Hello everyone!
After some months of time, spent onto developing the new Civilisation, I'm happy to announce that the moment has come: The Necropolis is now here for you to play and enjoy.
A big thankyou to everyone who has expressed interest in my work. It's helped me to keep going and finish my work just as I've envisioned it.
The Necropolis
The Necropolis is a civilisation of skeletons who have risen from realm of the dead to bring Death and havoc over the world of the living.
This civilisation features a number of unique gameplay elements:
- Souls as a unique resource, required for the recruitment of units.
- Death terrain which is spread by your buildings, killing all flora in its reach, leaving a lasting mark on the land.
- Ability to raise the maximum population limit (with the help of a building) above the one set for other players.
- Two unit spells capable of raising fallen enemy units as skeletons that remain in your service until killed (using up population slots)
Instead of using a generic skeleton for all of these, I implemented numerous skeleton variants, in accordance to the units that are raised as such after Death.
At the same time the Necropolis comes with some disadvantages, though:
- Inability to lift taxes. Instead you will generate souls with the help of Soulstones.
- Your units, being without Life, don't recover their wounds over time.
- Inability to be allied with any of the other civilisations. You can still make teams consisting of Necropolis players.
While these disadvantages may seem harsh, the Necropolis more than makes up for it with the sheer amount of units it can recruit and send into combat in a short time. If you ever decide to choose a Necropolis AI player as your foe, be prepared to face a challenge like none before.
Some key units and their abilities:
Skeleton Workers, Skeleton Warriors and Skeleton Archers
You will always keep recruiting these baseline units throughout your game. They are extremely cheap and, expectedly, not very powerful. Skeleton Workers and - Warriors have no gold cost.
Skeleton Mages
Cheap spellcasters that feature some remarkable abilities. With the spell Assemble Bones they can "repair" fellow skeletons to full health, even if perished. The Bone Shards spells allows them to cause area damage.
The Harvester
This will be your hero unit. Its deadly scythe can hit several enemy units at once. Furthermore it can cast Death Bolt, a spell which inflicts 90 points of damage on its target and causes it to return as skeleton on death, if killed shortly after.
The Lich
Liches are the dreaded masters of death magic. They can raise up to 5 perished enemy units as skeletons, using the spell Return of the Dead. No less impressive is their spell Incense of the Dead, creating an area around a corpse that will continuously damage living units and heal undead units at the same time.
Wraith
A wraith is a restless ghost that, due ot its ethereal form, receives only 1 point of damage from each physical attack, while magic and fire attacks still inflict full damage. The Wraith features the ability Disappear that allows it to vanish into the void and appear at its destination location 10 seconds later. If put on auto-casting, the Wraith will use this spell to avoid further harm as soon as its hitpoints have sunk below 20.
These are not all units. I'll leave it to you to discover the other ones, though.
Other improvements:
Apart from my works on the Necropolis, I did some improvements on the spells of other civilisations. In particular the cooldown times for many spells have been revised, meaning, made shorter.
The Poison Rain of the Masterwitch has been renamed to "Acid Rain". It now causes damage on undead and mechanical units aswell, to reduce the disadvantage of Ziggurat players against Necropolis.
The Summon Phoenix - spell of the Master sorceress has been modified so it causes a lot less damage on allied units that are accidentally hit by it, removing cases where a master sorceress accidentally clears all of the sprites in her group. Additionally the phoenix has been improved so it will no longer head for the closest enemy unit but for the center of a nearby enemy unit accumulation.
This is all for now. I hope you enjoy this update.
If you come across any issues with the new civilisation or if you would like to give any other feedback, you are welcomed to do so on the Steam-included forums or drop by our discord server.