A Legionary's Life v1.3.14

I have added a brief description to over 40 enemy types. The description can be seen in the details screen of each enemy, below the name. It should provide more background information to players who are not familiar with the time period, and also add more depth to the encounters. Special thanks to flori2412, who once again offered to translate all the new content into German for free.


Fights against enemies who have the terrain advantage are preceded by an alert that explains the situation and its consequences. The icon indicating this condition and your Stance circle are highlighted for a brief moment. High ground is a crucial factor in combat and it was commonly overlooked by players. This change should make it less elusive.


When fighters enter the fray, a tip will remind you that you can click on their avatar to see detailed information about them. If you find this feature annoying, you can turn it off in the Combat options.


Every time you adjust your Attitude (and you should do it very often), a basic tip will appear next to the slider to show whether your Attack and Defense are being affected positively or negatively. This should help new players figure out as early as possible how Attitude affects their performance, and its extreme importance in combat.


Libyan spearmen now spawn in the second campaign with exactly the same range of possible stats they have in the first. Before this change, it was possible that they spawned with slightly higher skills. This made no sense from a historical or logical point of view. In general, I have a strong disliking for any form of level scaling in RPGs. This was the only thing in the game that resembled level scaling, so I'm happy to get rid of it.


If your missing Health is less than 10% of its maximum value (for example, if your current Health is 46/50), you won't lose Morale when you spend turns during the camp phase. If the missing portion is 10% or more, the behavior will be the same as before.

Fixes

• Fixed a bug that could prevent ambushes from triggering at the appropriate time.
• Fixed a bug that could make a fight freeze at its conclusion.
• Flori2412 kindly provided a couple of corrections to his German translation.

Changes

• The hand-to-hand fights against phalangites now last 24 rounds instead of 20.
• The difficulty of the rolls for the first three places of the elite javelin contest based on distance (part of the contests you can select shortly after your first raid in Upper Macedonia) has been reduced a little.
• Your share of the loot after the siege of New Carthage is now 120 denarii instead of 80. If you volunteered for the hazardous assault on the citadel, you get a prize worth 150 denarii instead of 100.

The first change requires a little explanation: as the majority of you already know, when fighters use the Recover action and have not been attacked since their last turn, the action succeeds automatically with no roll involved. As usual, it is true for both player and AI controlled characters. This is already explained in both the action tooltip and the combat manual, but I decided to make it more noticeable. From now on, whenever a character benefits from an automatically successful Recover action, the message will be "Succeeded! (Undisturbed)" instead of the ordinary "Succeeded!". The combat log will also contain a more detailed explanation. I hope this makes the mechanism a little more conspicuous, especially to new players.
Flori2412 kindly provided some refinements to his German translation. I have imported them into the game.
The implementation of the Hall of Fame has been improved.
If your job in preserving the lives of your men at Ottolobus is deemed "excellent", the impact on your reward at the end of the battle is bigger.

There is a further indicator for Feints and Shield Attacks. It shows the overall chance of full success (that is, the combined probability to pass both the primary Skill check and the Resist check).
When the chance to hit is extremely low, attacks will succeed only partially. The target will be Grazed instead of being Hit, and the damage will be reduced to 30% of its value. Weapon Skill values above 35 will progressively reduce this possibility. The victim's lack of Stance will also make this occurrence more rare.
Bull's-eye shots are only possible when the chance to hit is at least 50%.
The mechanics of how javelins can break shields has been reworked.
First javelin throws (the text-based ones) have been revised. Direct kills are only possible if your chance to hit the enemies is good enough.
Stance damage for successful Charge attacks reduced from 80-100 to 60-70.
Stance damage for successful Knock attacks reduced from 64-80 to 48-56.
Stance damage for failed Shield attacks of any kind reduced from 30-60 to 20-35.
Stance damage for successful Shield Push attacks against the phalanx increased from 16-20 to 24-28.
Knock attacks are a little more likely to hit.
Min damage of all weapons increased by 3.
Max damage of all weapons decreased by 1.
Handiness of Gladius Hispaniensis - type V raised from 51 to 53.
Damage protection of quilted linen cuirass increased from 7 to 8.
Torso Cover of pectoral plate increased from 35 to 40.
Torso Cover of back-and-breast plate increased from 50 to 57.
Fixes

When a character with low Virtue tries to speed up his career by removing the opposition and fails miserably, the Game Over is properly handled.

Workouts are initially 50% more likely to improve your Attributes. The odds will drop a little faster than before the farther you get from the initial value. Overall, the progression curve is significantly more favorable to the player and I think it also makes more sense than before.
Similarly, your mental Attributes will improve more often when you successfully complete a foraging mission or show good leadership.
The chance to skip a combat turn because of slow speed has been decreased. If a character has a Quickness score of 50, the chance to skip a turn and the chance to obtain an extra action are now the same (assuming full Stance, no Fatigue and Content Morale). Suboptimal Stance and levels of Fatigue will still significantly slow you down. Morale will continue to have a small effect, too.
The Phalanx had its Quickness reduced.
Fixed a minor bug that allowed users to interact with the Health bar in the main character screen. The underlying Health value was unaffected, so it was substantially harmless.
The name you choose when you generate a new legionary is saved and reused as default when you create the next one (it won't work for currently active characters: the name is only saved when you assign it to a new character).

Today's update is very small, but important. Besides a minor accessory improvement to the engine, I have made a few tweaks that will affect the balance of the earlier phases of the game.
Your Sword, Shield and Javelin Skills will start at 29, 29 and 26 respectively, instead of 29/29/29. However, now after the first main battle you get a 5-point bonus to all your Skills instead of 3, and 4 points after the second.

This is to reflect the fact that his first real combat experience and his first pitched battle should deeply affect your legionary's confidence and reliability in a fight.
To accomodate for the lower starting value of the Javelin Skill, the safe option for your first javelin throw (the one where you just aim for the mass of enemies in front of you instead of picking off a specific target) is less demanding.

More importantly, improvements while using the basic sparring training (the one that is always available, regardless of your relationship with your fellow legionaries) are a little easier, especially between 40 and the low 50s.

These changes should make the first campaign easier to survive, its two middle sections in particular. It won't make it a cakewalk. The way you manage your legionary in and outside of combat is still of utmost importance for his survival.
If you push too hard for the kill instead of caring about survival first, you increase your chances of facing an early game over screen. If you attack again immediately after missing your first attempt, when you are already off-balance, you risk putting yourself in a terrible position, and your opponent will likely exploit the situation at your expense. This is a difficult game, and it takes patience to master.

I haven't done it in a while, so before talking about this patch, I'd like to thank all of you who have shown support and appreciation; unconventional indie games such as this can only exist thanks to your constant encouragement.

As for today's update:

• Added full localization support. Well, the game had already been developed with potential localization in mind, but some less urgent aspects were postponed.
• A certain fellow legionary whose life you can save in Hispania should be a little more resilient.
• During the third main battle, there is now an opportunity to change your equipment after the scouting mission.
• The way the persistence of the Hall of Fame is handled has been changed to allow a more user-friendly approach in case something very unfortunate happens, like a power shortage at the exact moment the file is being written. The solution adopted in a previous version wasn't effective enough.
• Fix: when polearm using enemies were hit by a javelin thrown by the player, the disrupting effect on their Reach advantage lasted for one round longer than intended.
• Fix: joysticks are now prevented from interfering with movement during foraging missions. Hopefully, this should solve the rare problem some users have reported. I haven't been able to replicate this issue, so feedback is appreciated.
• Fix: a Cup could be wrongly assigned to the player character after defeating a normal Gallic mercenary, if a mercenary leader had been defeated in a similar encounter during the same game. The Cup should only be assigned when the leader is defeated in single combat, not when one of his henchmen is killed in formation fighting.

Several changes are related to foraging missions, including a couple of rare but nasty bugs.

I have also extended the tooltips of Feints and Shield attacks to avoid misunderstandings about the effective chance of success of actions that have two indicators: the actual chance is the combined chance of both indicators. In short, if the "H" indicator of a Feint shows a chance of 70% and the "C" indicator shows 40, the combined chance of success is 28%. You might pass the first "H" check and fail the second, in which case the action is Resisted, producing a reduced effect. From several reviews and comments I have read in the past few weeks, it seems that many players assume the overall chance roughly amounts to the higher of the two indicators.

Among other changes, there is the ability to adjust your Attitude before combat begins, even when there is no opportunity to throw a javelin.

Here is the changelog:

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• Movement speed in foraging missions has been increased by 40%.
• Fighters skipping their turn or performing a Second Action are a lot more conspicuous in the combat UI.
• You can always adjust your Attitude before melee combat begins, even when you don't have an opportunity to hurl your javelin or you are out of missiles.
• The tooltip of Feints and Shield attacks has been extended to explain more clearly that you have to pass both checks for the action to succeed.
• Second actions are no longer possible during the first round of combat.
• The volume of the combat music has been reduced.
• The skills of the weakest possible companions that can spawn to help you during the siege of New Carthage have been increased a little.
• The chance of an Expert Militiaman spawning during the fight in the streets of New Carthage has been halved.
• At Baecula, if your maniple takes part in the flanking maneuver and you face the Libyan spearmen, there is no longer a chance that your companion will be a green recruit with low skills.
• Fixed: bug that could delay an ambush happening during foraging missions until you went back to camp.
• Fixed: potential freeze during foraging missions that could happen when time ran out at the end of a text event.
• Fixed: hunting and fishing actions not consuming time as they should. To compensate for this change, you have 15 more time units to complete foraging missions. Besides, failures yield 50% of the supplies you get when you succeed (it was 30% before this update).
• Several UI elements have been enlarged, including buttons, icons and text.
• Minor changes to the engine.