It's now exactly two weeks after the release of Nowhere Prophet and from where I stand it looks like I managed to deal with all the really big issues. A lot of bugs and problems are fixed (I'm sure there are more so please keep reporting what you find) and now it's time to look beyond simply repairing things and to making the gameplay experience better.

Coming Updates

So, what's foremost on my mind there? Equipment Powers A number of the equipment powers are clearly better than the others, skewing equipment and limiting the choices because some are clearly better. I'm looking at the unit spawn and refresh items for example. During prototyping I tried out a number of variants of the equipment system. One where items had a number of uses in each fight, or a general number of uses per item. A version where power use cost energy (different based on the power) but I removed all these things that to keep the system simple. Right now though it feels like the Tool Power design space would benefit from having Energy cost added back into it. Costs could be used to balance some of the powers of course, but this would also make a wider variety of powers possible in the future: Stronger powers for higher costs. In general I think this is something that will improve the play experience, so keep your eyes peeled for that. We're currently discussing the ramifications of this in the discord #workshop-chat channel. Come join us! Better Follower Filters This is the quality of life update the game needs the most right now. I'll ultimately have to see what makes the most sense but my current thoughts are: Remove all filter buttons on the screen directly. Only keep a button that opens up a filter menu and a simple text-box that allows you to search card names and text. The button opens a small overlay menu where you can select your filters:

• Show Wounded/Unwounded
• Show Common/Rare/Legendary/Mythic
• Show Factions

Maybe this overlay could provide detailed statistics on your current deck and thus free up the space of the stats area in the screen to be used for a "remove all wounded followers" button that turns into a "remove all" button when you have no wounded followers. I'm also thinking about the ability to make some of your followers as Favorites. You could then filter by Favorites, and they would always be sorted at the start of the list. Also when healing favorites in your deck and not in your deck would be prioritized before all others giving you some more control. Here's a (arguably VERY quick) mockup of what it could be like:
What do you think? Any good ideas on how to improve this? Am I missing anything vital or important? If so, join the discord and let me know! Comeback Content Another thing the game could do better is to allow players to come back from having lost board control. To that end I'm looking at maybe modifying some existing cards or adding new ones that make the game a bit more forgiving if you fall back. An example would be a card that stuns all followers. This isn't something you would ever want to use when you're leading, but when you're behind it can give you enough room to put some of your units down in a safe environment. This would allow me to put the price of the card down a bit, which means it doesn't eat up all your Energy budget for the turn. I have a few ideas for pieces of content like this but as always I'm curious to hear your thoughts!

Update Schedule

So with these changes coming up next, how will these roll out? Well the current plan is to keep the Preview branch active for this. Ideally I'd like to update Preview at the end of each week and then give you all time over the weekend to play and test. If nothing unforeseen catches fire or explodes then the update could go live to everyone after the weekend.

Preview Update: 1.00.014

And in line with that today marks a new update to the preview branch. This one is mostly bugfixes, some balancing and interface improvements. As usual: If it breaks nothing major it will go live early next week, so give it a whirl! [quote=changelog]Balancing Improved states for opening the gate with follower count was reduced to 25/50 Armored enemies have a tad less armor AI now properly evaluates and targets obstacles with Taunt You gain Focus as normal on Doomed difficulty now Juggernaut cost increased to 5 (was 3) Decoy changed to 2/4 (was 1/4) Interface Followers in Combat now only show the "multiple effects" icon if they actually have multiple icons to display Critical enemy buffs are marked blue in pre-combat screens Event buildings leading to potential boss fights are marked red in locations Focus value display changed in edit deck screen Crypt Gate events split and put on the map and into the location Chance labels in event options adjusted to be more accurate Added visual effect to unsummoning of units Bugfixes Brain Drain can now target obstacles as expected Coordinated Swarm now also potentially targets the enemy leader Battlefield Sense no longer triggers if Energy is full Quickly unsummoning a unit with a fury effect no longer creates a stuck card Can no longer spam ESC to quit out of Mulligan while game is still setting up starting state Can no longer sneak illegal attacks in during animation (queueing an attack while kennel master is off the board and before his dog has appeared now leads to no action happening) Route Generator now no longer creates multiples of unique locations (gladiator camp, boss locations)[/quote] Alright, and that's it for today! As always, thanks for reading, thanks for playing and thanks for speaking up! - Martin