Hey, rulers!
It's been a while since we reported on Warnament's progress. It's partly because we got carried away with developing the game. Time passed by as we introduced small changes to the game every two weeks. A couple of new political institutions here, a nice vignette for the map there, a bunch of fixes on the server side over here… Little by little, we ended up with quite a different game: more stable, more pretty, and with much deeper gameplay.
In this dev update, we will try to review the most significant additions to Warnament. We still keep to our philosophy of the game being compact and easy to start playing, but more experienced rulers will find themselves with a much bigger toolkit for dominating the world.
Even the gloriest of wars must come to an end at some point (which is a good thing, we might add), and so does Warnament. There's now a limit of 100 turns per session (or 2 hours in multiplayer, by default), after which the countries are rated by their success in controlling territory, the state of economics, and the number of vassal states.
A nice place to try out this new system is our new scenario - World War II - in which history may take some unexpected terms: from the secession of Catalonia to the re-establishment of the Russian Empire. This scenario relies heavily on the new rebellion mechanics: if there's too much discontent among the population, you might end up with some of your provinces declaring independence. It's also how Israel might appear on the map in a quite different way than it did, according to history books.
If (or should we say - when?) it comes to war, rulers of Warnament will have more instruments at their disposal - both military and diplomatic. The former includes garrisons, the size of which depends on the overall economic situation in a province. From now on, one just can't move an army to another country's province and claim it as their own - they would have to completely destroy the garrison.
s for battles, there's now an element of randomness: even if you attack with a bigger army, there's still a chance of losing a battle.
And when the fog of war dissipates and the negotiations for peace are happening, one of the conditions of the treaty may be creating a demilitarized zone in the bordering provinces. No armies can be present in such provinces for a selected amount of turns.
Some peculiar changes were made in domestic politics, especially for those preferring a more… extravagant style of play. Communist countries might treat their population with good old repressions, which may cause paranoia among the authorities, resulting in deteriorated relations with other countries. Which is probably bad news for them, because communist states now have a perk of increased artillery range.
Fascist states have a whole new array of options for going wild, and establishing policies of xenophobia and/or occultism: if you ever considered devoting your life to serving the dark gods - that's your chance (we don't judge). Monarchs in Warnament now have more options, too: if you think that the progress has gone too far, you can always return to feudalism or re-establish serfdom. You are the king, after all!
Regardless of your political regime, the new, more flexible, and deep economic system in Warnament will be at your disposal. You can now allocate a budget for each province individually, which influences its garrison size and the number of slots available for buildings. And on the national level, you can financially stimulate science, infrastructure, or population independently, allowing you to fine-tune the economics to match your style of play.
These are the most prominent changes in the gameplay, but any game is more than just mechanics: other aspects of Warnament were improved as well. We've worked a lot on the server side of the game, and now any player can start hosting a multiplayer session at any time.
We've also made quite a few changes to the game's UI and UX and added pretty borders for countries on the map:
Last but not least, we added sounds and several new music tracks to the game! You can check them out in one of our gameplay videos (which we're posting on our YouTube channel every week):
As for our plans for the near future - we've got a surprise for you: we're now preparing Warnament to be released on Android. No date is nailed to the wall yet, but our expectations are to ship the game by the end of September. Warnament will be released as a free-to-play game with an option to buy cosmetic items for money.
On one hand, this is an intermediate stage of the game's development: our main focus is to hit Early Access on Steam. But, on the other hand, we already have an experience of releasing a mobile grand strategy: Cold Path, Warnament's spiritual precessor, was initially released on Android and accumulated a handsome number of 1+ million downloads. So if you enjoy mobile gaming, make sure to join our Discord server to be among the first to know about the upcoming release.
A friendly reminder: if you prefer playing Warnament on your PC, there's a closed beta which costs as little as $0.99 to start playing.
That's it for today, rulers! We'll keep you posted on Warnament's progress. Until we meet again!