Hi guys!
Since the beginning of March, we’ve been working on a completely new faction – the Forsaken.
These ancient creatures have been cast out and now skulk alone in the darkness beyond the margins of civilization. No man would have the courage to visit the cursed lands they normally inhabit, but now they’ve begun to invade the territories of men!
Their special abilities and traits will pose a great challenge in battle, forcing the player to try new and very different tactics to overcome them.
The second big task for us has been the design, implementation and testing of a new campaign mode: Conquest.
The Conquest campaign will play completely differently from the default Adventure campaign.
Your goal will be to attack and capture sites in one huge world map comprised of fortresses, camps, mines, villages and so on.
You’ll be able to field up to 12 combatants in battle, as opposed to only 6 in the default mode.
Tactical decisions will grow more complex as the battlefields are larger and you’ll face many more enemies. Formations, frontline soldiers, archers and possibly even siege weapons will have to be considered!
Furthermore, you’ll have the option to garrison some of your units in world map nodes to secure different areas against roving hostiles.
Your enemies will have the same goal – they will try to capture nodes, increase their income, and hire new soldiers to fight for them.
There will be more factions in the world map, and each faction can declare war on its neighbours, just like the player!
There will also be a new resource to gather, metal, which will be used to craft new weapons and armour.
You’ll be able to free oppressed villagers and enlist them to fight for you (in which case you can choose their class and gear), or to become a blacksmith or miner. Or you can assign them to manage a fortress and raise its income.
As you can see, Conquest is much more focused on the strategic layer; you’ll have to plan long term to succeed in this much more complex campaign.
We plan to publish a playable build of this new mode in our beta branch soon, hopefully by the end of next week. From there we will gather feedback and suggestions from our beta testers to finish the work as soon as possible, maybe even before final release!