Hello, everyone!
This is a very interesting update which changes life recovery quite considerably. This single update lets you quickly regain life via medical items, adds a new source of income and play style, reduces your reliance on revives and introduces a new status effect.
New stat bars
Let's start with the most noticeable change:the stat bars! I know this is going to throw some of you off for a bit while you get used to the new system and colors, but we felt they really needed some revolutionizing after all these years. The idea was to make them more intuitive, for both new and old players.
- Life bar added.
- Colors reconfigured with the new life bar in mind.
- Secondary transparent/border bar displays duration until the next tick.
- Happiness now shows duration until expiry when over full.
- Animation when bars initially go over full capacity.
- Animation when new segment is added to the bar after each tick or after item usage.
- Notches below the bars display helpful increments. I.e. Every 25 energy (req for attack).
- Each bar has a hover-over tooltip showing helpful information.
- FULL or OVER is now displayed instead of 00:00 when the bar is full or over full.
We'd be happy to change anything here based on feedback to make the bars as helpful and as easy to use as possible. There may be minor issues, especially with compatibility with certain browsers, but we'll be quickly fixing them.
Medical items now give life
Small first aid kits, First aid kits and Morphine will now provide an increase of life when used. They can be used even while outside of hospital to increase life; however they're still limited by your medical cooldown period. They replenish your life by 3.25%, 7.5% and 15% of your maximum life, respectively.
Revives have no cooldown, and only provide 25% life increase
This was a controversial change for the committee. It took a long time to find the best settings - we had four different polls and lots of brainstorming. The current +25% life value was arrived at carefully, but can be changed in the future if necessary, depending on feedback.
The consensus is that reviving was far too overpowered, meaning that factions relied on it so heavily to compete that it was negatively effecting gameplay. We want reviving to have a purpose in Torn of course, but it was never intended to be a compulsory action.
We had discussions about adding medical cooldowns to revivers or for the users receiving the revives, and live gains varying from 10% to 75%. In the end, we settled on +25% life with no cooldowns on either side, while still reducing hospital time by an unlimited amount.
We feel these changes should improve the flow of factional warfare, especially when the new system eventually arrives, and generally improve gameplay. I'm sure it'll certainly be a relief to many who won't have to go through the trouble each time they're attacked.
Blood types, blood bags and a new educational course
This is one update I've been quite excited about. The concept is actually really simple, but may be quite difficult to initially wrap your head around. This is certainly not a feature which everyone has to use - you'll get by fine using just the basic medical items if you wish.
Every person now has one of eight blood types. A+, A-, B+, B-, AB+, AB-, O+, O-. This blood type is yours for life: you cannot choose it, and you cannot change it. The rarity of each blood type is based on realistic statistics, so don't be surprised if you get a pretty common one.
Once you have completed the new education course 'Intravenous Therapy' in the Biology category, you'll be able to withdraw and deliver blood via blood bags. You can create a Blood bag of your blood type by using an Empty blood bag. This will cause you to temporarily lose some life and will add 3 hours of medical cooldown. This Blood bag can then be later used by you personally, or by anyone who has also completed this course and has a compatible blood type. Blood bags will replenish life by 20% of maximum and remove 60 minutes of hospital time, kind of like a supercharged hit of morphine.
You'll only have positive effects if your blood type is compatible with the blood bag you're using. Every blood type can be a recipient or donor to other specific blood types, exactly the same as in real life. Here's a helpful chart: Red blood cell compatibility table
Empty blood bags will be made available very soon. Every filled blood bag in Torn will have been created from an actual player donating their blood. Your blood types are unknown until you attempt to use certain bags, or withdraw blood into an empty blood bag yourself.
Radiation sickness
This is a new status effect caused by dirty bombs. Every time you're hospitalized with radiation poisoning, you'll receive some level of radiation sickness, the effects of which will decrease over a long duration. Radiation poisoning can last anywhere from 30 days (Severe) to just a few days (Mild). You can help speed up the recovery by using Neumune tablets which can now also be used while out of hospital.
Radiation sickness will decrease the effectiveness of your statistics when attacking, just like drug addiction. I'm sure we'll also be adding other effects in the future.
This helps to make dirty bombs a more devastating weapon which has the potential to totally cripple an opposing faction's ability to attack. Having said that, I'm sure Dirty Bombs 2.0 is on the horizon after territorial warfare is released.
Company specials
The framework for the new company specials system has been completed, and we've released it today for the very first company on our list (Hair Salon). We expect companies in this category to start losing and gaining stars (up to 10) over the next week. The release of the new specials for a single unpopular company may not seem like much, but it marks a great milestone. If this works without issues, we'll be able to start updating multiple companies and releasing their new specials each week.
Please note, a lot of the specials have been changed or optimized since the survey to provide better balance. Some have even been completely replaced.
As with any update, none of this is set in stone. We'll be watching feedback and gameplay carefully to determine any adjustments which we should make.
If you spot any problems, please don't hesitate to place a bug report in the 'Bugs & Issues' forum and we'll resolve them as quickly as possible.
Thanks.