Overhauled training system, Doctores, Training matches and more

Salvēte Lanistas! In this little developer blog I would like to show you all of some of the things I have been busy with as of late :) First of all, I want to give a huge thank you to the players reporting bugs, suggestions and just general feedback on the game in the Steam forums. And also just to say that I truly appreciate the positivity and kind comments - Even when people are providing constructive criticism, it's being done in a very mature and polite manner.

With all that being said, now lets move on to probably the biggest new addition that has been added to the game!

Training Overhaul

This is probably the single most requested features / feedback I got from the demo, and you were all right. Honestly I should've done this one from the beginning.

My concern back then was that I didn't want players to be able to just keep training up their best Gladiators without putting them in any danger, but I do think the system I've come up with is kind of cool and creative and makes the player have to take some difficult decisions. Doctores

Each Ludus can now retire one of their Gladiators as their Doctores. This is where the difficult decision comes into play, as you can't reverse this decision and call them back from retirement. However, you can of course replace them with another Gladiator if you find a better fit and lets just say your former Doctores won't like this, and might consider coming out of retirement for another Ludus. As you can see from the screenshot above, the Doctores stats and trait acts as your cap and what they can teach your other Gladiators. This means that if you Doctores has 50 in each stat, this is the maximum cap your Gladiators can train to, furthermore, they all have a 1% daily chance of getting any positive traits that the Doctores has or loosing a negative if it's the opposite to it. E.g. Loosing unathletic if Doctores has Athletic. This cap also goes for the "Heavy Training", which I've kept but changed so it's now fully reliant on the Doctores and not your Drillmaster. This means the gold per upgrade for drillmaster has also been reduced by half.

Training Matches

You will now see there's a new "Decisions" tab in the Ludus Management - More on those other decisions in another blog later :) But the first of them is "Setup Training Match". So a much requested feature was to be able setup sparring / training matches between your own Gladiators, and your wish has been heard. Steam post image

First of all, you have full flexibility in what kind of match compositions you like here, they can even be asymmetrical so 2 vs 4 or whatever you really like. Steam post image

Training matches of course won't provide you any income nor fame. But your Gladiators will be rewarded with combat experience as if it was a normal match. Because of this I have also added a 1 week cooldown on training matches so they can't just be continously spammed. However, while your Gladiators can't die from training matches, they can be injured. When Gladiators get injured they will get a special temporary trait named "Injured", which put them at 0% energy for 1 to 14 days. Effectively making them unavailable for the important matches, so while training matches doesn't have any fatal risks associated with them, you should probably still consider not making your main guy go 1 vs 5 before that important Champions Cup Match. So I believe these 2 were probably the most requested features I've been getting.... Or wait more indepth tactics was also a request I believe - Oh well, I'll add that as well!

Tactics overhaul

So improved tactics is something I wanted to do for quite a while, and I am very pleased to present this new feature to you all. You will see that first of all you're able to setup a "stance" for each slot. Being Aggresive, Balanced & Defensive. Balanced is the default which everyone was using before, where as with Aggresive the Gladiator will take more risks and defensive show more caution. Furthermore, you can now also assign an individual instruction to each slot, which is honestly a ton of fun to see play out in the actual matches!

Combat Experience

So with a new training system in place, it was also suggested that actual combat experience should be a thing. And I actually really liked this, and honestly implemented it in a very simplistic way.

So combat experience will be tied directly to fame, as that's anyway a stat only obtainable through combat, so made sense to just piggyback off that one. You'll also notice that Block and Dodge baselines has been decreased, and the way those then increase are by improving your combat experience. There's 8 levels of combat experience - And lets just say that reaching 400 fame might make your Gladiators "Legendary" ;)

Internal patch notes:

I started out this blog by saying how much I appreciated the bug reports, and I wasn't just being modest because I honestly would've never found some of those myself. But I do believe that I have now fixed every single one reported (please let me know if I haven't). I do know some people are reporting long loading screen times, and I am trying to figure out why this seems to happen for only some people. But I am of course committed to get this fixed as I totally get it's not a great experience (even though my new loading screens are cool!). In case you're curious on what has been fixed/added/changed, here's my internal patch notes. Some of them might seem a bit weird as they were fixes to things that was never released in a public build. But figured, it's still interesting for some of you to see. (DONE) Fixed some code in regards to how stat changes are updated

(DONE) Resolution 2560x1600 / 16:10 aspect ratio fixed

(DONE) Sound Settings will now save correctly

(DONE) New traits added

(DONE) Fixed error with Champion trait not instantly applying its effects

(DONE) Female Slave Master Chest fixed

(DONE) Added training matches

(DONE) Fixed stats in pregame selection not showing correct values

(DONE) Training Match overwrite when playing cup / league fixed

(DONE) No Fame from training matches fixed

(DONE) Training match bug fixed

(DONE) Roman spear gold adjusted

(DONE) Selling Gladiators now maintain the correct sorting

(DONE) Clicking a trait when tooltip is showing, no longer disables it

(DONE) Number hitbox in tactics view no longer blocks mouseclick

(DONE) Adjacent trait bug fixed

(DONE) Hide tactics UI for Cup matches

(DONE) When a Gladiator dies, their name instead of ID will now show in news

(DONE) Added combat experience to the game

(DONE) Added multiple pages for equipment in stash when exceeding 30 items

(DONE) Made items in the stash stack

(DONE) Different music at the end of season screen depending on Promotion/Staying in league/Relegation

(DONE) More impactful tactics

(DONE) Ambient music added to MainHub

(DONE) Added Prize pool window to Champions Cup

(DONE) Fixed layout of past winners in Champions Cup panel

(DONE) Redo training system

(DONE) Change Drillmaster costs and function

(DONE) Added blood effect to the portraits

(DONE) Added Steam Status flavour text

(DONE) Added new Combat text events for DoT's and Unyielding effect

So on that note, this blog actually became quite a lot longer than I intended it to be. But I am actually very happy with the progress so far, and the ETA for a summer release still stands. But I am concerned with setting a final release date yet as I don't want to rush things and I also believe most of you will also appreciate waiting a few more months if it results in a better overall product. All the best! Mathias