Version 0.79.1 Release Notes

The Harvest Comes to the Swamps

On the outskirts of the scenic autumn landscape of harvest world, a murky swamp is home to a variety of aquatic creatures. Crocodiles, water drakes, and trolls all call this landscape home. But none is more feared than the dreaded frog demons and their overseer, Croakus, a powerful reverse empath. Empaths feel the emotions of others. A reverse empath makes others feel what it feels - and what Croakus feels is a LOT of pain!

So get ready to plop and splish'splash around the new turf, pay close attention to lore for strategy tips, and be on your guard as you traverse the swamps and take on your next challenge...

About this Update

The first harvest world update brought a lot of new players to our community, many of whom have shared their excitement, ideas, and feature requests with me here on Steam and our Discord. I'm particularly excited about this update as it involved a great deal of direct player collaboration to hone the balancing and abilities of the boss. I know you particularly enjoy a good challenge... to a punishing degree in some cases... and I think the fight against Croakus won't disappoint.

Additionally, this update also features another player-driven collaboration: Rival Adventurers. These are player-created adventurer parties that I have injected into the RNG procedural population and will surface as Elite Summoners you can defeat to earn soul gems to help bring down the boss. Special thanks to Kaaz for sharing custom deck designs that were used for these characters. If you have a killer battle team you've constructed and would like to see as a rival in our next update, please share a screenshot of your team build with me.

Release Notes

Here's everything that's new and improved in v0.79.1:

• NEW SUMMONER: Quinn, the Rugged Mage embraces the raw fury of nature whilst remaining assuredly calm and in control as he boldly orchestrates combat from just behind the front line. Commands Nature and Arcane magics.
  
• NEW CARD: Arcane magic receives its first playable dragon, Stormbringer, who wields an electrifying chain lightning breath attack.
  
• NEW BIOME: Harvest world now includes a swamp region with new elite and aquatic minion encounters. All characters can wade through the new shallow water terrain, which provides protection against fire damage, but adds vulnerability to shock. Aquatic units can move faster through this terrain than other units.
  
• Deep Water: Deep water, found in rivers, is not traversable, but units can now be knocked into the water. The impact into deep water deals 3 unpreventable damage. Defeated units cannot Downfall. Surviving units are removed from the board for 3 turns.
  
• Shock Damage: All lightning spells now have "Shock" tag applied. Shock deals extra damage to units in the water.
  
• New Fate Encounters: The Dice Mistress offers the opportunity for high stakes dice rolling, including a chance to finally acquire those cards you haven't unlocked yet. Roy Blanchard will give you a tour of the bayou. And what swamp would be complete without gator wrestling?
  
• Rival Adventurers: Various rival adventurer parties will now randomly surface as elite enemies in Harvest world, and, soon, to invade the other biomes as well!
  
• New Boss: Croakus is a giant frog demon with powerful reverse empathic abilities. Any attacks to the front of this demon will result in it "sharing its pain" with everyone on your team it can see. Bring healing...bring lots of healing.

Bug Fixes

• Performance Improvement: Fixed the memory leak that was causing lag to build up when playing the game for long sessions and adversely affecting frame rate.
  
• Performance Improvement: Vastly improved the texture packing algorithm which should result in smaller file size cache, less texture memory, and overall better performance.
  
• AI Improvement: Taught the AI to use the Abysmal End card
  
• AI Improvement: Fixed bug where AI would not attack with temporarily mind controlled units possessed by Vampires or Psionists
  
• Balance: Increased the health of the Bear from 12 to 13 and increased the size of its model to make it more...ummm..bear-like!
  
• Balance: Detonate spell is now stackable. Two copies of Detonate on the same unit will make an 8 damage explosion instead of a 4 damage explosion.
  
• Fixed bug with Withered Transmogrification - where, when mind controlling a withered, then attacking, you wouldn’t get ownership of the new withered unless you defeated it on that same attack.
  
• Changed the Walk 500 Miles achievement to "Walk 500 Miles...OK 100" and reduced the walking distance requirement to the equivalent tile distance of 100 miles.
  
• Fixed bug with using fast travel on the Fortune Teller map.
  
• Fixed bug where non-destructible barrels, crates and brambles could spawn in the non-playable border on the edge of the world map. (Thanks one of many)
  
• Improved the procedural population algorithm to prevent encounters (ex: Dinner A-Fowl) from appearing outside the harvest world and support encounters distributed across multiple biome regions in the same world.
  

Community Spotlight

I'd like to highlight awesome content creators who've shown a lot of love to Summoners Fate recently:

Kormaktv, who you may remember from our developer interview during the Tacticon Event in September, was the first debut our Harvest World update, which you can see the VOD for here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ls73cAwzkFI&ab_channel=kormakrtv

The results were bloody and devastating - apparently Vikings love a good fight, even if it ends in their annihilation ;)

Streamer Channel: https://www.twitch.tv/kormakrtv

Tudututu is a very passionate and enthusiastic gamer and the first to create an entire video series of Summoners Fate. Here's the first episode:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfCuQqcZQJM&ab_channel=Tudututu

And he's got a second series already in the works for Harvest World.

Streamer Channel: https://www.twitch.tv/tudututu

Show Your Support with a Steam Review

Just another friendly reminder how much I value and appreciate your Steam store reviews of Summoners Fate. You can submit a review directly from our store page or directly from your Steam library if you prefer. These really help a bunch to get additional visibility and grow our player community, and of course let me know what I'm doing well and how I can further improve the game experience for you.

Join the Discussion:
- Steam discussion board: https://steamcommunity.com/app/1681840/discussions/
- Discord: https://discord.gg/d20studios (RossD20Studios#2359)

Thanks so much!

~Ross