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What second mentalist?
There is a healer on the islands. A battle when the defender didn't bring enough golems (if I recall correctly). But this one is mainly a healer (quite a good one though), not a mentalist.

Up till now, it's saved character inventories based upon character position within the saved character info array as it existed on first loading up the battle.

dude really? how did you manage to get rpg and arena relatively bug free?

okay, first of all, people do instinctively learn orders, positions, relations and all kinds of patterns. Letting the framework decide how to order the characters basically fucks up people's mind. NEVER do that nor let that happen. You can let the gamer decide how to order the game items, but you are never allowed to mess up with the order of skills or any controls (like the hover thing).

if you want to finally get rid of this random swapping bug, you will have to restart with an adequate design.

Use defines or constants (or what ever this adobe thingy got) to assign unique ids to all characters. Implement the character list in a way that all characters have one definite position and NEVER change it. Like really NEVER. Use black squares or red crosses or what ever to mark the dead characters or the ones that are already on the field. But do not mix the order in any arrays or lists.

Use single ton pattern to assign unique ids to all items. If you don't know how to implement the single ton, run throw all items and find unused id to be assigned to new item. Do not store in the item itself whether it is equipped or not and who carries it. Rather add two array to all characters, store in one of these the equipped items and in another array the rest of items. Each time the user equips/unequips/drops/whatever the item run throw both array, do what ever is necessary to ensure consistency and redraw the item window.

Do not rely on the framework. All frameworks have bugs and you don't have time to find these bugs and work arounds. Assume the framework tries to trick you and build in means to get everything right.
Store into the save file the id of a character together with its data. When you load the file identify the character depending on the id, not on the position. Assign then a designated position in the array of characters to the loaded one.

As for the items, store the id of the character, who carries it, together with the item. Once the item is loaded, use the character's id to decide where to put the item, do NOT use any array indices.

Do not add the bonuses or debuffs to the current health variable or current resist. There are a lot of other minor bugs coming from this mistake, e.g. bonus hp from static shield goes lost, if you unequip a shield or an orb.
You need to implement this stuff functionally (instead of imperatively). Write a function that runs through all items and sums up all bonuses and debuffs, but do not store the value. Call this method each time you need to draw the hp bar or calculate the current hp for some actions, but do not store the calculated result. You will have to call this function each time you need the value.

Make it easy for yourself and implement all buffs and debuffs like these are items, items that cannot be traded and that do expire. In the class of a character add an additional array for these buff-items and debuff-items. Do NOT ever store any sums or current values. Implement a function for each property (like hp or resist) that always runs over all constants and items and calculates the current value or the sum, but never store it!

And stop using byte data types or anything below int. WTF you are trying to create? A game that would fit on a 3.5" disk?
Let's say you got 100 units on the field, everyone carries 10 items and has 10 buffs and debuffs. That makes no more than 3000 entities. Even if you have 10 properties, you would quasi-save 90000 bytes by using byte instead of int. WTF dude?? 100 KB is not worth the headache. Use int for all game object properties! And since you keep mixing singed and unsigned types, use always signed. Your values are not gonna get that high to blow up an int.

This might sound rough, but when did you release the game? Like two months ago? And you still have a project stopper in the product. Forget all the minor bugs, which you can fix in 5 minutes. It does no matter whether you got 100 minor bugs or not, but it does matter if you have 1 project stopper. Ignore all the other stuff until you sort out this item mess.

Ice/Freeze feels only op because spriggats are a bit op and appear unexpectedly in the middle of the fight behind the back line.

Btw. according to the manual cryo blast attack has 50% chance to freeze. If you put on a blue orb, you have 50% resistance to cold, therefore immune to freeze status. This is why I put the blue orb on both magi. Unfortunately, it is just another minor bug that the orb doesn't provide the status immunity.

Craig, why did you forbid to drop the incompatible inventory? We could at least drop and redistribute it earlier, but now it is not even possible to work around the bug.
Someone should really stop messing up with the ids of characters and items.

You don't understand. The ones who managed to come across this forum, will know about the item file and even more, and will be able to edit themselves what ever they want. I was speaking about the ones, who buy the game on steam to check it out and see if it's fun or not. They will not even follow the link to this forum, not to speak about manually installing some special mods. They buy the game and expect it to be complete! I suppose this is the majority of buyers.

If people want to waste time grinding, then let them grind. It seems like a bad idea to get rid of experience from legitimate pushes and pulls because some people enjoy grinding.

I agree. Even though it totally sounds like pokemon, it is an important part. But I would prefer some generic grinding missions instead of pull/heal/build/hover abuse. It also helps people to learn how the skills work and to develop their strategies.

In my early stages I also said I have no money to buy weapons less for armor and stuff. However, that was caused by not picking up just three chests in the first two missions. My problem was that I did not know when the battle ends and I have overseen the chests in the village. But even with that deficit, which is quite a lot (I was missing 2 swords, gold and I think one more item), I was able to gear up step by step.

For the last mission I have chain mail, steel shields and weapons and iron helms on all melee units, I got wings and some book on the spriggat; wooden mail and some off hand equipment on all magi. In addition to that I have still 2-3 shields, some armor and other stuff in the tent. And I cannot even take all equipped units into the battle. So  its more than enough out there after all. You just don't get it from the start, but you don't need it in the very beginning, because opponent is not so strong any way.

I suppose the resource management is a part of the challenge. Missing chests means wasting your resources. Lacking equipment is the logical consequence.

However, there should be some "easy" mode for casual players. Either the weapons should not break, if the wearer has no replacement, or "easy" players should pay less in the shop.

I did not even use apples, bandages or pills (except for the tutorial mission). Because I am used to save for the case it gets harder. So the "normal" mode is pretty much okay as it is right now. I definitely do not want it any easier. But I admit it is a bit too hard for casual players.

There is nothing strange. Registering on every forum or site you come along is quite inconvenient. Or do you use same names and pws on all forums/sites? How do you keep track on all that then?

Do not expect people to register on some forum each time they buy a game.

The only reason I put efforts into registering here is that I want to see more campaigns, extensions and any other kind of content in this game. And that is not going to happen, if Craig doesn't solve the two most frustrating bugs. In fact I have come across dozens of bugs, but there is no point to report minor things as long as the game is hardly enjoyable due to the two main problems.

Wait what?
You equipped your squad, deployed them, saved, quit and loaded? And that has triggered the bug?
Now I suspect the save/load functions even more, but in addition to that the deployment function might be the problem. It is the moment when you replace on character on the field by someone from reserve or when you swap to characters on the field to put them into the better order...

Since the last update I did that a lot (swapping characters on the field and in the reserve), but could not reproduce the bug. However it might be a combination of all those factors:
- new characters in the group
- save/load
- swap characters on the field

Pretty much yes.

When they joined my forces one of them had a wrench another one had sword equipped. None of them had a mace.... Fortunately, I am used to use my resources efficiently.

btw, I am not sure whether that was mentioned or not. I think each time this replacement/swapping occurs, we got new characters in our group and/or they appear in a different order in the list of characters during the deployment phase.

One more question:  do you trigger the load after the autosave? If you do so, there might be a bug in a save/load routines, some kind of incompatible change in the character map. If you do not trigger the load after the autosave, the load/save routines should be not the cause of the problem.
In case you suspect the load/save functions, try to turn off the autosave and let me test it next weekend.

Its a 32 bit integer meaning either -4 or the number you see depending what meaning you put into the most significant bit.

Plainly said, it is a visual bug. Consider they got -4 psy defense, so psy attacks deal increased damage on them.

AI issues are pretty much on the bottom of the list at the moment I would think.
If the unit cannot do damage to your units, but can do damage to your constructions, they do so in assumption that you would not build actually useless stuff.

Try to build the bridge in the place where the castle bridge goes down and put your units on the river bank blocking the bridge. The bloodthirsty guard will let the bridge down even if that means killing most of his man. That was even more fun before the bug with negative HP was fixed, because you could one hit all the -211 puppets and get exp for that...  :P

The challenge is not to escape, the challenge is to cut down dat op Fera.

I can confirm this bug too. Used a decoy, energy went, tile became not passable, but no visuals were confirmed.

whoohoo, reading this I feel super lucky having lost just few items I could buy later and the spearman and having made it to the final mission...

That is a well known bug. If you have a mission with a deployment phase, you are lucky and can drop and reequip all. Preset missions are kinda dead end in such a situation.

But Craig should be able to find the source of the trouble soon.