Greetings to you, best community in the world!
The time is nigh, as v1.4 Battle Tides has just landed on Steam! This is our fourth, free, major update and it’s packed to the brim with glorious features and tweaks. I’m going to run through the major features, but you can take a look at every single nut and bolt in the patch notes, here.
Let’s launch into the features that v1.4 Battle Tides brings.
Five new glorious cards will be gracing Armello. These are primarily focused on further empowering the player to make tactical decisions, whether it comes to leaving your mark in combat or protecting your settlements.
Art and Animation for Poison Taster by Jerome Jacinto
- Poison Taster (Follower): Removes Poison and gives immunity while Recruited.
- Poisoned Dagger (Item): In Battle, First Burned Rot Card is a Poisoned Attack.
- Hero’s Shield (Treasure): In Battle, +1 Reflecting Shield
- Snake Venom (Consumable): (Play to) Creature; In Battle, first rolled Rot counts as a Poison Attack until end of next turn.
- Palisade Walls (Trickery): (Play on) Settlement; Settlement is Fortified until Terrorised, or until owner changes. SFX audio to support this.
The Piercing Dice got a little lonely, but fear not! Two new “special” dice have been added to spice up Armello combat!
Reflect – Blocks the incoming hit and bounces back the damage to the attacker, which may be blocked again by their own defences.
Poison – If this hit isn’t blocked and thus causes a wound to the target, it will “poison” the victim.
Art and Animation for Poisoned Dagger by Simon Boxer
With the addition of these awesome new combat features, we’ve modified a few things to clean up combat and future-proof the system for bigger and better things! Special dice like Poison and Pierce now resolve in the order that they were created, simple as that!
Also If two special dice collide they will cancel each other out and behave as their base dice type. Thus a ‘pierce’ dice meeting a ‘reflect’ dice won’t pierce the ‘reflect’ and the ‘reflect’ won’t bounce back a ‘piercing’ dice."
If you’re the type of person that craves details, check out this detailed blog post by League of Geeks co-founder and director, Blake Mizzi, here.
A cool thing about card and board games is that when you tweak a few values on cards, the result can be a completely fresh gameplay experience. This time, we’ve got a big old list of tweaks and adjustments, a bunch that are based on community feedback!
Here are three specific highlights of the changes that landed in v1.4 Battle Tides!
Hot Rot Wine (Item): Now costs 1 Rot instead of 1 Gold to play.
It’s cool that players use Hot Rot Wine to score last turn victories. In fact, it’s really important that every player feels like they can win, even up to their last turn. We don’t necessarily want Hot Rot Wine to be the “best” way to get a combat victory in every scenario, so now by inflicting a Rot, all non-rotty players will suffer a further disadvantage when fighting the King, whereas the heavily Corrupted get a much needed boon.
Blacksmith (Follower): New effect; in Battle, +1 Sword/Shield for first Sword and Shield symbol Equipped.
Heroes with the Blacksmith by their side felt a little too invincible for our liking. Now, with the correct gear equipped he provides a maximum of 2 pre-locked symbols in combat. Powerful but fair.
Welcoming Party (Trickery): New effect: Target is exiled to nearest unoccupied Mountain and ends Targets Turn.
We really like versatile cards but we feel that most experienced Players were using Welcoming Party strictly as a mode of transportation rather than a peril. Now, it’s a threatening Peril AND it can absolutely still be used for movement. You may just need to be a little more crafty.
We've been keeping an eye on how you, our beautiful players interact with each other and we've made a few changes! LoG co-founder, Trent "good hair" Kusters bares all the juicy details here. We've replaced a few lesser used chat options with some rad additions.
Once again, I’ve chosen three to show off but there are a heap!
"Exclaim" > "Curse" for when the Wyld fails to shine upon you.
"Truce" > "Hero" to suggest an allegiance in a pinch.
"Farewell" is the perfect way to end a match, or an opponent.
Alright folks, that’s the scenic tour of v1.4 Battle Tides but I’m excited to see you jump in and discover all of the juicy details that weren’t even mentioned!
Definitely follow us on Twitch and tune in at 7:30pm on the 6th July PDT as we’ll be streaming some v1.4 Battle Tides and giving away some goodies to our viewers!
Remember to holla at us with your feedback on Twitter, Facebook and the forums (Steam & LoG)!
May the Wyld guide your path.
<3 Lisy & the LoG Crew