Greetings, Bloodsuckers and Sanguine Nobles. I’m Bas, a senior game designer at Triumph Studios. Today, it’ll be my pleasure to guide you through the dark and alluring locations of Thrones of Blood. Please keep your blood maggots on a leash during the tour.
(Check out Thrones of Blood First Look Dev Stream!)
Sunless Terrain
As we knew we were going to have vampires in this DLC, we wanted to play with the trope of vampires having to avoid harmful sunlight. We also wanted to include the environments vampires are usually found in media: grim, mystical, haunting, and romantic forests and plains backed by dark castles. In short, we needed a suitable gothic backdrop for our pretty and terrifying vampires!
To do this on the scale of an entire realm, we came up with the Sunless terrain, a new type of terrain feature similar to Gloom. It can be identified by its dark appearance with plenty of crimson details like roses and blood rivers.
Close up shot of sunless terrain featuring roses and a river
The primary function of this terrain is providing safe haven for Vampire Rulers and Heroes. This terrain and the entire Underground are the only places on the world map where they do not suffer from Sunlight Weakness.
Next to that, the terrain is also slightly hostile to anyone that still has a beating heart: Units without Heartless have their healing and regeneration reduced and Cities of a race without Heartless suffer a city stability penalty, adding a certain amount of dread and fatalism to the terrain. Of course, as an elder vampire you’ve learned to adapt your people and are completely immune
Since this terrain is hostile to most except undead and vampires, it only shows up in a limited amount in normal realms. If you want to cover the world in darkness, however, there is the Sunless Highlands realm trait that starts you out in a realm with a lot of sunless terrain. There are also ways for Vampire Rulers to spread this terrain themselves through spells and a city structure.
Sunless highlands realm trait tooltip
Good to note is that Sunless terrain can be combined with almost all features that synergize with adaptation traits and the Primal culture. So you can totally be an Arctic Vampire ruler or a Dune Serpent Primal Vampire!
Sunless In Tactical Combat
As with all terrain types, Sunless will have unique visuals for the Tactical Combat maps, giving a creepy atmosphere when facing off against the many horrific creatures Age of Wonders 4 and Thrones of Blood has to offer.
Natural combat map in Sunless
The new terrain in Tactical Combat isn’t just for show; there are 2 new dangerous obstacles found when fighting within Sunless terrain. Rose Vines is one such obstacle; it inflicts bleeding to any unit that starts its turn in it or passes through it. More importantly, each Rose Vine obstacle creates a copy of itself on an adjacent hex after 1 turn, this copy will then create a copy itself and so on. As a battle goes on, the terrain gets slowly flooded by thorns.
Creeping rose vines spreading around
Next to that, we have the Banshee Pods. These are inspired by dried-out Snapdragon petals, which look like miniature skulls. Banshee Pods release a dreadful Banshee Wail when destroyed, inflicting frost damage, weakened, and remorse in a 2-hex radius.
Banshee pods
Custom Regions
With the addition of Sunless terrain, we also made some natural story regions using this new terrain. You can encounter these in normal realms and in increased numbers in realms with the Sunless Highlands trait. These natural story regions allowed us to nicely frame the new locations that can be found in Sunless. Such as a creepy gothic palace on the edge of a cliff overlooking the surrounding dead forests.
Example of sunless natural region
The new locations include a Magic Material, 2 new Ancient Wonders, and a new Landmark. Let’s take a look at those now!
Blood Glass
In Thrones of Blood, we wanted to add a new magic material that would fit with the vampires and sunless terrain, and so Blood Glass was born. A sort of naturally occurring stained glass crystal with bright red colors. Blood Glass is the only magic material found in Sunless terrain.
Blood Glass, next to its economic bonuses, unlocks a bunch of item infusions that are linked to the new tome content of this DLC, such as the ability to inflict a new status effect called Blood Parasite. What does it do? You’ll have to find out in a future dev diary!
Normally, new magic materials belong to a new set bonus, but we could not guarantee that enough Blood Glass would be available for a set bonus, due to the limited amount of sunless in a normal realm. Therefore, Blood Glass was added to the Ore magic material set and the set requirements changed to requiring 3 unique ore magic materials, rather than having to collect all of them.
Ancient Wonders
Next to the new Magic Material, 2 new Ancient Wonders emerge from the dark corners of the realm! First is the Crimson Fane, a new bronze wonder found in both Sunless and other terrain types such as Desolate (the areas containing Ashlands) and Arctic (the areas containing Snow and Ice).
The Crimson Fane is a sinister dungeon in which ancient rituals once took place. It grants one of the new wildlife units and allows you to sacrifice thralls (which both the Vampire Rulers and Eldritch Rulers from Eldritch Realms can use) to gain a permanent increase in casting points. This is all assuming you’ve dealt with the horrors found within.
Next to the Crimson Fane comes the colossal Rose Choked Palace, a new Gold Ancient Wonder exclusive to Sunless terrain. It grants a larger pool than usual of units to your rally of the lieges when captured, and is the only way for non-vampire rulers to ignore the penalties of Sunless terrain outside of undead transformations. So be sure to watch for vacancies!
Rose Choked Palace
These gothic mansions were once (or perhaps still are) owned by vampire nobility, but are free real estate if you manage to clear them of their squatters. You’ll be fighting them in the opulent gardens full of hedge mazes and gargoyle statues. Oh, and did I mention the overgrown Rose Vines present? The groundskeeper must’ve perished long ago for things to be this bad.
Landmark
Lastly, the grandest thing to find within the new Sunless lands is the Thorn Heart Landmark, a grotesque giant heart beating and spreading its crimson veins across the lands. This landmark can be present in any realm with Sunless, but is more likely present in realms with the Sunless Highlands realm trait.
Thorn Heart beating
It grants a large amount of resources to adjacent provinces. But annex too much, and it will start spreading sunless terrain all around and within your city’s domain. If you’re a vampire ruler or happen to have gained a Rose Choked Palace, this dangerous effect can be turned in your favor.
Thorn Heart selected
Regardless, getting the threshold bonus will always let you benefit from a new combat enchantment that affects all your enemies while fighting in Sunless terrain anywhere in the realm. So even if your units aren’t too keen about fighting in Sunless, your enemies will have it worse.
And there you have it! The creepy new terrain and the dreadful new locations all available to you to stalk around in when Thrones of Blood drops on the 11th of November. Be sure to rise from your coffin next week when Luis returns to reveal the bloody and tormenting tomes of Thrones of Blood!
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