Greetings, tactics aficionados! [url=https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1849820/view/3709316454045079716?l=english]Last month's update[/url] was small due to how much time I was putting in getting Together in Battle ready for release. Even though TIB releases in just six days, I've decided to set aside some time to push another, larger update for TTL anyway just because I appreciate you all so much. 🙂 Without further ado, here are this month's improvements to the game, starting with AI! - the AI now recognizes Fire as an environmental hazard it can shove enemy units into. - the AI now recognizes that flying enemies won't take environmental damage from being shoved onto terrain that flyers can naturally pass over (like water, lava, or chasms). - the AI now accounts for environmental damage when evaluating the danger of ending its move on a space. - on the highest AI settings, the game now accounts for collision damage it can cause via knockback skills (i.e. smashing characters into walls, objects, or each other by using Shove, Kinetic Gust, Smash, Charge, etc.) - the game AI no longer treats skill scripts as rendering a skill inherently useful even though the skill does no damage and imparts no status effects. (This keeps the AI from incessantly using skills like Juxtapose, Trade, and Twirl when it has no better moves.) - fixed: the AI would simply never complete the turn of a character who wandered into a pressure trigger but didn't actually end up stunned or otherwise unable to act (e.g. from wandering into Caltrops). - fixed: in some situations, it was possible for the AI to lock up at the start of its turn when BeforeTurn dialogue spawned. - a major usability buff for the gamepad: attack-tile selection behavior has been rewritten so it now "snaps" to the closest attack tile based on the direction you pressed instead of just cycling through the attack tiles in an arbitrary order! This makes targeting attacks with the gamepad [i]much[/i] quicker and more intuitive. - slowed down the battlefield cursor when playing in gamepad mode to make it easier to avoid overshooting small movements. - fixed: in gamepad mode, using the cancel ("B") button to exit the main menu after opening it during dialogue would result in the dialogue box not regaining focus. - upon finishing deployment in a map with fog of war, the game now reveals tiles for the newly deployed characters automatically based on their Perception stat without you having to move them. - fixed: dynamic palette-swapping during battle (e.g. changing colors when characters switch army allegiances) had been broken by version 1.0.45. - fixed: it was possible to undo after using Swim. - fixed an inconsistency in the code that was causing flying characters spawning on spaces with a fly-only object to spawn one elevation level lower than intended. - fixed: the game had stopped fully dropping flying characters into water or lava when afflicted with the Heavy status effect. - fixed: the game had stopped fully dropping levitating, land-based characters into water or lava when the Levitating status effect ended. - fixed: characters being created from premade unit templates had their tags applied twice. - fixed: the game was including destructible objects on targeted spaces as secondary characters for purposes of Heal and Attack barks, which could lead to situations where the character saying the bark could address the inanimate object by name (e.g. telling "Reeds" that they were going to be healed). - fixed a bug in which incomplete fading out of dialogue babble sounds would cause subsequent sound effects played in the same channel to play at the wrong volume. - fixed: upon changing scenes in the middle of a fade-out of music or a sound loop, if the scene transition finished before the fade-out did, the game would reset that sound's volume to the default and prevent the fade-out from finishing. - fixed: the game would lock up when attempting to start a new game while not connected to Steam. - fixed: space selector appeared in the top-left of the map, not aligned to any space, prior to the start of turn 0 in battle. - fixed: victory fanfare could sometimes start playing before the appearance of the victory box at the end of battle. - fixed: the game still displayed "-0" damage popups for skills that don't normally deal damage when those skills were used by the AI. - fixed: the game was creating proc gen golem characters without assigning them the golem babble sound set. Finally, we have some improvements specifically for campaign creators: - new destructible objects are now available in-game: Thorn Vines, Ice Spikes, and Explosive Tree. - Fire now deals ongoing environmental damage each turn a unit stands in it. - the AddCondition script action now supports the Set Army Alliance condition. - new stat supported by UnitsToList: Health Left. This automatically calculates the character's current health by deducting Damage from Health. - new stat supported by UnitsToList: Energy Left. This automatically calculates the character's current energy by deducting Drain from Energy. - shuffled the AIHandicap values around a bit to account for the AI's new capabilities. They are now 0: full intelligence. 1: disregards space safety. 2: disregards backstab. 3: disregards lethal hits. 4: disregards knockback. 5: disregards attack effectiveness. 6: doesn't rotate to avoid backstabs. 7: doesn't prioritize healers or 'Protect Char' units. 8: actively avoids backstabbing. 9: disregards counterattacks and on-death attacks from enemies. - fixed: the -NAME- and -CHAR2- special characters would remain unchanged if the target unit had no name. These now display its class name in that circumstance. - fixed: destructible objects in proc gen maps were being created with a blank facing instead of a facing of "None", which in turn would interact with the game's logic in such a way that attacks from assassins against them would be counted as sidestabs. And that's about it! [url=https://store.steampowered.com/app/1267210/Together_in_Battle/]Together in Battle[/url] now comes out in early access in just six short days. I'm going to be primarily focused on developing that for the time being, but I'll still be keeping an eye on the TTL forums for any bugs or other issues that need addressing. Thanks once again for all your support! It means a lot to me. 🙂 Yours in tactics, Craig