AVWW Beta 0.518, "Eagle Tiers," Released!

This one is another really big release in terms of balance.  And also: first new enemies since beta!  The new Eagle, and the upgraded Eagle Diver, are two variants off the same enemy which you can now encounter in the forests.  There's even a new bird's nest monster spawner for them.

The next big balance news is mostly to do with spells and other player equipment.  Previously the crafting tiers were defined as 1 tier = 5 crafting levels.  That was really turning out to be problematic, because it meant having to gather gems and craft an entire new arsenal every 5 civ levels.  Which really was much too fast to be fun, instead feeling more like a treadmill. 

In prior versions of the game that wasn't an issue because the bad difficulty scaling meant that players could continue using lower-tier equipment and thus not run into the issue.  But fixing the difficulty scaling brought this issue into sharper relief; previously they had sort of cancelled each other out, as can definitely happen in game design.

Anyway, there were a host of other changes around this, too: lower-tier spells don't get so much cheaper in terms of MP quite so fast; and higher-tier spells get more expensive in terms of MP, faster.  All the spells have had their MP costs doubled in general, because the new higher player MP stores meant that these were now out of balance.  The range of time it takes for your equipment to get completely obsolete has changed from 10 levels to 20.

All in all this should lead to a smoother, more fun progression; but as always, we want to hear from you about it!  There's some other cool stuff in this one, too, such as another 7 boss room templates, and various tweaks and bugfixes. 

The next release is likely to be tomorrow.  Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.