Forums: Announcements

If you missed the newsletter that went out via email today, you can read all about the most recent updates here:
http://docs.aethora.com/2007/7/1/july-update

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Updates! The short version:

• I increased the rate of recovery for inactive characters. It was one health point every five minutes, now it’s one point every three minutes (so from 12 an hour to 20 an hour).
• If you want to spend a little gold to get instant healing, there is a Hospital just off Hopitan Square.
• You can now change the name of any character from their equipment/details screen.
• A new mission was added! This one is a little harder than the Volum Mills Escort quest. It starts in the Industrial Plaza.

The long version with many more details can be found at the Library of Aethora. If you have time, please read it.

Thanks!

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UPDATE – see the September Announcement for details on the changes to defeat in battle.

The “fleeing” option I mentioned in the last post has been implemented. Here’s how it works:

Each character has to flee on their own. There is no option for the whole party to flee at once. In order to flee from a battle, you must move a character to the edge of the map. Once you are in a tile on the edge of a map, a Flee from Battle button will appear (next to the End Turn button). This means that some maps are easier to flee from than others, and that movement-based attacks and buffs may play a larger role in battle tactics (some enemies love to slow down your movement rate, so be careful!).

Penalties for fleeing:

• all the skill levels of the fleeing character that are over 15 will degrade by 10% (gonna hurt more at higher levels)
• the fleeing character will be reduced to 20% of the health they had when they fled (fleeing from battle doesn’t save you from having to rest a character)
• if all your characters flee (or some die and the rest flee), you will still lose the battle. If the battle is an encounter that’s part of a mission, you will most likely fail the mission (failed missions can usually be reset from the Missions menu)

Why would you want to flee?

• a fleeing character doesn’t lose any equipment
• if some characters have fled, the remaining characters can still win the battle – so if one character is getting beat up and you don’t want to lose equipment, have that one character flee
• the lower your skills are, the lower the penalty, so early on, don’t be afraid to flee from a tough fight

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UPDATE – see the September Announcement for details on the changes to defeat in battle.

Up until now, if you lost a battle, every character in your party lost their entire inventory. While I feel it’s important to have a decent “death penalty”, it’s been suggested that this particular penalty is a bit harsh. I’d like to make some changes to try to make the death penalty less frustrating, but I need to balance out something else. So here’s the deal:

• From now on, if you lose a battle, each character who dies will lose the items they have equipped (but keep the items in their inventory).
• The maximum number of items any character can now hold is 8
• If any character already has more than 8 items, they won’t lose any items, but they can’t take any new items until they trade the extra items away (or trash them, using the trash can on the Equip page)
• Now when you win a battle and you are looting items, you can jump to any character’s equipment page in case their inventory is full and you want to trash some items to make room for new loot

That should make defeat a little less frustrating, without allowing the game to become too flooded with items. However, it still kinda sucks if you have a good item equipped – especially a rare item that you obtained as a mission reward and have no way to re-acquire. Therefore, I’m working on a way to allow a character to flee the combat area without losing any equipment, but instead taking a hit to their skill points. I’ll make another announcement once the “fleeing” method is implemented.

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Hey, just a quick announcement to let you know, if you ever want to change which avatar you picked for a player, you can do so by clicking on that player’s equipment page (go to Party, and then click on equip).

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Hey, everyone. Forums are mostly working now. No, there are no smiley faces or obnoxious avatars, and for that, I apologize. You’ll have to make do without. Emoticons are supported ;)

The forums follow a kind of branching tree-format, so pay attention to what message you are replying to if you want to preserve the flow of conversation.

Some of the forums cost a small amount of gold to post to. Let’s just say that the denizens who keep the forums up and running need to pay the bills.

Also note that Private messaging is not yet functional, but will be very shortly.

- Jason

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