Hear ye! Hear ye! Adventurers! Today we have released update #10 (0.9.0) for thy Ultimate ADOM Early Access! But more great news for all rogue-like fans: Together with Developer Team ADOM we have today announced an August 25, 2021, full (version 1.0) release for Ultimate ADOM - Caverns of Chaos! But now let's deep-dive into the new major Combat-Update: Let's start with the YouTube-video of the Ultimate ADOM Combat-Update: [previewyoutube=dq4DsfK125s;full][/previewyoutube]

Full Changelog version 0.9.0 - Ultimate ADOM Early Access Combat Update

Community feedback-based additions and changes!

• Powerful monsters may now carry Treasure Troves with them.
  • Defeating them and looting these troves will offer you a choice of mighty items, and also offer you the chance to sacrifice gathered gold for a new random selection of items!
• All combat skill trees have been completely streamlined, allowing you a choice of fighting style instead of locking you into certain weapons.
  • The old combat skill system forced you early on into specializing on certain weapon types. Therefore, the old skill system has been replaced with 140 new skills, offering a longer and more interesting progression.
• In general, combat has been spiced up a lot by making it much more challenging:
  • Being swarmed by enemies makes it more likely to be hit the more enemies attack you in the same turn. This applies for both ranged and melee combat.
  • Wielding multiple weapons now comes with a price and requires skill investment to be effective.
  • If you (or your enemy) deal at least 10 points of damage with a melee attack, they will cause a minimum of 1 point of damage even if your Protection Value is higher. This allows you to whittle down even heavily armored enemies - and it makes charging into a swarm of monsters more dangerous while wearing heavy plate.
  • Critical hits from both player characters and monsters are slightly rarer now.
  • A high chance of hitting something also increases the chance to bypass an enemys armor, too.
  • Armor can now be damaged or even destroyed by armor-penetrating hits. Make sure to carry a spare pair of pants with you, if you rely on such things!
  • Area spell damage has been slightly toned down again. While still being an excellent choice and playstyle, room-filling spells are no longer the answer to everything you might be encountering.
• The way player characters heal has been changed.
  • You will regenerate more slowly while crawling the dungeon, thus making hunting for regeneration flux points, healing potions or food more tense.
  • At the same, time, healing while resting will become faster, the longer you remain undisturbed, making the search for rare and undisturbed spots more important.
  • Finally, healing potions are now more common, and every adventurer starts with one.
• Achievements have been added to the game! 50 very different challenges await you.
• While creating a custom character, the powers of races, classes and professions now are explained with much more detail.

New Content

• Four new pesky monsters plague the early dungeon levels.
• Tons of new prefixes and suffixes, which effectively are adding millions of new items to the game:
  • Added 18 shield prefixes and 13 shield suffixes for a total of more than 40,000 new shields that can be found.
  • Added 13 ranged weapon prefixes and 14 ranged weapon suffixes, a couple of million new ranged weapons that can be found.
  • Added 6 more armor prefixes and 2 more armor suffixes.
  • Added 2 more body wear suffixes.
  • Added 2 more melee weapon prefixes.
  • Affix-based powers have been boosted to make them more exciting. A weapon of orc-slaying now finally means actually slaying orcs while wielding it!
• Powerful items have a special marker with different colors now, indicating their power level: blue, yellow and purple indicate that a weapon is powerful, mighty and epic respectively.
• The format of the highscore file was updated to improve performance.
  • Important notice: Unfortunately, this means that your old highscores will be gone after the update. Make sure to take a screenshot of your old highscores for bragging rights!
• We also changed the format of some other configuration files, so you may get some prompts again in the main menu (that you already answered before) and you also might need to reconfigure the statistics configuration again (if you changed it).
• You can now earn 5 Steam trading cards.

Various bug fixes and improvements:

• Auto-exploration has been redesigned and should now be much smarter and less prone to unexpected results.
• Orcs and trolls now also have level-based benefits, like the other player races.
• Wizards now receive the first four levels of literacy for free. Those starting scrolls are no longer dead paper weight!
• The duration and severity of poison has been adjusted.
• Dangerous monsters and similar challenges no longer should be generated directly adjacent to stairways, giving you a greater chance to bypass them without getting pummeled.
• The dungeon no longer sports any dead ends.
• Melee archery now works as intended.
• Summoning monsters no longer causes a huge performance hit.
• Summoned monsters now behave less like companions and more like the ravenous horde of beings they are supposed to be.
• Harvesting buttons now only are offered if you really can harvest items.
• Many items that had no effect have been removed and will no longer spawn. All armors, bracers, cloaks, gauntlets, gloves, footwear items, headgear items, necklaces, amulets, shields and tools you find have a use.
• This includes bandages: Using them now provides some healing and stops bleeding.
• We removed the eyewear slot.
• Will owisps now actually can attack.
• Troll Assassins will no longer start naked.
• Many minor bug fixes.
  • Too many and too little to list here in detail.

Development-Roadmap