than enough room for flexibility. The way you move the Gladiators to the different positions are very much like how it works in an auto-battler game - You click on and then select the tile you want it to be positioned in and it moves there.

In the actual pregame selection you will now see that there's a dropdown, with the numbers added so it's more intuitive which of your Gladiators start in which position. You will also noticed I have added the numbers below their feet as well as a button to easily switch the positions as a QOL feature.

When an AI club starts a season they are assigned a random favourite formation from that playbook. During the season the AI watches how that setup is doing. If a club keeps stumbling and collects several losses in a row with the same formation, the director behind the scenes gets nervous and tells them to try something else. The club switches to another layout from the playbook and keeps going. If they start performing better with the new idea they stick with it for a while. If not they will eventually change again.

On top of that, the AI also looks at who should stand where. Before each match it scores its own gladiators based on how tanky they look. Those with big health pools and solid protection are more likely to get pushed into the three central slots where the pressure is highest, while lighter fighters naturally drift toward the safer edge positions. So even without you seeing it the AI is trying to do the same thing you are doing in the tactics room put the right body in the right place.

Closing remarks

I hope you have liked what you've seen and read in this developer diary, and that it's adding more depth and actual management to the game, as well as making the player able to leave their mark on how matches turn out without directly controlling the Gladiators. Next up the plan is to add a couple more QOL features, and then work on Multiplayer starts :)