[zombero]

So, just as Stage 5 was a site for many adjustments to enemy movement on the map, it seems Stage 7 will be seeing a fair amount of combat updates. I'll be using this topic to update what's going on with that.

First order of business: everything related to how a leader modifies the stats of their minions has been recoded. This was some of my oldest and sloppiest code, and it needed some updating. Now it's a lot easier for me to work with, adjust, and expand. And speaking of adjusting, some adjustments have indeed been made:

-A leader's MaxHP may now grant a bonus to the minion's Str/Agi/Int. This is a very targeted buff to tanky Str characters as leaders (Knight/Paladin, Wildman/EvilOne, etc). These characters would wind up being inferior leaders to, say, a ninja master, because MaxHP did nothing to bolster the stats of minions while Str/Agi/Int did. I have no intention of penalizing low HP classes (Mage, Princess, etc) with this change, nor do I want low HP minions getting bigger buffs as a result of an HP comparison, as such, I had to get a little creative with the formula. Right now, the formula is: Leader_MaxHP - (Minion_Lv * 5 + 80). Any negative numbers will be treated as zero, so this can only act as a bonus. This comparison has 1/3 as much impact as the normal Str/Agi/Int comparisons, but applies to all 3 stats. This formula may receive adjustments in the future, but for now, we'll see how it goes.
-Additionally, Cha and Ali factors were slightly reduced, causing them to not matter quite as much.

Next up: Making having a dead leader reduce move factor by 1 in combat.

[zombero]

Dead leader factor done! Squads with dead leaders now not only move slower on the map, but have 1 less move factor in combat as well. Not a huge penalty, but its a penalty that takes effect immediately, so this gives some extra incentive to sniping down an enemy squad's leader (and protecting your own) and hopefully also some extra incentive to use sniper type classes that would be able to pick off an enemy leader.

Next up: Going to be taking a look at class elemental resistances, primarily for the sake of enhancing a class's resistance to the elements that they have thematic resistance to. But I'll be taking another pass and resistances in general and looking for places to make tweaks.