This week we ship a feature that will change the way you play the campaign as well as introduce three significant upgrades of the user interface. It's been a productive week for our team, and we're really happy to see the various mechanics of the game come together!
While the game doesn't have a tutorial yet and we know that it might still be too difficult to grasp at the first launch, we're getting there – just please have some patience =). We'll add a few more key features like hunger, cooking, travel magic, upgrades and sieges first, and once these are safely in place, we'll finally start on the introduction to the game so that it's ready for the general Early Access.
Detailed release notes are on the game's forum, as well as below.
"POINT MEN" ARE IN, PRE-ENCOUNTER SCREEN IS OUT
If you've been reading modern military memoirs, you may be familiar with the terms "to walk the point" and "point men". These terms refer to the soldiers that are at the front of the party that moves through the hostile territory.
With version 181, we make the transition to using the top party panel for managing the team that goes into any new encounter while saying goodbye to the dedicated pre-encounter screen
Here's how the party panel looks –>
Note that the three characters on the left side have different portrait backgrounds, as well as feature encounter icons in the top right corners of their portraits. They are the party's "point men" –>
You can assign specific characters to this role by clicking on their portraits, to have them swap places. In the example below, I first click on the disciple on the right side (a frame appears), and then on the disciple on the left side (the exchange is complete: they swap places).
Following the exchange, I initiate an encounter, and sure enough I get the three characters that I've just appointed to walk the point, in the same sequence as they are displayed in the party panel –>
Overall, this new feature streamlines the preparation for any encounters, and lays further ground for introducing further personal traits that can be related to certain characters taking the risk (or being afraid to do so).
FORCED RETREAT & DRAFTING
Forced retreat and drafting are an extremely important addition to how encounters play out in the game, even though the actual user interface elements are small and blend into the existing controls.
First, let's remember the rules for retreating from combat:
- player party may retreat at any time, if opponents are not challenging it
- aggressive opponents (e.g. gigglers) generally prevent party from retreating in the first 3 rounds of the encounter
- a character who retreated, receives 5 days of stress condition (which lowers their memory, courage and endurance)
With version 181, we now also allow individual retreat (check the icon in the top right corner of the character's portrait) – and it obeys the same rule, in terms of availability. You can force a party member to retreat as long as retreat is available to the whole party –>
In this example, I had the misfortune of stumbling upon 3 opposing parties that merged together before attacking me.
I managed to survive for 3 rounds, though my leftmost character took a lot of damage and was about to die – which is when I pushed him to retreat –>
Once a character has retreated or died, a spot in the party is vacant, and drafting becomes available –>
When you hit "draft another member", a panel appears that lists those in the party who are available for drafting –>
You can preview their stats by using right mouse button to open their character profiles. Once you made your choice, and confirmed it, the new party member arrives to the frontline, and is able to act, immediately.
What this feature brings is the incredibly important ability to use all of your party members to challenge a larger opposing party, and to prevent deaths and injuries by forcing characters with a lot of damage or fear to retreat before it is too late. Moreover, it also allows you to force retreat characters that have, for example, accumulated too much paralysis, or fire, or acid.
In other words, more control – more flexibility – and more combinations. See if you can now challenge larger and more dangerous parties of opponents, and win those encounters despite unfavourable weather conditions!
FROST: UPDATED MECHANICS
If you ever fought a battle under the hail against a group of Shadows who dealt additional Frost tokens on top of what the weather was dealing, you would be glad to know that we changed the mechanics of this token a little:
- now 3 or more tokens of Frost deal 1 Damage per round (was: Paralysis)
- now 6 tokens of Frost deal 1 Paralysis per round (was: Damage)
NEW SEASON DEVICE, NEW SEASON RULES
As a part of the overhaul of the travel mode user interface, we upgraded the device that displays the current season: it displays the current season (including the detailed tooltip, which as always is available by pressing "SHIFT" as you hover over the element) and its progress.
New feature: due to unpredictable trajectories of Rund's three moons, seasons now no longer last 10 days each, but instead vary between 6 and 16 days. The exact length is determined at the start of each season, and is reflected in the season's progress bar.
TURNS DEVICE
More improvements on the travel mode: not only do we now show the total number of days since you started the Prologue, but also the current turn. The icon of the currently active turn lights up, and each icon has a tooltip and its detailed ("SHIFT") version that detail the rules (for example, do you know at which turn creatures get spawned? at environment's!).
ANIMATED CREATURE STATES
Once we added the sound effects of opposing parties changing their states from "idle" to "alert" and from "alert" to "in pursuit", we felt like this helped a lot I identifying the threats to player party. But sometimes it wasn't really obvious, where did the sound come from. With version 181, we introduce the animated creature states that address this issue –>
In the plans for one of the future updates: to actually center the screen on the specific opposing party that makes the move during its turn.
CHANGE IN CONTROLS
This change may make some of our early players cringe (and we understand you!): we swapped mouse controls in the travel mode.
Now, to move, you will use the Left Mouse Button –
And to access information (e.g. Character Profile, Hex Info, Discovery Cards, etc.), you will use the Right Mouse Button –
This is a part of our general push to harmonise the controls in the game.
UPDATE: ALCHEMIC CAULDRON
As a small step towards the upgraded user interface of Alchemic Cauldron, we already introduce a new middle section with this week's version. Nothing changes much, it's just a process of a larger update that we expect to finalise in version 182.
WHAT'S NEXT?
Next week, our team will split into two parts: one part will be fixing the small outstanding issues, of which we accumulated a good devil's dozen (cleaning up the Encyclopaedia, setting up a separate Rulebook and so forth); while another part will be busy with the prep work for a few larger features that we'll ship in versions 183-185 (including travel magic with its first real spell).
If you're a part of the Limited Early Access, please give the current version a go and share your comments on the Steam forums, on the Discord server or on the YouTube channel – we love getting feedback.
Thanks, and see you next week!
Team CO