Its Fat Tuesday! No better way to spend today than to have some cake and splatter your friends in a good game of Rescue the Princess.  Since the initial launch of FP almost three weeks ago, we have enjoyed jumping into random games with all of you and helping coordinate team efforts to save the Princess and thwart the enemies’ attempt to steal her back!  While many fans have quickly picked up the advanced strategies, we’ve noticed that quite a few people are still unaware of the deeper strategies and gameplay.  Here are some more handy tips to help you in your efforts to fight the good fight.

Great Balls of Fire

When a Mage casts a fireball they actually perform two types of damage. Initially the enemy is hit with impact damage and set on fire, but the majority of damage is caused after the target burns for 3 seconds and receives additional Scorch damage. Charging the Mage’s fireballs increases impact damage, but greatly increases Scorch damage.  The fire Mage’s AOE works in the same way burning and Scorching any enemies in the area.  Enemies who get set on fire must quickly find water to eliminate the scorch damage, or they burn, baby, burn!

WTF?! BoOoOoOM!

Did you know the Mage’s fire AOE will light the fuse of unlit bombs?  If you are a Mage and you see an enemy carrying a bomb, use your AOE to light their fuse and create a spectacular meat firework!

Cool It

Ice Mages can be used in many interesting ways to add new strategies to your team’s attacks.  Their Ice AOE can extinguish burning teammates and can put out the fuse on burning bombs.  Their Ice Shard attack also slows down the enemy’s movement speed, with the duration of the affect increasing with charge time.

Death From Above

Dropping bombs into the Catapult will cause them to light at launch creating devastating air strikes.  Try adding the Chicken Potion to the mix to create a fried chicken air strike of death.  Remember that you can power the Catapult with different launch powers to attack different areas of the map. Use an air strike to blow open the enemy Castle doors..?

Carpet Bomber

The Worker’s bombs are a great way to damage small crowds of enemies or retreat from a deadly advancing Warrior.  Did you know that the Worker’s bombs always perform the same amount of damage regardless of the charge time?  Tap the attack button to release bombs quickly into crowds of enemies or charge the Workers bombs to attack targets from further away.  Jumping or adding movement inertia to bomb attacks makes them fly further.

Clucking Hell!

The Chicken Potion is a hilarious way to incapacitate large groups of enemies, but have you thought of using the potion for offensive attacks?  Try coordinating team Chicken attacks and launching from the Catapult to fly further across the map.  Don’t forget that a Chicken moves very quickly and also disguises your class.  Chickens also jump higher than any other character.

We’ll see you online,

- Titan Dev

The Sony America connection and lag  patch is now live.  For those of you in North America (as well the rest of the community served by Sony America), turn on you PS3’s, fire up Fat Princess and you should get the update.  Europe is coming next week.  As noted in the previous blog entry, Titan Studios had nothing to do with this timing.  Before you skewer us, please read the previous post.

Patch Notes

Our primary focus with this patch was to improve connections and reduce lag.  We also addressed the AoE scoring exploits, a few other scoring imbalances, and made minor tweaks that should reduce stalemates.  Here are the details:

• The server selection heuristic has been modified so that ping time has been more heavily weighted when selecting potential matches.  This will result in players being connected to games in such a way that game population and ping are more evenly weighted.
• Newly hosted servers will be more attractive to potential clients and thus fill up more quickly. The change will also better distribute connection attempts among servers and thus reduce failed attempts.
• Potential servers will be given less time to respond to ping requests.  This should speed up that portion of the connection process.
• Selected servers will be given more time to establish a connection, resulting in fewer failed attempts.
• The connection code is less sensitive to packets coming back out of order.  This was a cause of failed connections.
• Ice Mage and Dark Priest AoE scoring has been adjusted from 10 points to 2 points per enemy affected.
• Non-worker resource return has been reduced from 20 points to 10 points.
• Feeding the princess has been reduced from 20 points to 15 points.
• Castle door hit points have been reduced slightly from 30 to 25.
• The Princess’ calorie burn has been increased at weight stage 2, 3, and 4.  Calorie burn was previously 2 per second at all stages.  Stage 2 is now 4 per second, stage 3 is 8 per second, and stage 4 is 12 per second.

How To Play the Patch

Our experience using the patch is that successful connections occur more than 75% of the time on the first attempt.  Selected servers are more fit, and so lag is reduced.  A number of other problems attributed to lag are, as a result, also less prevalent.  We expect server host migration to work more consistently.

The community will have to find a new balance in terms of host versus player distribution.  Because of changes to the heuristic, there may be more servers with a moderate population of players, and fewer servers that are nearly full or nearly empty.  The ideal ratio of servers to players is probably about 4 servers per 100 players.  Unless you have a spectacular connection, try finding a game or jumping in first.  If games are full and you’re having a hard time connecting, and you have a decent connections and a good ISP – by all means host.  If your connection is moderate or poor, though, you won’t have many joiners.  As with any peer to peer game – many empty games means too many hosts.  Few, full games means not enough.

Future Patches & Updates

In future patches or updates, we will address other bugs and issues.  Again, we wanted to get this out as fast as possible, and so changed only what we could safely and by last Monday afternoon.  Down the road, we will address less common and less severe issues including: disappearing princesses, broken hat machines, migration issues, and the rank system.  We may also address other features and balance issues.

Thanks for sticking with us through this crazy first week.  There is more great stuff to come.  Have a fantastic weekend and see you online!

- Titan Dev