This Merchant Life Patch Notes — July 11, 2019
Aggregated from Steam, cross-tracked with Battle.net coverage on GamePatchNote.
More bug fixes and balance changes, particularly focused on skills, road events and cart parts. Also a nice new rotating background element for the combat screen!
Balance
- Three skills changed. 'Bargain Hunter' now causes cut price events to last longer, rather than increase the chance of cut price events occuring. 'Everything Must Go' becomes 'Delivery Service' and instead of making cut price events reduce prices more it instead makes high demand events last longer. Finally 'Timing is Everything' becomes 'Alert' and instead of doubling the changes of high demand events occur it instead gives the player an additional heart to their max health.
- Reduced road event chance down a bit more as journeys now take longer in general.
- Limited Event and Limited Combat Avoidance both bumped up a little, so both are more spaced out on the road.
- Bumped the cost of the first three upgrades for each cart area up a little.
- Added hero available to recruit in tavern to current tavern save/load.
- Cost of buying 10 x Hides in the Overloaded Merchant road event (18) reduced from 500 to 200 coins to make it worthwhile.
- Reduced cost of buying a book from the Travelling Library road event (14) from 500 to 200 coins, and the cost of borrowing one from 100 to 50 coins.
- Selling price for 8x Grain in the Travelling Brewery road event (127) increased from 250 to 360 coins.
- Selling price for 4x Ale in Celebrating Adventurers road event (126) increased from 500 to 600 coins.
- Selling price for 5x Hides for Iron Hide road event (121) increased from 400 to 450 coins.
- Selling price for 3x Herbs for Cheese Merchant road event (116) increased from 450 to 500 coins.
- Bee hives cart part now repair the cart 3% when arriving in a settlement rather than 5%.
- Adjustments for cart speed changes made more granular. Increases to cart condition drop rate and fighter morale drop rate based on cart speed increases bumped up significantly so that cart speed is less OP.
- Cart wear upped slightly from 0.7 to 0.85.
UI
- Some new UI elements and tweaks for combat screen background, xp bar at top of map screen, top HUD bar for map screen, current city indicators, info button, cart capacity panel, reward panels for events.
- Prevented zoom in on map beyond starting zoom level
- Sell buttons on exotic market screen now correct button visuals.
- Caravan sidebar max stats for stat bars reduced down a bit more.
- Fixed a number of minor text overlaps and alignment issues.
- Added missing amount of coin from sale text for a number of sale options in several road events.
- Tweaked option text for option in road event Priest Appears to make it clearer that healing is for your guards and not you.
- Changes to the weight penalty thresholds due to the effect of a heatwave are now displayed in the mouseover text correctly.
Fixes
- Adjustment to the Skills sidebar to prevent a potential bug where after loading the game a skill point could be spent without purchasing a skill properly, causing many problems.
- Fix to some missing elements on SecureSave.dat file creation
- Fixed event 50 requiring a different resource than cloth to sell for that option to be available.
- Fixed the bonus from the skill 'Cart Enthusiast' (reduction in cart upgrade prices) not persisting once the game was saved and then loaded.
- Two starting road stats tweaked to correct initial values.
- Game now detects day/night state upon loading without needing the caravan to travel first.
- Added an extra check in resource calculation which should prevent resource totals dipping into the negative, even if there are issues with specific event scripting.
- Added some other missing requirement checks for a few road events (50,52,136)
- Adjusted rewards for road event Forest General Trader (54) so that you can't trade something away and receive less than the expected amount back due to a lack of space, by making rewarded goods in this case the same amount as for goods traded away. Also made Ale for Iron trade less bad for the player by making it an even swap!
- Adjusted the costs for one of the Sick Wagon (34) road event options to explicitly require gold and to require the player to have enough to make it fit better with the event result text. Removed the time costs for this option as well.
- Added check so that if a mission is failed on the road due to time running out, that mission slot is immediately selected as the current slot, which means road events reliant on having a currently empty mission slot for certain options will now correctly have those options immediately available.
- Adjustments to required space in cart to ensure that it covers the overage is swapping and receiving more than you trade away. Also reduced to just 1 space in cart for explicitly free collection options as opposed to purchases (where enough space in cart is required for the entire amount to make the purchase).
- Adjusted the 'GainGoods' event result type used in a couple of events to work more like other gain resource result types, which should sort out a few issues the old format was causing with resources going over capacity, incorrect resource reward amount messaging etc
- Also adjusted the 'LoseGoods' event result type to work more like other road event results as above.
- Meeting Jack Knife road event (where you can purchase weapons) now not available until you have unlocked rare goods.
- Ensured a couple of road events, one forest and one heartlands, can't be triggered before combat elements of the game are unlocked in month 2 and at level 2.
- Fixed a couple of combat road events so that options are properly available to attempt to intimidate potential attackers if you have a strong enough security force.
- Fixed the Self-Maintaining wheel covers part being far more effective than intended at reducing cart wear from travel.
- Fixed issues with the Furnishings cart part causing decimal mission rewards and also being applied to non-living cargo...
- Added delayed checks to cart's target rating so that it is calculated after all of a cart's stats have been resolved, fixing issues with target rating appearing super high until the cart moves after loading game.
- Planters and Mining Equipment cart parts now generate resources at a slower rate, and correctly update cart capacity.
- The correct regional scenario is now shown and active immediately upon loading the game without needing to initiate travel.
- Horse hats now correctly make the caravan immune to the effects of a heatwave immediately upon being applied, including immediately after loading the game.
- Mounted Sextant combat avoidance should now work correctly.
- Post battle player injury calculations adjusted so that the Crossbows cart part works correctly in reducing the chance of injury after losing a battle.
- Got the cart defence stat to correctly work during the looting phase of combat again.