Crusaders of the Lost Idols Dev Tracker

This seems like a pretty common sentiment. I remarked elsewhere in the thread, but I'll have to squirrel away some time for adding options to this. Thanks for the feedback!

Catalysts might be a ways off, but Rubies I can see happening pretty soon. I mentioned elsewhere that they might be used for missions, or as u/egrutz2 suggested, something to help speed up your runs.

Hi!

Catching up on EP can be pretty tough, I know. I like the idea of a talent to add to your base EP, or to reduce the EP required for missions. I'll make a note of that.

And you're right to think about whether it's imba! One thing we always have to keep in mind when adding lower-level talents, is that for higher level players they are essentially free. But you're right, it wouldn't really affect balance.

Milestones are fun! I shouldn't spill details, but we've been thinking about something pretty similar to this. (Sorry to be so brief!)

1. Good memory! Looking at it, all the Idol missions except A Hidden Stash have the same cooldown, though some belong to the Rare group and others the Epic group. If only that particular mission is taking ages for you, I'd chalk it up to chance. That said, I do want to overhaul mission timers in general.
2. A Hidden Stash has a much much higher weight than the other ones. I don't think that's making anybody very happy, so I might reduce it. Even better would be moving that into its own mission group, to let you have longer Idol missions regularly. This is me spitballing, but I'll pitch it to the others.
3. Yep, their costs are meant to be 400x those of previous slots rather than 40x. I understand that base costs and upgrade levels are one of the more inscrutable areas of the game.
4. Sadly, I don't think that's on the cards. We can certainly commit to being on Steam, and the hope is to be available by other means as well, but for browsers that's a no.

Hi Susan!

For now, I feel our focus is more on other means of progression (talents, higher caps, more T5 supports) but it's something to think about. Certainly for the moment we don't want material amounts exploding, as a number of things are balanced around the kinds of legendary levels that people have (or can expect to have) right now.

As a fun fact, I think Wrena might break with a level 23 legendary amulet.
(Edit: Oops wires crossed, we're clear until the early 30's)

You're very welcome!

I think this is more an oddity than a decision we've made. For a number of such objectives, those Crusaders aren't "locked" but "asleep", which goes back to the Sleeping Beauties objective in Grimm's Idol Tales (predating me!) The main difference here is that those sleeping Crusaders may become available later in the objective, so it makes sense for their levels and upgrades to be retained.

It hasn't been a focus of ours, since Idols from objectives/challenges are usually pretty negligible compared to Free Plays. From another angle, you might consider the reduction a sort of cost for doing the objective.

I can't think when the last one was. I do remember forgetting to add the chest code, and someone took that as me saying "having me host the Q&A is enough of a treat, no chest for you". I had a good chuckle at that.

I'm definitely fond of things that can fit different roles depending on circumstance or choice. One idea that's been on the backburner for ages is upgrades that let you cycle through their effects. That could be something that targets the column in front versus the column behind, or a different ability altogether. As for filling allll roles, that might be a little much, but I'd very much like to add one that fills two or three.

As an alternative/addition, it would be fun if Skins did this, eg swapping in a tanky-looking version of someone to give them tank abilities.

Hi!

Crusaders is made using Flash, which lets it run in browsers (for now...) and the Steam version uses Adobe AIR, which lets a Flash program behave like a normal desktop application. The programming language for this is ActionScript, which is much like JavaScript but with some more OOP-ish tendencies, like the ability to give things static types.

Since it's Flash, we can lay out interface elements in a graphical editor, which saves a lot of time in making UI elements (though it remains the slowest kind of task for me to do.) For example, this is the Skins window in the editor: https://imgur.com/a/vrY0QQn

It's a decent paradigm. Not without problems, but generally quick to work with.

Hey Daurakin,

My hope with how projectiles behave now was that they would outdo your other forms of damage in situations where they are practical (nearing your wall), whether the higher outgoing damage was CLK or DPS (hence scaling off both). In the case of 43G1S and co, they should probably be altered to behave similarly.

That does leave Sniper and Omniclicking in an odd spot, to be sure. I don't think they're wholly without use (well, maybe Sniper...) but yeah they could probably use a re-think, whether that's a change to them, or to how something else interacts with them.

Instantly sprinting to the next boss is a cool idea. I'll have to jot that one down. There should even be room for something like that around the map UI.

Another we had kicking around was using rubies to accelerate, cancel, or expire missions. In general, spending small amounts of rubies for daily niceties is something I'm very in favour of.

Well, in a sense, increased DPS is increased gold. If you can beat monsters on higher areas, you'll earn more gold.

But yes, I can certainly see more gold-oriented talents in the future.

Hey schaikie123,

I like the idea of boosting the gold buffs, but I think that's sort of covered right now. We have the Lingering Buffs talent to let you stack up your buffs multiplicatively, and ways of getting more/better chests (Ana and the Jeweler talent, for now) that enable you to stack that up even higher.

It might be that I'm being too cautious here. Definitely something to think about.

I'm a bit wary of increasing material drops, as players already earn quite a lot of them in their Free Plays. I understand feeling stymied around the level 10 mark, but this is more or less the intent, given how Legendary items scale. As a fun fact, Justin's original design for them had balanced things around reaching level 5 or so, whereas high level players are at 14 or 15 these days.

The hope is to introduce a new way of boosting your Crusaders, whether that be with crafting materials or some other currency. We're still pretty far from that, though.

Hello!

I wouldn't add the NB tag to The Desert Bus, as we generally consider robots to be genderless (with some exceptions where they are obviously gendered).

The requirements for getting those newer missions are stricter than the old missions, but maybe they should have been a little more tailored to the tags they involved. Still, aside from gear/recruitment missions (which are generally harder), there are only 3 requiring nonbinary, so it's unfortunate that you've gotten these missions enough to be bothered by them. Sorry that it worked out that way for you.

Glad you're enjoying the game!

But sorry, Crusaders is no longer available on Google Play or the App Store. However, packs are available on all the other platforms, if you enjoy playing on PC.

Elloello,

We were just discussing new talents yesterday, so I would describe progress as "contemplative". But, there are some ideas in there. For now, what you can expect is: they'll cost more! Sorry, that's about all I've got right now.

This is a good idea! We've been meaning to decouple a handful of things from bench slots, and abilities are one of them. I think in a perfect world, this wouldn't even require a talent. As for what to do with things like loot which buffs those abilities (making those Crusaders more or less essential for the ability) that's in the air right now. But we've had some cool player suggestions on that front.

(Actually this is 187! That's a good start!)

Hello everyone, and welcome to the Q&A, where you bring the Q's and I try to rustle up some A's.

For those unfamiliar: I'm Kevin, the developer working on Crusaders. I'm responsible for adding new things to the game, fixing bugs, and breaking things. I also have more human roles like writing the names and text you see on loot, and helping decide what new Crusaders ought to do.

I'll be around actively for about an hour, and will check back on things over the course of the next couple days. I'll do my best to be quick and candid, but we'll see! I'm no good at using Reddit, so please bear with me.

Per tradition, a code for free chests: DEVK-EVTA-LKSI-DOLS(Awards 2 normal Jeweled chests. Expires at 9:59:59am Pacific, Tues March 10th )

The previous Q&A can be found ...