cne_kevin

Hey, I happened to try this earlier! Downloading and extracting the .zip version, then running

wine "Crusaders of the Lost Idols.exe"

in its directory seemed to work just fine. It seemed plenty stable, but admittedly I only let it run for half an hour or so.

Closing the game, whether that's clicking the X on steam, or navigating away in a browser, will pause a moment and prompt the game to save immediately. I suspect that closing the browser completely won't allow this, so I would close the Crusaders tab before closing the browser, if possible.

I'll dig more into the limits that various browsers might impose on saving in this way.

And in general, most meaningful actions (moving Crusaders, leveling them, buying upgrades, beating areas, bunch of others) will prompt the game to save within a couple minutes. I have some ideas to have it save more aggressively in these situations without spamming the server as it did previously.

For now, if the saving on close isn't working for you, I'd move a Crusader around and wait for the "Saved!" popup. Sorry for rambling!

Sniper needs some re-thinking in general, but having it apply automatically with X taskmasters is a good idea.

And those buffs have taken up too much room for too long. I've been meaning to redo that bit of the UI.

That incarnation of Phase Skip was quite unpopular, but I think with some adjustment we could make it good. I'll make a note of it.

Missions' cooldowns and availability are a strange beast. Before adding much more that affects them, I think we're more inclined to overhaul them. Ideally they'd be more predictable, so that when we do add things like reduced cooldowns, it's easier to tell that something is actually happening. Timeline on that is... TBD!

I like the idea of having to swap out primary DPS, though I don't think it would be in the form of a penalty. In general I prefer incentives over disincentives (even if they're equivalent.) That said, Bonus Idols' scaling might turn this into a tick-tock cadence of good runs and poor runs, if one DPS is significantly better than the other. Another problem to solve.

I think weekend buffs can still shake things up for players who aren't thoroughly decked out. Lately when setting them up I've tried to buff more abilities or buff them more, but there's no sensible number that's going to, say, make Squiggles beat Wrena. Certainly something to think about for the next time we have a tier 4 or 5 Crusader in the weekend buffs.

And yep, I enjoy silly things like having to use Hermit too. You can expect similarly framed objectives in the future.

Not too late!

1. Yup, agreed. Part of the motivation for making the bulk chest contents display the way they do was to provide a more general rewards display that could be used elsewhere (particularly missions)
2. Also yes. I'd like to separate it from the bench slot entirely. There should be room somewhere or a big red button. I remember when we first added slot 25, I could no longer fling the scroll wheel to get the reset button. Heartbreaking.
3. We could probably have something like this... I think more likely would be replacing the "always scientific" option with something to select a number at which to start using scientific notation.

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.