Hello everyone! It's been a WHILE! Probably a while too long, but life is life and I can't always devote as much time to Dungeonlike as I would like. But here it is, a new major version increment, yay! This version comes with three massive feature clusters, one being the open world, as described in the previous post (https://sheriour.itch.io/dungeonlike/devlog/17010/the-transition-to-open-world-w...). All "in progress" items from that post have been completed, with some additional stuff, especially in UI. Yet, open world is still in fully experimental stages and no feature is written in stone to stay. As always, I am open to suggestions and ideas.

The second feature cluster is a large number of tweaks done to the combat and health systems. Although I wouldn't call this an "overhaul" as the core mehcanics remain the same, the number of tweaks, rebalancing and new sub-systems amounts to a sizeable pool of changes in this area. The game now features critical hits, which apart from increased damage and armor penetration can lead to critical conditions (eg. broken ribs, punctured lungs). Apart from being debuffs in their own right, critical conditions (and missing health in general) will now cause pain, which in drastic situations may turn a powerful enemy into a punching bag.

I've also tweaked AI in some places, but most importantly enemies can now use consumables and defensive spells. So you might have to face mages who drink mana potions and teleport around the level if you get close. They will also use new mana-oriented single handed staves, together with shields and reworked mage robes, which now can actually be used for something more than decoration.

I've made the descision to keep the main Pinfell Dungeon as it was, until I figure out how to exactly treat it within this open world setting. The only difference would be that now it sits outside of Pinefell, so you cannot lure enemies out to be killed by guards anymore, but in essence you can ignore the open world and just play this game as you would version 0.2.3, heading straight for Durgaz. This makes the open world an optional aspect, which is probably most suitable for its experimental state at the moment.

But enough of me spitting words! Full-ish list of changes can be found below, for those who crave the details.

New Stuff (mechanics & content):

• Open world introduced, with following features:
  • Camps - Small, single level locations which can be cleared out by killing the rare enemy in one of the tents. They generate ambushes when player walks near them.
  • Dungeons - Multi-level locations which can be cleared out by killing the rare enemy at the bottom of the dungeon. Pinefell ruins are an exception as they will never vanish.
  • Cities - There are now three cities, including the good old (yet revamped) Pinefell, a major city of Dewmere and a minor orcish settlement of Zilgurd. These locations do not differ massively (yet), but they offer different services and different levels of items to represent their economic power.
• Explicit factions introduced. The game always had "hidden" factions, but now it has them out in the open, so that the player can distinguish between Bandits, Horde Deserters, Undead and Alarian Kingdom.
• Bandits are a new faction, with a batch of new enemies to fight. Both camps and dungeons can spawn inhabited by Bandit faction.
• Undead now feature some mages: Liches. In fact, these are the most powerful mages in the game and probably the most powerful enemies in general, if not eliminated quickly.
• Auto-eat feature introduced, so that as long as you have some food in your inventory, you will eat it automatically to avoid dying while traveling.
• Two "specialist shops" are now available, with Tavern selling food and Alchemist selling potions.
• Talar Guild allows to set a given city as Town Portal target.
• Town Portals now teleport to a dedicated "teleport pad" area near Talar Guild within cities which support Town Portals.
• Talar Guild allows to choose if you want your Talar Scroll gold to be sent to your Strongbox, or directly to your inventory.
• Body Part based attacks are now possible, although this is mostly limited to punches. This will need more work in the future with a full blown martial arts feature, but for now it means that weaponless berserkers will not just stand there.
• Hex resistance reduces all incoming magic damage by a %, on top of allowing to resist the spell outright. So even if the spell hits, there is some level of protection involved.
• Dash made more expensive and only moves player by distance of 2. Greater Dash, unlocked at Athletics (20 lvl), allows to move by 3 tiles and comes at an even greater cost. Costs of both actions get reduced significantly with higher level of Athletics.
• Spells now have a Piercing (as in, resistance piercing) characteristic to mirror the Aim of ordinary attacks. This allows players to create "resistance breaking spells" by focusing on that parameter instead of sheer power.
• Critical hit mechanics overhauled. 
  • Critical chance introduced as a weapon/spell characteristic.
  • Increasing Aim of an attack or Piercing of a spell will increase critical chance significantly.
  • Critical hits can inflict critical conditions which are very annoying and take a lot of time to heal, if not treated correctly. These can also come about as a result of incredibly strong attack, when it doesn't need to be a critical (similar to old blunt damage conditions). These conditions depend on the Body Part which was hit and type of damage that was sustained.
  • Concentration and Athletics give partial protection from critical hits by lowering the crititcal chance of incoming attacks and spells.
• Blindness no longer fully takes the sight away, it only limits sight to 1 tile (this would be the most annoying feature in the world if the player was stuck blind for couple of hundred of turns). It does, however, lower other combat stats as well, so it's still a valuable debuff, and/or a pain in the... eye.
• Introduced Pain debuff. This reduces hit/dodge chances for all attacks, including spells, so a creature under severe pain becomes practically helpless. Pain comes from sustained damage and Critical Conditions, but a part of it (based on Endurance and Intelligence) will be ignored.
• Sphere of Protection spell added. This is essentially a combination of Mage Armor and Spell Shield.
• Enemy mages can now use more spells.  I will let you find out yourself how amusing that is exactly.
• Enemies can use consumables. This generally means potions, but it also means that it is now possible to loot potions off your enemies (if they didn't manage to use them or had multiples).
• Some new staves are available now to offer something for wizards in the late game.
• Staves made one-handed. This means that both staff+shield and dual staves are a possibility for a mage. Enemies will utilise both approaches as well.
• Any enemy who has enough Athletics will now use Dash to escape.
• Scorching arrows and bolts are now available for a hefty price in shops. These inflict fire damage, which together with critical hits gives archers a tool when facing heavily armored enemies who are otherwise nearly unaffected by ranged weapons.
• Different shields now offer different bonuses to block chance.
• New enchants can further improve block chance of shields or decrease stamina drain of blocks.
• Greater health potion added as a late-game consumable offering faster healing, especially effective when dealing with critical conditions.

New Stuff (UI & usability):

• Dungeonpedia fully updated with all features, as I don't think I touched it since version 0.2.0 or so.
• All message logs are now timestamped.
• Current weight + limit, food reserves and carried gold are now constantly displayed above the message log.
• When experience is gained by killing a creature, the message now specifies which creature was the source of experience gain.
• Holding Ctrl on the world map allows to view location names (font color informing about friend/foe status) and their factional control.
• Holding Ctrl will now also display creature resource levels (small window) and factional allegiance (as an icon).
•  Minimap improved in multiple ways, showing more detail and not losing any information.
• Town Portals remain active for a limited time now, displaying time left before the portal vanishes.
• Town Portals inform on when they lead to, when inspected in Look mode.
• Basic day/night cycle. This does not affect the game mechanically (yet), but makes passage of time more meaningful, especially when traveling.
• Attack speed is now displayed as a turn fraction (eg. 0.5 turn, 1.2 turn) to make it clearer on what is fast and what is slow, and how exactly this translates to combat situations.
• When aiming an attack at a Body Part, both the hit chance and critical strike chance are displayed.
• All body parts are now described in detail, as many descriptions were missing previously.
• Item descriptions are now visible for non-consumables.
• When blocking attacks with a shield, the amount of stamina used for the block is reported in the message log.
• Food can no longer be consumed when the action would lead to wasting the food item due to hitting satiety limit.

Balance:

• Bread is more filling now.
• All food and consumables made significantly cheaper.
• Speed, although still much of a secondary stat for attacks, is now far cheaper to improve. This is a change to both weapons themselves and custom attack cost calculations.
• Shields no longer increase armor penalty.
• All armor pieces made significantly more powerful, especially chest pieces and head armor.
• Blocks and hit chances can no longer go above 95% or below 5%. So there is always a chance... to die.
• Slash-to-blunt converts at a lower rate when protected by armor (mostly visible when using chain armor).
• Zombies, especially Ogre Zombies, made more powerful as they were not much of a threat.
• Spells rebalanced to prevent crazy lategame scaling. Well, at least make crazy lategame scaling more of a challenge.
• Mage armors significantly buffed to make them actually viable in combat situations. They also provide hex resistance even when not enchanted.
• Mage enemies are now a far bigger threat, as they hit much harder than before and use more diverse armor (although never the highest plate tier and such).
• Armor penalty decreases global speed instead of movement speed. This means that a heavily armored creature with little training in armor will become extremely slow in combat in general, not only when running.
• Advanced weapon attacks reworked, a lot of details have been changed here and some attacks (jabs) were removed altogether. In general, these attacks should be now far more viable, as during my past playthroughs I realised I would have never used them myself.
• Starting classes offer different armor sets now, while custom player-made classes start out with a comparable boost in gold, to decide on their armor through ingame purchase.
• Above change to item sets made it necessary to boost low-level enemies, as they would be (and I still feel they slightly are) underpowered.
• As the game now offers a large number of camps and dungeons to "farm" gold, Talar scroll sells items for 50% of their value instead of 75%.
• Two-handed weapons got nerfed as the damage difference between them and single-handed weapons was far too big, especially visible when getting one-shotwith a critical hit from an Orcish Warlord.
• Rusty Mail removed, got Light Mail instead to actually bridge the gap between early and mid-game armors.
• Rare items will now have slightly more diverse properties, as the same base enchant cannot be applied more than once (it was in theory possible to roll a weapon with +100% damage, which could lead to severe imbalance).
• Health potion now lasts for 180 turns and speeds up healing of critical conditions.
• Healer prices reduced.
• Some numerical fixes to enchants. Damage increasing enchants have been nerfed. Armor enchants no longer increase defence by % values, they use larger flat values instead (+10 instead of +40%, etc.).

Fixes/Stability:

• Fixed a bug which caused the "You are full!" to appear multiple times at once.
• Stairs/pillars and other permanent dungeon features no longer vanish when not in line of sight.
• Target memory (for ctrl+hotkey and ctrl+arrow) improved considerably, as it would break after using a consumable, or after cancelling an attack half-way.
• Escaping enemies no longer walk into walls and pillars, which would sometimes happen and prevent players from reaching the loot.
• Smash Grip attack can no longer be used to generate infinite weapon copies.
• Aiming actions like Dash allows now to point at invalid targets, as this would previously prevent player from changing Dash directions in tight corridors, as he had to pass himself as the target and the system would prevent this.
• Dogs were resistant to blindness.
• Cost multiplier for spells (when creating a spell) was displaying some astronomical values, which were not true.
• Multi-shield setups did not actually count additional shields (sorry mr. Tower Wizard :/) but now they do. Introduced some rebalacing here, to make second shield less useful than the first, so multi-shielding is no longer a no brainer for wizards.
• Player no longer "drops" armor from an equipment slot when a body part becomes disabled. Only handheld items are now dropped in such situations.
• AOE attacks would often get blocked from being used with Ctrl+hotkey.