This Merchant Life Patch Notes — August 7, 2019
Aggregated from Steam, cross-tracked with Battle.net coverage on GamePatchNote.
This version features some more bug fixes, polish and rebalancing! The looting mechanic has also been adjusted a little so that a high cart defence stat doesn't mean you can entirely ignore enemy attacks.
Rebalancing efforts for this update were focused on buildings, explore events and road stats. In particular explore event rewards for one-time events have been greatly increased to make them more meaningful.
Systems
- Explore event options that introduce new town locations - taverns/friends/trainers - now become unavailable once that location has been unlocked, but the events themselves will continue to appear.
- If cart defences match or exceed enemy attack scores in a quadrant during the looting phase then looting now does take place in that quadrant, but only one resource type instead of two, whereas before no looting at all took place in that quadrant. Effects on cart damage, merchant injury, morale loss and mission failure are unchanged.
Balance
- Stopped Erin's time cost reduction bonus from affecting the time cost for drinking in taverns and healing at apothecaries!
- Career flee boost added to chance of successfully rushing through the fire. Wording for the flee skill also changed from 'combat situation' to 'dangerous situation' to match it's existing use here.
- Reduction in cart condition wear from travel for Merchants with the Stablehand background increased from 15% to 20%
- Longer market events career bonus for Seers increased from 24 to 36 HRS.
- The road between Mandrago and Jarl has had it's region reclassified from Forest to Mountains and stats adjusted accordingly.
- Minimum road stats increased from 0.1 to 0.2 - if they drop below they are reset to this amount.
- Building in Randos changed from Support Town Guard to Well Maintenance.
- Building in Serenity changed from Well Maintenance to Road Repair.
- Building in March changed from Donate to Wedding to Watch Towers.
- Adjusted the thresholds for road ratings for security and speed, so that 'Terrible' is a larger range and 'Excellent' is reduced.
- Rebalanced the security and safety ratings for roads. In particular makes slower roads somewhat less slow, generally compressing the variations across the map. Also generally downgrades road stats a little, making the improvements from buildings more important.
- Having met Muirne no longer turns off Explore Event "Lancer" (64) .
- Explore Events "Influencer" (57). "Knight of Cups" (53), "Parking Problems" (44), Pickpocket (35) set to unique.
- Explore Event "Reckers Vs. Wizards" (54) moved from general unique to Archon specific unique.
- Explore Event Reputation rewards and penalties increased for lots of unique events. Food Fight (50) 1 > 4, 2 > 4. Arrow (18) 3 > 5. Artemis (12) 4 > 5. Beauty contest(3) 1 > 3. Daylight Robbery! (4) 2 > 6. Inferno (32) 3 > 10. Stall for Time (36) 1 > 4. Feline Fine (37) 1 > 5. Shake Down (48) 4 > 10. A Bank Robbery! (56) 3 > 6. The Wild Woods (61) 3 > 6. Parking Problems (44) 1 > 5.
- Explore Event XP rewards increased in many cases, including - Artemis (12) 300 > 500. Burnish (11) 200 > 400. Parking Problems (44) 100 > 250. Pickpocket (35) 100 > 250. Riddle explore event XP rewards doubled from 200 to 400. Many other explore events have had their XP rewards increased as well, asides from those that are repeatable.
- One of the Explore Event option rewards for "Arrow" (18) changed from Reputation to XP.
- Upped the increase in Explore Event XP rewards somewhat as global reputation tiers increase.
- Removed trait rewards from some options in repeating Explore Events - 1,8,9,13,16,33,63,64,67,68,69,72. Generally repeatable options in events no longer give trait rewards unless occasionally when they have a cost attached.
- All rewards for Explore Event Free Half-Day (1) increased.
- Explore Event "Alms for the Poor" (45) option reward changed from reputation increase to losing coins. Event "Atton" (9) changed from reputation to XP.
- A number of other balancing adjustments made for Explore Events.
- Chance of Explore Events being available when reaching a settlement reduced from 33% to 25%.
- Moved from 50/50 chance of getting a General/Local event to 66/33 General/Local.
- Added Elysande, Theodora, Red Bards and TOLA to potential factions that you can make become allies with to complete the story chapter requirement to become allies with a faction, previously these factions weren't counted towards that goal even if your reputation with them reached ally status.
Content
- Looping songs do now loop most of the time rather than just playing through the once. Added the launch trailer song into the music player mix.
UI
- Adjusted text for Delacroix's hero bonus to state the correct mission types that it provides a reputation bonus to, and removed reference to it providing a reputation bonus to explore events (and stopped it doing so).
- Joanna's boost to the chance of gaining Intel from explore events now shown in the mouseover for EXPLORE.
- Added Time Cost icon and cost amount to button for meeting friends and crafting. Ensured these take Erin's time cost reduction bonus into account, and also that the time cost for training does too.
- Rounding added to display of coin costs affected by reward or bribe scale to avoid decimals.
- Detail text describing background bonuses now more specific about the bonus amounts.
- Career bonus details added as a mousover to career icon on the profile side panel.
- Added colour change for cart condition being below 20%, as it does further reduce cart stats.
- Tweaked calendar scenario mouseover to always keep text on screen.
- Camera zoom out made smoother.
- Added a few building specific hints.
- Flipped security and speed on the road travel UI overlay to match which side they appear on when clicking on a settlement and getting travel details.
- Panel frames for the cart categories on the cart parts screen now highlighted when panel selected rather than on mouse over.
- Made adjustments to the looting screen during combat. Now only shows negative consequences of being looted if they took place (morale loss if you have any fighters currently, cart damage if condition was previously above 0), takes into account losing less condition than the current penalty to reach 0 condition, highlights that all cart defences holding if you lost the battle prevents cart damage. Also updated to show looting taking place at a reduced level when cart defences hold, unless there are no goods to loot.
- Added a couple of new hints relating to the updated looting system and updated a few existing ones.
- Looted events message in main UI now auto adjusts in size depending on how many good types were looted, and should fit maximum 8 all in if necessary.
- Adjusted how gaining/losing resources is depicted in the caravan sidebar - a small up/down arrow rather than a recolour of the icon. Also resets whenever reaching a settlement now, rather than only after going to a market within a settlement. Gaining/losing resource status should also occur for various events that didn't seem to be triggering it before.
- Added autopay all on/off buttons to the security sidebar.
- Rumours now appear immediately on the map after found in a tavern, rather than requiring the player to begin travelling first.
- Adjustments to the camera system. Reduced the distance the camera can move towards the bottom of the map to prevent the view going slightly beyond the edge of the map when zoomed out, and adjusted the position that the camera moves to when clicking on Mandrake and Hallbright, the two settlements that sit below this camera movement limit. Adjusted the boundaries of camera movement in general to prevent being able to move the camera beyond them after clicking various other settlements. Added a camera warp when moving from the right and top boundaries of the map to make for much smoother camera movement from these positions.
Fixes
- Hero bonuses now end as soon as a hero leaves the caravan rather than after you complete your next journey.
- Adjustment to the number of hours in a day. Let us never speak of this again.
- Fixed issue where the Explore time could become 0 through Erin's bonus stacking after going to locations in the town hub.
- Fixed crash caused by selecting Alternate hero portraits for Payback mode.
- Using the random option in a tailors can no longer change a merchant's actual physical appearance!
- Fixed issue where horse helms would visually remain on cart after being removed.
- Krallen explore event options should correctly become available once he has been met in his initial explore event introduction.
- Ensured all coin requirements for explore event options are correct.
- Removed Temp_FixFactionRatings from load game code, it was causing the Changers faction reputation to go from 0 to 30 after you loaded a campaign mode save.
- Can no longer get the riddle lady reward explore events multiple times for the same one.
- Lancer background colour now correct on the security sidebar.
- Building improvements to road stats now immediate rather than only kicking in after a scenario change in that region.
- Time doesn't slip forward an extra hour after road events have already been triggered and begun...
- Orion images fixed for story cutscenes when portraits set to 'Alternate' mode.