Hi everyone,
Today we'd like to tell you about the new system we've been working on — it's called "Master favors". Let's begin with comparing the new Eador to MotBW.
Here's a situation. You're playing on a big map against one or two AIs. Difficulty level is decent enough, "rushing" against AI didn't work out. You save up forces to breach their defenses, capture a couple of their provinces, kill an enemy hero coming through nearby, and by the third province your army is already no more. You send your hero for reinforcements and either hire guards in new provinces or just give them away back to AI, because you've got nothing to defend them with. This feels too much like some World War I nightmare.
To introduce some variety into later stages of the game and give players more strategy options in general, we're adding Master favors. You can choose one Master out of four: Ul-Dagan, Dariol, L'Anshar and Doh-Gor. Build temples to worship them. Complete quests and collect "favor" of your chosen Master. Then this collected favor can be spent on special rituals to break through enemy defenses and counter-attack right after a defeat.
Examples:
- Hero teleportation from a capital to a selected province within 5 hexes.
- For 5 turns double your province's income and add additional 3 points to citizens' mood, but in return you get -5 to population growth with -2 population reduction in a turn.
- For 5 turns the price for hiring units is halved, but population growth is stopped.
- Strike an enemy province with necrotic energy that will kill its inhabitants, kill or greatly damage its army and reduce HP of all armies near this province to 40%.
Once again, to get access to Master favors, you'll need to build a temple dedicated to him. As a result, Temple quarter, previously fairly empty in MotBW, will now have a greater purpose.
You'll be able to try out this new mechanic in the update 2.12.1 — we hope you'll like it!