An update, and the roadmap to Season 2.

Season 2 is around the corner

Hey guys and gals, as well as nonbinary pals. It's VD here, with an announcement (of many more announcements to come) after a while. It's been a hectic first season and I'm so glad everyone has taken to it so well. We have around 50 active managers at the moment, which is a pretty great feat for such a niche little game. The community aspect has been thriving, so thank you all for that. But it's time to look into what the future brings. This announcement goes out as an email, to perhaps entice a few of those inactive managers to log back in and join us. Also, if you guys were planning on spreading the word about the game, the last few weeks of the season would be a good time to do so. We have some bot teams available for takeover from the 2.3 expansion. The leagues wont expand anymore this season, but getting players on the waitlist before the off-season rollover would make that transition smoother.

The last full round of Season 1 begins today, so I thought it would be good time to start introducing some of the changes that I have been working on behind the scenes. This will mark a substantial changeup, and I'm hoping it will form what will essentially be the real 1.0 version of Shakuras Reborn. I hope that they will form the stable version of Shakuras for many seasons to come, but as always I will have to monitor things. The ethos for me has and always will be to maintain the core of ideas and systems that Shakuras has, while improving on them. Full reworks and rehauls are rare, and reserved only for truly broken mechanics. And because the game is already a living entity, some ideas are simply too big to reasonably implement.

The changes will be pushed into the code during the next few weeks, and fully implemented in the off-season week between season 1 and season 2. No major changes during seasons, as I've proimsed. (Except for urgent hotfixes, which there have been a few so far.)

In this post you'll get the short version of upcoming changes, but I will be making separate posts on all the main changes in upcoming days and week(s) that will go over them a bit more in depth. At the end, I will also be adding a "patch notes" page to the manual for season 2 ( as well as updating the manual to match the new reality, of course ).

The short version

THE MATCH ENGINE - MAJOR BALANCE REWORK

• The races sit closer together, and some underlying technical biases have been fixed.

• All eight skills are worth training on every race, and no single skill answers every matchup any more. Each race now has three Core skills — one for each opponent. The idea here is that each matchup gains identity, and in general skills are now better balanced without obvious outliers. In theory, this holds. As a result, the CORE / STRONG / SITUATIONAL / USEFUL system is being repurposed a little. It will be explained in a separate post, with all the next lab-result tiers for each race.

• The all-in (cheese) mechanic has been improved. The skills of the player will now more actively affect the players chances of choosing a cheesy build, and their success with it. Aggressive players gamble more, strategists pick their moment, and hopeless underdogs are more likely to try their luck. Let the cheese flow through you.

THREE MECHANIC REWORKS

• Experience has been slightly nerfed. Experience still matters, but it fades as raw skill rises. At the top of the ladder, talent can beat tenure. Between equally matched players, experience remains the decider. This is a general nerf to players who would previously win only based on experience- something that legacy Shakuras players will certainly remember. Experience remains an important mechanic that I am not ready to let go, though I know some managers dislike it.

• Condition has been reworked. Both condition recovery, and the effect it has on matches has been reduced. Players now have a comfort level, under which condition recovers quickly (1.5 per night), but above which it revovers slower (0.75 per night). The comfort level starts from 100, and with each year past 18 it drops by 0.75. This is perhaps the biggest deviation from the original, and I will go over it in a separate post as there are many minor changes to it as well. The intended effect will be for condition to be a mechanic where players are no longer at 100 every match, and instead it will fluctuate more. It also acts as the eventual brake for older players. If I had to designate one system as the most likely for further rework down the line, it might be condition. We will have to see how it plays out, as currently condition is mostly a non-factor.

• Team confidence will be retired, for now. Turns out, it was mostly inert anyway, and not working as intended. It will hopefully return in the future as a reworked version. Someone suggested making it an individual stat, which might be nice. It is something I will likely bring back if Team Staff ever returns properly.

NEW FEATURES

• 2v2 is here. The final phase of every league season is the teamplay phase: every match carries a 2v2 set on its own maps, with hidden pair race chemistry to discover, a separate 2v2 rating and board, dual tournaments and pair sparring.

• Players can now generate as Random race players. The odds are 3% for an amateur or free agent to be a random player.

• Scouts now report a kid's ladder rank, F to S, instead of his skill sheet — and the prospect pool will be limited to kids aged 13-16. And constantly rejecting the same player will now make them quit playing for good. Hopes crushed at a higher level.

• KOF is now called the Winner's League — and it will be possible to designate one optional sealed counter-pick. Because of the general condition rework, a winning streak is also going to carry extra condition penalty that only applies during the match to the player on a hot streak. This was put in to keep the all-kill rates down as they would likely have gone up otherwise.

• Improved preparation information on the match pages.

Plus some general changes and fixes around the board. Further posts to come, and I will also open a new channel on Discord to discuss any changes. I appreciate the community feedback, even if I cannot implement everything that comes up :)

Yours as always, the reluctant game master,
Joni / VaultDweller