We’re excited to announce that trading cards are now available for Gladiator Guild Manager!

We’ve added 9 trading cards featuring gladiators and faction characters, 6 backgrounds, and 10 emoticons.

We’ve also fixed several minor bugs in the latest update. These include issues with weather-related traits such as Crimson Lungs, Rain Absorber, and Wind Rider, along with other minor trait, item, and UI bugs.

Also, I wanted to tease the next project that I’m dabbling with. It’s super early, and I just have a visual prototype that you can see in the trailer. But I wanted to share it early so anyone interested can wishlist, follow, or join Discord[discord.gg] and be the first to get access to the early alpha build as soon as it's available. I am planning to heavily rely on your feedback again in shaping this game as well.

https://steamproxy.net/steamstore/app/2389020/Dreadwoods_Gatekeeper/

Of course, we’ll still have more small updates for GGM eventually, but we have slowly started looking into what’s next as well. This will be a smaller/shorter project compared to our 6-year-old Gladiator Guild Manager child ːlolGGMː

Gladiator Guild Manage is on 50% Discount!

We brought Sages Sacrificial Diadem item back to its original damage. We were made aware that the nerf didn't make much sense, and after considering it, we agreed. So now it does a 100/150/200% intelligence boost like before.

Fixed issue where resetting gladiator stats was not possible during tournament mode.

One of the most requested features is to add some QoL for priority points. The issue was having to select every unit individually and set their points. We received suggestions to add buttons to select them all, but we figured that would not solve it completely as you’d set points for units you don’t want to set points for. So now we added the option to select multiple units at once. You can use right-click and select multiple units with rectangle selection. You can also hold the CTRL key and add to your current selection, either with rectangle selection or just by clicking on more units.
Additionally, now you cannot click on enemy units while setting up the priority sliders. This was another big issue, as you’d accidentally select an enemy unit while trying to set their priority sliders, which would deselect your unit.
And slider sizes are increased to make it easier to select and drag them.


At the start of the game, we have two new options as requested by the community:

Unlock All Gladiators from the Start - Normally, new gladiator buildings appear as you finish championships. However, you can enable this option to have them all available from the start. Recommended only for players familiar with the game and looking for more customization.

Unlock All Gladiator Traits from the Start - Same as above. If you are already familiar with the game and want to play with more options, you can enable this. Keep in mind that higher tiers are still available only once the gladiator reaches those levels. But you won’t have to wait a few arenas to see all the traits from that tier, they will all be available.

We reworked the options panel, adding tabs so you can more easily find what you’re looking for.
Save Gladiator Positions - In the previous update, we made gladiators save their positions during championship and tournament rounds. A few people wanted to play the game as it was before, so now we added this as a toggle that can be enabled or disabled depending on your preference.

Enable Clear Team Button - This option will add an button that can clear the team if you quickly want to reposition them.

Random Team Sizes - To add the Save Gladiator Positions feature in the last update, we had to lock the variation of how many gladiators you can use in championship and tournament. Still, some people preferred the challenge of adjusting their team to different numbers of allowed units in each fight. So now you can re-enable it. The difficulty of the game will remain the same since the level of enemy gladiators will be adjusted to the number of gladiators you can use.

We have one more tab in options called Game Tips - where you can manually go through all the info about the game that is displayed randomly after each battle ends.

• You can hold CTRL and click on an item to sell it.
  
• Right-clicking on gladiator stats will assign 5 points to it.

We dug into the unit's priority system and changed how taunt works. There were issues where ranged units would not shoot the unit that taunted them if this unit was very close because they cannot shoot units in the minimum range. Now they will prioritize the unit who taunted them and move to an appropriate range to shoot them.
- Shop units are now closer to the levels of your gladiators to avoid the issue where you keep having to buy new ones.
- Taunt and AoE abilities are reported as the most OP things in the game. We had to nerf some of the AoEs to address this, especially now that taunt is working a lot more effectively. We also lowered the rest of the AoE radius a little bit to keep other team builds viable.

To differentiate Drummer and Rhino, we listened to your feedback and made Rhino have a bigger AoE radius (in comparison, both are nerfed overall) but shorter duration, while Drummer has a smaller AoE radius but a much longer duration, making them effective at different things.

• Drummer - Drum of Terror taunt ability starting AoE radius reduced from 3 to 1.3 and max reduced from 4 to 2.25. But the duration of the taunt is increased from min 3 and max 6 seconds to min 5 and max 10 seconds. Making him good at keeping the small group of enemies around him taunted.
  
• Rhino - Roar taunt ability starting AoE radius reduced from 2.5 to 1.5 and max reduced from 4.5 to 4. (Initially, we wanted to nerf this all the way to 2.5 but decided to nerf the duration instead). Min duration remains 3, but max is reduced from 6 to 5. Rhino's cooldown is also increased from starting 4.5 to 8, and from min 3.5 to 6 seconds. Making him good at taunting a bigger number of enemies but for a shorter time.
  
• Pyromancer - Unstable Firebolt max AoE radius reduced from 3.5 to 2.7.
  
• Dark Mage - Dark Void max AoE radius reduced from 2.5 to 2.2.
  
• Cryomancer - Frost Bolt max AoE radius reduced from 5.5 to 4.5. Max duration increased from 4.5 seconds to 5 seconds. Icicle Shot ability increases damage from 1 per intelligence to 2.5 per intelligence point.
  
• Hunter - Burst Shot increases damage from 14 per strength to 16 per strength and from 1 per agility to 2 per agility. Impact force increased from 3.5 to 4.5.
  
• Cleric - Melee attack increases damage from 1 per strength and 4 per agility to 2 per strength, 4 per agility, and additionally 2.5 per intelligence, so he scales a bit of damage with intelligence as well.
  
• Iron Scrap - Armor resistance increased from 40% to 55% to stay relevant with other units. For example, Drummer already has 40% for all attacks and has a taunt, while Scrap resists only melee and ranged attacks.
  
• Shaman - Summoning totems used to take 50 stamina and now requires 80 to be closer to the summoning costs of other summoners. The Shaman wasn’t this strong before because he would go forward and fight with the rest of the team. But, after receiving feedback that this is not best behavior on his side, we changed him to stand back and summon totems, making him very powerful as he would just sit back and summon totems throughout the battle. Even with the increased cost, if he has default stats, he does not lack stamina to summon them. However, if you focus all his stats on intelligence to increase the levels of his totems, he will start having stamina issues. This small adjustment just grounds him with other summoners like the Warlock, whose stamina needs to be taken into consideration.
  
• Druid - Roots ability used to give 0.5 damage per intelligence and now gives 1.5. Her regenerate ability used to give 8 heal per agility, and now it gives 9.
  
• Spearman's Spear Attack - Push force is increased from 2.7 to 10, but damage is lowered from 12 per agility to 11 per agility.
  
• Bossed Decaying Abomination and Blightspreader Abomination AoE abilities are nerfed for about 25% as they were too strong unless you had a team with a lot of ranged and crowd control units to keep them away.

• Extrovert - Now has a cap of 125% max main stat bonus, which is still very strong for tier 1 Trait but prevents abuse with a lot of summoners.
  
• Foul Mouth - AoE radius decreased from 2/2.5/3 to 1.5/1.75/2.
  
• Hold My Beer - AoE radius reduced from 2.5/3.25/4 to 1.5/2/2.5.

• Herculean Anchor - Reduced from giving 40%/60%/80% to 25%/37%/50%, because the downside of this item is only movement speed percentage, which is not nearly as big a downside as other similar items that cause gladiators to lose health.
  
• Sage's Sacrificial Diadem - Nerfed on rare (blue) and epic (purple) versions from 50/120/200% to 50/75/100%. This one was way OP compared to the rest of the items and might have been an oversight during the last balancing round.

We fixed a lot of reported issues and bug like:

• Projectiles that were dodged, not calculating damage correctly when hitting the next target.
  
• Units above level 60 had issues where they’d start leveling up even faster.
  
• Max movement speed of enemies is capped at 50 points.
  
• Selling items in Tournament mode and going undo does not keep the gold
  
• Resetting stats for enemies in Tournament mode is fixed
  
• Fixed friendly units who did damage to friendly shields as well as Vail traits damage leaking
  
• Lacking Stamina after battle stats is fixed
  
• Fixed many other issues or bugs with different gladiators, traits, or items.

We hope you'll enjoy these new additions, fixes, and polishes to the game! We invite you to join our Discord Community[discord.gg].

Thank you!

We had reports of people encountering “Localization Not Found” text in some places. This was really hard to track at first, but now we've developed a tool to help us locate those instances. We've gone through all of them and fixed them. Additionally, reported typos in English have been corrected. Let us know if you still run into any issues.


- Shaman: Nerfed slightly. The cooldown of his totems has been increased. The starting cooldown is now 14 seconds (up from 12), and the minimum cooldown is now 7 seconds (up from 6). It also requires a bit more agility to scale to the minimum cooldown.

- Dark Mage: Damage nerfed from 9 damage per intelligence to 8 damage per intelligence.

- Knight: Buffed. His melee attack damage per strength point has been increased from 3 to 4.5. The agility scaling remains unchanged at 6.

Let us know if you notice any gladiators that are too strong or not strong enough, and we’ll test them to see if they need any slight adjustments.

Thank you all!

The most requested feature since the 1.0 update was to save the positions of your gladiators. This posed several challenges due to the varying number of gladiators in each fight and the different arena shapes and sizes. However, we found a solution that addresses this issue.

Now, when you play a championship, the formations you set on the battlefield will stay the same between rounds. So, if you have eight rounds, you only need to position your gladiators in the first one. We still recommend keeping a close eye on the enemy team and repositioning some gladiators if needed in certain situations. But overall, this will save a lot of time on positioning.

We made an adjustment to the number of gladiators allowed for the championship. This number can no longer vary between different fight choices, which might actually be beneficial as you'll be able to plan for the number of gladiators you need during championships.

Since we now know the number of allowed gladiators, we have added this information to the Championship Panel so you can be better prepared.
Additionally, we increased the maximum number of gladiators to 12 in the last arena (Mana Tower), whereas previously, the maximum number was 10.

The same functionality applies to tournament mode. Once you position your gladiators, they will stay in those positions. The number of gladiators you can use in those battles will steadily increase after each round, up to 12 units.

The only situation where you would need to reposition gladiators is if they die. This applies only to championships since you have to go and revive them. In tournament mode, even if they die, they will be placed back since they are revived automatically and instantly. (unless you are playing in permadeath mode, of course)

If anyone preferred how the game worked before this change, please let us know, and we can add a toggle in the options to disable this functionality.

Thanks to the enormous feedback we received from you, we have also been fixing a lot of things over the past few days while working on enabling the saving of gladiator positions.

One very important fix in this 1.020 update is a safeguard against units falling through colliders. We thought we had already solved this issue as we had many beta testers and no reports of this issue, but now that we have thousands of players in the game at the same time, some people have still encountered it. So, we have added a safeguard: if gladiators somehow manage to pass through, they will be teleported back to the center of the arena.

You can find more fixes and improvements (like “Not Enough Stamina” indicators) in minor updates.

We’ll keep looking at your feedback, working on more fixes and Quality of Life features, general improvements and fixes.

Thank you all for your amazing support and tons of useful feedback that keep making the game better!

- Entertainment Forge

- Fixed Japanese localization mistake. (We’re working on all localization files for “Localization Not Found” issues)
- Druid, Afflictor, and Skeleton Mage now have both friendly and enemy priority sliders.
- Martyr Traits that change weather are fixed to work correctly in all situations, including tournaments.
- Unyielding and Practical Learner Traits now reset their stats correctly after each round in the tournament.

More changes are on the way. Thank you all!

Fixed Tournament Score issues when you end the tournament on your own without losing all the lives.