Greetings, Tacticians!

We just released a new Major Update, which brings a lot of replayability to the single-player campaign with the addition of Quests! Quests are new optional challenges specific to each mission.

In addition, this update significantly improves the flow and the user experience in the campaign. We also made some gameplay and balancing changes to four of the late game missions and to a few Champions & Relics.

We hope that you’ll enjoy this new content! If so, please consider leaving a review as it helps us a lot with visibility ːsteamthumbsupː

See you in the Arena,

The Skygard Arena Dev Team

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• In the single-player campaign, each mission now features two optional quests. To complete a quest, you’ll have to win the mission while meeting an additional condition / achieving an additional challenge.

• Examples of quests include playing a specific Champion, completing a mission before a certain turn limit, not losing a single Champion, not taking any damage on your Pillars… and much more! The full list of quests can be found below.

• The timeline of the Campaign now shows a tracker of your global progression, with 39 stars to collect (13 by completing missions and 26 by completing optional quests).

• When selecting a mission, now you’ll be seeing the context of the mission and what you need to achieve to complete the optional quests.

  

• During a mission, you can see on the right-hand side of the screen (i) the goal of the mission and (ii) what you need to achieve to complete the optional quests.

  

• We have designed most quests to be pretty challenging! Many of them will most likely require you to adapt your playstyle, build a specific team and experiment with new synergies. Some of them might seem impossible at first… but where there is a will, there is a way!

• The full list of quests can be found here[discord.com]. Will you manage to complete all of them and gather all 39 golden stars?

• Dialogue scenes can now be skipped.

• The flow in the campaign is now Introduction Dialogues -> Teambuilder -> Mission (Combat). The teambuilder used to be before the intro dialogues, which resulted in a weird experience: players had to build a team without being given any narrative context nor gameplay information about the mission, so we fixed this.

• The Teambuilder got a nice upgrade and now provides gameplay information about the mission that you’re about to play: overview of the Arena, win condition, lose condition and what you need to achieve to complete quests!

  

• The end game screen now has a Quests section which summarizes which quests have been completed.

  

• Added 3 enemy units to increase the mission’s difficulty.

• Removed many starting units.

• New: at the start of every even round (rounds 2, 4, 6, 8…), 1 enemy unit spawns from each Major Pillar controlled by the enemy team. These units spawn in Passive status and can become Alerted. The enemy units are Mage, Soldier, Archer and Captain in this order.

• Reworked lose condition: The Silver Kingdom army is entirely defeated → All of your 3 Champions are eliminated.

We think these changes will bring the following benefits:

• You will spend less time watching AIs play their turn and more time playing your Champions;

• The mission will feel less like a challenge to protect your ally units, and more like a race to capture the enemy pillars before the enemy army becomes overwhelming.

• The difficulty of the mission should feel more even across rounds, as facing the starting enemy army becomes less daunting but new units come in to replace defeated units.

• Removed an enemy unit that spawned with wave 2.

• Adjusted wave timing: the wave of enemies spawning at the bottom of the Arena now spawns in 3rd instead of 4th, which should give them time to reach the center of the battlefield and have an impact on the fight.

• Added a clear description of the relic Angelic Aegis (equipped on each Guard):

  -- Damage dealt to Guards change based on the number of Pillars under your control.

  -- 0 Pillar: 100% damage reduction.

  -- 1 Pillar: 50% damage reduction.

  -- 2 Pillars: neutral.

  -- 3 Pillars: 50% damage increase.

  -- 4 Pillars: 100% damage increase.

  -- 5 Pillars: 150% damage increase.

  -- Pure damage ignore the modifier.

• Clarified the description of the Sinsears’ Crown Relic:

  -- At the start of each turn, one Guard is designated as Sacrificed.

  -- When the final boss is attacked, the Sacrificed Guard receives all damage in their place.

  -- If the Sacrificed Guard is defeated, another Guard is immediately Sacrificed.

  -- Each time a Guard is eliminated, the Crown gains one charge. The final boss deals 25% more damage per charge (Current bonus : +X%)

• Fixed the hitbox icon of several spells of the final boss.

• The sacrifice of Guards now properly works when Daerio Duelist equipped with Final Hour casts his ultimate action Katia's Judgment: the final boss now longer dies, the Guard who is sacrificed now dies instead, as intended.

• We made a few changes to the order in which you unlock Personas and Relics through the Campaign. In particular, you will unlock Relics which synergize well together at the same time more often. Overall, you will also unlock more Relics, which mean more potential playstyles, especially in the late game.

We are changing her primary action, which was too clunky and was not providing a reliable source of damage. We also add a reliable source of Impact tokens, something that was missing in the pool of Champions’ actions. Finally, we enable her to cast her ultimate action more often.

• Her Primary Action Charge! is replaced by With Me!

  -- 1-1 range.

  -- Deals 40 damage to target enemy.

  -- Vallya and her allies around her gain an Impact token.

  -- Critical Strike: +50% damage.

• For the Kingdom (Ultimate Action):

  -- Ultimate charges cost: 7 → 6.

  -- Area of Effect : 5-cell radius → 6-cell radius.

• The Relic Shocking Gong is now called Speed Gong for the sake of clarity.

• Night Fang (Relic - reworked): Bu Shin deals 30% more damage as long as his target has more health points than him.

The previous version did not let players play around the various positive tokens and reduced the diversity of potential synergies and situations. With this reworked Relic, we provide a tool to maximize Bu Shin's damage against high-HP units and when he's close to dying.

• Changed camera settings in order to fix a bug which would prevent players from controlling the camera and would make the camera drift towards the top left corner.

• The VFX of Constellation (Na Jima Skirmisher's Ultimate action) is now properly displayed.

• Made it easier to scroll through the rewards received after a mission in the campaign.
  
• Slowing Ammo is now given as a reward for mission 3, while Stunning Core is now given as a reward for mission 4.
  
• In the mission The Tournament, Vallya is now equipped with the relic Slayer's Mace and Aiden with Tome of Sight.
  
• In the mission At The Heart of the Forest, you are now able to change the starting position of your Champions. Also, you can see the starting position of the first wave of enemies.
  
• In the mission At Kingdom at War, the victory condition is now to eliminate all enemies without losing Vallya (previously : hold 8 rounds without losing Vallya).
  
• In the mission Ambush, enemy units now switch from Static status to Alerted status in 2 cases:
  
  1. Whenever one of your Champions comes within three cells of an enemy unit;
     
  2. Whenever another unit becomes Alerted within 2 cells, triggering chain reactions.
• In the mission The Truths of a Clan, we increased the damage dealt by the enemies by around 20% in phase 2.

• Improved the AI of Bu Shin Thunder to make him cast his ultimate action more often.

• When Aerica's Relay Beacon is already in the arena, selecting the spell and hovering on an ally now properly shows the preview of the teleportation of this ally to the cell where the Relay Beacon is located.

• The Ethereal token now works properly in PvP games : the bearer can move through obstacle and enemy Champions.
  
• Damage dealt by Poison tokens, Bleed tokens and Aerica’s Sentry are now correctly dealt to the second Champion under the effect of Bond (aplplied by Raine Life Mage's ultimate action).
  
• Preview of incoming healing is now properly displayed when playing Daerio Renegade with the Blood Blade relic.
  
• The description of the Slowed Token now correctly states: Slowed X - The bearer’s next movement is reduced by X.
  
• The description of the Blind Token now correctly states: Blind X - The bearer’s next movement is reduced by X.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused red tiles to appear permanently in the Arena when Champei Earth Avatar casted Bounce right after being deployed.
  
• Fixed a bug that could cause the game to crash when Bu Shin Thunder equipped with Unending Tempest would die right before his turn.
  
• Fixed a formatting issue in the description of the various AI opponents in Arena mode.
  
• Fixed a bug with Galeblade that prevented Champions from benefitting from its effect if they already had a Haste token on them.
  
• Fixed bugs that could create incorrect interactions between Blind and Sight tokens.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused incorrect data to appear on the end game screen in Arena mode.
  
• Fixed a bug which delayed the visual feedback associated with gaining ultimate charges when certain Champions would pick up two ultimate orbs in the same movement action.