Arcanox Beta Version 46

Arcanox beta version 46 is available! The game server is back online!

Update 1: Immersive mode breaks the game on some Android 4.4+ devices. I’ve reuploaded the client with immersive mode disabled.
Update 2: Immersive mode is fixed now.

CHANGES

REMOVED: Arcane Power

No one really liked the arcane power. Either players felt limited or overwhelmed by the 15 possible attacks. Attacking is the most fun part of Arcanox and everyone should enjoy this part as much as he likes. Also the arcane power mechanic was quite abstract, not elegant, and not well integrated into the rest of the game.

Instead of limiting the attacks, the rewards for attacks will be reduced, when players attack a lot within a short time. I’ve tried to balance the reward reduction in a way so that rewards of average players never get reduced.

REMOVED: Shield

Many players tried to use the shield in a clever way to avoid losing gold and trophies. As a result, the shield was almost more important for the rank in the ladder than building a great defense or being a great attacker. I want players to enjoy and brood about the core-game, but not to fiddle around with side mechanics like the shield. Also the shield mechanic was quite abstract, not elegant, and not well integrated into the rest of the game.

From now on, the match making algorithm will prevent players from being attacked to often.

NEW: Trap Maintenance

Players should have a cheap option to buy some carefree offline time without excluding them from the matchmaking, because the match making works best with a huge number of possible targets. In the past dedicated players logged in after almost every defense to check if all of their traps are active. I don’t want any player to interrupt his sleep or other important activity, just to check the status of his traps.

From now on, players can order their trapper to maintain their active traps for 9 hours by paying some rubies. This means traps that are triggered during a defense are recharged automatically, while the trapper is in maintenance mode.

NEW: Quick Battle End

Sometimes battles were very long, even at x4 playback speed, when there were only very few units with low damage per second left.

From now on, units will attack without attack cooldown, when all defenders on their floor have been destroyed. This means units deal much more damage per seconds on floors without defenders.

NEW: Quicker unit card placement

Unit cards can be placed by holding the target floor with one finger and tapping on the unit cards with another finger.
This method allows to place unit cards very quick. The previous two methods (dragging and tapping) are not affected by this change.

CHANGED: Computer opponent level up

Players unlocked difficult computer opponents very fast, with the result that that attacking got very hard, frustrating, and less rewarding (gold, rubies, and emotionally).

To fix this more difficult computer opponents can only be unlocked with a perfect 3 star victory.

CHANGED: Castle Heart

• The castle heart gold storage is filled up first, to make destroying the castle heart more rewarding for attackers
• Stored gold is visualized in the castle heart
• The castle heart can be enchanted with health or damage reflection, like barricades

CHANGED: Revenge attacks

• Button for revenge attacks can only be used once
• Revenge attacks are only possible within 12 hours
• Different push notification for revenge attacks

BALANCING CHANGES

• Reduced costs to change card enchantments from 50/150/300 to 30/90/180 rubies
• Level 5 and 6 card packs are less likely to contain a goblin card now
• Reduced gold costs to upgrade cards a bit

Rooms

• Reduced hit points of barricades from 580 + 60 * level to 400 + 65 * level
• Reduced hit points of quarters from 300 + 200 * level to 250 + 200 * level
• Reduced hit points of card shops from 500 + 80 * level to 400 + 70 * level
• Increased price for second and third worker from 300/800 to 350/850 rubies
• Tweaked gold upgrade costs of several rooms, so less upgrades cost the same

Computer opponents

• Reduced number and strength of traps for computer opponents with level 4, 7, 10, 13, 16, 19, and 22
• Card drops of computer opponents have been adjusted to ensure that players get a bigger variety of cards

OTHER CHANGES

• Several sound effects have been improved
• Several adjustments to the user interface
• Activated “Immersive mode” on Android 4.4 and better
• Added a tutorial step which explains how to access the card info screen
• The tutorial girl has been improved to look more human and welcoming
• Battle result dialogs are displayed for cancelled battles (player logged out during the battle) after re-login
• Players also receive rubies for cancelled battles
• The most recent changelog is displayed in the news tab

BUG FIXES

• Computer opponents dropped cards with lesser variety than they should
• Foundries and vaults of computer opponents contained more gold than they should
• Several players were disconnected 8 seconds after login, when they did not send an action to the server, like collecting gold or moving a room
• Sometimes push notifications produced the error message “Arcanox has been stopped”
• Several camera control and card placement bugs
• Foundries of other players were never animated
• Closing tooltips sometimes triggered underlying buttons or closed dialogs
• Some spelling errors
• Sale price of cards was calculated wrong, when the card upgrade costs were below 5000 gold
• In rare cases the game crashed while it was still loading

Thanks a lot to all beta testers. The game wouldn’t be the same without your support and feedback. Special thanks to Philipp Arlt, Patrick Bandau, Corey Blaise, Nicko Böhnke, Timur Erdman, Cory Felts, Waldemar Friesen, Gerru Kloppers, Torsten Krauß, Andrew Moore, Heiko Nottbohm, and Enrico Wachtel.
Your feedback, advice, and bug reports were invaluable for this update!

Please let me know, what you think about the update. Which changes do you like? Which ones do you dislike?
Have fun!
Chris