We haven’t had a lot of time since the launch to stop by and say hi, we’ve been focusing on getting you fixes for the more serious bugs, as well as visiting Boston for PAX East. But today we’ve got a great excuse to let you know what we’ve been up to. Here we’d like to introduce you to the first major content update for the game.
First up we’ve got a new clan for you to play. It took us a little longer than expected to get everything balanced and ready. This was mostly because we devoted more dev time to bug fixing than content creation during the first few weeks after the launch. But now you’re going to have an entirely new way of planning your strategy and claiming victory. Let’s take a closer look...
The Clan of the Raven:
Great explorers and merchants, their mighty fleet allowed them to be the first to land on Northgard. They are strong trade partners if you don’t mind their constant scheming. Brash and swift, they will often be found roaming where you least expect them.
- The Ravens can Colonize new tiles with either Food or Kröwns. This plays to their strengths as merchants. You can take advantage of their buffs and optimize your production of Kröwns then expand rapidly, or just work towards an economic victory...
- You have access to a clan specific building, The Harbour. This replaces the Longship dock, allowing you to recruit Sailors but also to explore coastal areas of the map and send recruitable Mercenaries on targeted raids!
We’re not going to say a lot more in this post, as you would have noticed we just pushed the update to you. So go… update, test, discover! Let us know what you think, we’re sure that you’ll want to find out how well we managed to balance the clan, and we’d love to hear your feedback on how we did.
But wait… There’s more!
Changes to other clans:
Along with designing a new clan, we’ve also been reading through your suggestions and ideas and adding them to our list of things to do. Here are a few tweaks that we’ve made to the clans that should change the way you play a little.
The Stag Clan:
- They can now build the Hall of Skalds without upgrading their Town Hall.
- Their Thane fame bonus has been replaced with additional Supplies.
The Goat Clan:
- knowledge "Healthy Food" has been replaced by "Barricades" which increase civilians resistance by 10% per building in the area.
All Clans:
- The Happiness bonus for Wealth (Kröwns stocks) has been removed, it is now a Raven-specific knowledge.
Here we’ve made some clan specific changes to address some balance issues, but also just to make each clan more unique and interesting to play. This will be an ongoing process, but we’re interested to see what you think about these changes.
Gameplay changes:
- Forgot to build a Mine? You can now increase the maximum number of buildings by 1 if you’re willing to part with some Kröwns... This can only be done once per area.
- The price of recruiting warriors now varies: the first warrior will cost 20K, the second 25K, the third 30K and so on. If one or several of your warriors are killed, the price will revert to the corresponding level. This change is designed to balance the cost/power ratio of larger armies.
- We have improved the ability to micro-manage combat and fixed several bugs related to fight handling. Feedback wanted!
- By popular demand, we’ve added Ctrl+1-9 shortcuts to allow creating groups of units or memorizing buildings!
- We have increased the time it takes to colonize the Yggdrasil. This will allow the AI (and other players) to contest your claim!
- Sailors’ tools can now be improved.
- More Fish can be found in new maps.
- The Great Explorers achievement has been fixed!
- The AI has been significantly improved.
- Version number v0.1.4202.
As you can see, we’ve been keeping an eye on the things that come up the most often in the forums. We think that this is enough changes for one update, as we’d like to be able to get feedback on a smaller number of things if there are any issues, but we are working on much more than this. In particular, we’re going to be focusing a lot of our energy on multiplayer over the next few months.
This will probably mean that we’ll be pushing less major updates of content or mechanic changes, but it will mean that you won’t have long to wait before you can crush your friends into the snow!
On top of this, there are some shield maidens in the pipeline, another clan to come and a stack of other more important gameplay elements that will be pushed as often as we can stop testing out our PvP version in the office. ;p
Last but not least, thank you. Thank you to everyone who got behind Northgard and helped us launch the game successfully into Early Access. Thanks for buying it, sharing it with your friends, making videos, tweeting, liking, twitching, writing articles, reporting bug, sharing your ideas or just playing the game and having fun. Without you guys we wouldn’t be thinking more ambitiously about our multi implementation, we wouldn’t be talking about adding more mechanics and pushing the game even further.
Thanks again and stay awesome.
The Shiro Games Team