Closing the Gap

The focus of the past few weeks of work on the client have been twofold: continued cleanup and preview requests.
After overhauling the help, which included adding pictures and improved formatting for the text, there were some typos and inconsistencies which needed to be fixed.  Based on feedback, I also expanded some of the messages displayed when the tutorial is active.  I will also be adding a button to get back to the tutorial screen at any time (right now it is only accessible once).
Additionally, I started soliciting requests for Conquest! to be previewed.  As part of this process, I enlisted help from several members of the Core Labs accelerator program to comment on the viability of the game and to help me craft a concise message.
The next item on my To-Do list is to update the manuals available on the web site.  These were thrown together a while back and need to be tightened up and expanded to make them useful.  I'll begin this process by looking around for similar online manuals to see what worked (and possibly what didn't).
I re-learned a painful lesson in QA this week, as I released a build without thoroughly testing everything and managed to break the tutorial.  At least we are still in Beta.
On the server side, I re-balanced some of the troop types, corrected a few bugs, and make two major changes regarding the breakdown of casualties during battles: first, incoming casualties are spread amongst armies based on the ratio of that army's side to the total fighting.  For example, if you have two armies fighting for you and one has 700 troops and the other 300, the larger one will absorb 70% of the casualties.  Similarly, when individual troops take casualties the damage will be spread based on the ratio of the troops in that current rank.  So if you have 70 Knights and 30 Soldiers in one rank, the Knights will absorb 70% of the damage.
Prior to this change casualties were divided evenly, which didn't make a lot of sense.
I also rebalanced the Ranger class to have food spoilage and reduced the effects of tax rates on food production and birth/death rates.
Follow the journey on Facebook or Twitter.  Until next time, I hope to see you in the game.