Fortnightly Update #1: Demo Release

Greeting Gladiators!

Two weeks ago, we publicly released the demo for We Are Gladiators on Steam, and the response has been nothing short of phenomenal. We want to extend our heartfelt gratitude to each and every one of you who has participated, played, and provided invaluable feedback. No amount of words can't express enough how grateful we are for the volume of bug reports, feature requests and feedback we've received from all of you. Your enthusiasm fuels our passion to create the best gaming experience possible.

Changes List

Based on your feedback, we've been hard at work making improvements to the game. Here's a list of the most consequential changes we've implemented since the demo launch:

1. Inventory space is now unlimited, instead of being restricted to 100 slots.
2. When one of your characters is killed in combat, each item on the killed character has a 50% of being recovered and added back to your inventory, instead of being lost and gone.
3. Enemies that you kill in the arena have a 25% chance to drop their items as loot (25% chance is rolled for each item).
4. Completely overhauled the layout, art assets and functionality of the Armoury, Library and Hospital features.
5. The Inventory window no longer exists on its own. Your inventory view is now embedded within the armoury, library and character roster pages for easier access.
6. You can use ability books / learn abilities simply by right clicking an ability tome icon in your inventory within the character roster page. No more navigating to the library, dragging in a character, dragging in a book, confirming the choice, and having the character immediately ejected after learning.
7. No more drag/dropping characters into the hospital. You can select which character to use bedrest/therapy/surgery on directly within the hospital page. This should make using the hospital faster and more intuitive.
8. Updated the views/layout of the post combat screen where you view your character stats and loot. Loot and character stats are now on a single page, instead of two separate pages.
9. Story events where your characters can be killed have been modified to be less punishing
10. ‘The Swamp Corpse’: There is only a 33% chance to get killed with each loot attempt, instead of 50%
11. ‘Brawl In The Barracks’: If one of the brawling characters is killed, you recover all of their items.‘The Strike’: 25% chance for each character to desert you instead of 33%.
12. ‘The Kid: Part 1’: If your character who is extorting you ends up killed for whatever reason, you recover all of their items + 100g.
13. ‘The Hooded Purveyor’ event: when you choose a trinket, he now only steals 50% of your total gold instead of all of it.
14. Reworked how XP rewards work for combat: Each character gains a base amount for simply participating in a combat (25 for 1 skull combats, 50 for 2 skull combats, and 75 for boss fights). When one of your characters kills an enemy, that character gains 100% of the XP reward for that enemy (no more XP sharing killing blows). If any enemies are killed indirectly (Heart attack, poison, etc), that XP is spread over all participating characters evenly.
15. Buffed two handed melee weapons: the damage modifier of all two handed weapon primary abilities (Overhead Chop, Clobber, Overhead Slash, etc) has been increased from 130% to 150%.
16. Crossbows got buffed: +5% Penetration and +10% Armour Damage.
17. Spears have been nerfed: reduced Armour Damage and Penetration.
18. Lunkers and Lunker Wranglers have been buffed: +5 Dodge, +5 Accuracy, +10 Constitution
19. Imperial enemies have been buffed: +5 Accuracy and +5 Dodge.
20. Gormak The Great character got his stats buffed. More might and resolve, so that his stats are within the correct Wyrm Hunter background stat range.
21. Deserters cannot gain the ‘Brave’ perk.
22. Removed the clock/timer UI from the top bar.

Bug Fixes:

Here's a list of some of the major bugs that have been fixed in the latest update:

• Fixed a bug that caused garbled, eligible text in the ‘A Company Ends’ story event
• Fixed a bug that caused injuries to never tick down past 1 and heal/get removed.
• Fixed a bug with the ‘Resourceful’ perk so that it actually works (Resourceful: Your first Skill ability each turn costs 1 less Action Point)
• Nimble will now correctly make your character immune to free strikes during their first move action. 
• Fixed a bunch of bugs caused by the visual event system that was corrupting save files.
• Fixed a bug that allowed players to equip a shield with a two handed weapon.
• Fixed a bug that caused a Shattered enemy that died from a DoT to cause one of your characters to suffer a heart attack, then bug out the whole application.
• Fixed a bug that prevented your first character (‘The Kid’) from being able to gain new perks from the perk tree.
• Fixed an exploit that allowed you to infinitely duplicate items in the armoury (sorry :D) 
• Enemy portraits in turn windows now face the same direction as player character portraits.

What's Next: Fortnightly Updates!

We're thrilled to announce that this post marks the beginning of a regular update schedule. Moving forward, you can expect a fresh post every two weeks to keep you in the loop about our progress, new features, and further refinements. Your feedback will continue to play a crucial role in shaping the game, and we're excited to have you on this journey with us.

Thank you once again for being a part of our growing community, and we can't wait to share more exciting news and progress in the coming weeks. Stay tuned, and don't hesitate to share your thoughts and ideas in our Discord channel – your voice matters to us!

Wishing you all good fortune in the arena!

The Viking Roo Team