Hello and welcome back to a new series of Drop Duchy’s Devlogs (I love a good alliteration), dedicated to the upcoming content of our first major content expansion.

First, I’d like to thank you all for playing the game. If you’re one of the 100,000+ players who’ve purchased Drop Duchy, you can proudly say that you’re 0.00001% responsible for the project’s continuation. In fact, thanks to the game’s incredible success, we’ve decided to continue expanding it. So far, we’ve released two bug-fixing patches, and in a few weeks, you’ll also get to discover a big content update featuring new mechanics, new cards, quality-of-life updates, and more!

This first post will tell you more about the new DLC faction we’re introducing with this update available from August 18th : The Tribe.

Power of the Druids

The Tribe is the fourth faction in the game, and as you know, we strive to give each faction a strong gameplay and thematic identity. After the peasants, city dwellers, and crusaders, our next idea was to focus more on the forest, nature, and exploration, which is how we decided to go for the mystical druids.

The central mechanic of the Tribe is called the Cairn’s area.In your starting deck, you’ve got the technology Ancient Alignment, which adds four Cairn’s pieces to the round deck. Your goal is to create the largest rectangular area that fits inside those four standing stones to trigger the effect of the Tribe’s starting building, the Stone Circle. Indeed, if you manage to place the Stone Circle inside the Cairn’s area, it collects a massive amount of resources.

The Cairns also recruit troops when aligned with one another, which can be helpful to support your early game military needs, but you may also decide to drop the idea of a rectangular area in favor of a stone alignment to gain even more troops. In this context, existing technology cards, such as Tactical Advantage or Strength in Numbers, become particularly interesting.

Exploration Combos

But wait, don’t underestimate the power of a large rectangular Cairn’s area too quickly! Trying to position a Cairn in each corner of the grid is certainly a challenge, and you’ll have to reconsider your usual approach to optimal positioning, but it provides a fantastic opportunity to set up massive exploration-related combos.

As a reminder, in the game, when you complete a line, you get to explore its square and gain resources; now you can explore them a second time! The Tribe has access to exclusive cards that leverage its boosted exploration capacity, such as the Druid Hut for extra food & defense, or the technology Lush Woods, which adds food to forest exploration gains.

At this point, I should mention that it can be worth revisiting cards from the base game that fit into this archetype. Buildings such as Exploited Lands or Royal Garden can yield resources twice in a round now (or even more if you used the Manor’s capacity to explore squares in range three times!). While the Tribe’s natural environment is the forest, they can definitely work with the river if you bring in a good Shipyard, which recruits for each time a river square adjacent to the grid border is explored.

Now, if you want to go all-in on the exploration, your best option is going to be another druid-exclusive card: the War Council, which recruits for each square explored in the round.

Sacrifice and Progression

Like the other factions in the game, the Tribe can play in any mode as long as you’ve unlocked at least the Technology cards in the Progress tree. It comes with 12 faction quests that’ll help you figure out the new mechanics of the faction and challenge you to leverage its power. Can you beat Act 1 without a single production card other than the Stone Circle?

As you complete the quests, you’ll unlock more cards and get to another specialty of the druid-inspired faction: reading the stars and sacrificing opponents. For the first one, you’ll have to wait until the following article to discover how the Tribe interacts with the new Constellation mechanic we’re adding to this update as well.

As for the second, the Tribe can get the technology Law Court which removes units from every enemy building inside the Cairn’s area and more importantly, the building Sacrificial Site which has the power to recruit one unit for each unit that was removed during the whole round (by any building or technology card). That’s another entire archetype you can build your deck around to unleash devastating combo: the good old Siege Camp fits perfectly in such a deck.

Wrap Up

That’s it for this first devlog about the next big update to the game. We hope you’ll enjoy this new faction as much as we did when it launches this summer. With its original mechanics and introduction of new combos, the Tribe gives you a perfect excuse to replay the game to figure out new strategies using both old and new content.

In the next article, I’ll tell you more about the major additions of the (free) content patch: the Constellation mechanic, the Endless mode, and Elite enemies! See you, have fun!

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JB Oger - Game Director

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