Hello, reader!
The most significant way to improve your units as you traverse the lands is gaining renown through your actions. Fighting bad guys (or things) and doing good social deeds will net you some renown. There are rare cases of small renown penalties - infamy if you will - that you’ll have to decide whether are worth taking for the potential rewards they grant.
Gaining enough renown will allow you to increase the rank of each hero in your party. Ranking up for the first two times grants every unit a new Skill slot, so units will have at most 4 Skills to use in combat (not counting movement). After that point, each rank allows units to upgrade their existing Skills. Every Skill can be upgraded two times, and each time there are 3 possible upgrades for you to choose from. The upgrades are exclusive per branch, so picking branch A will make branches B and C unavailable to that unit for the remainder of the run. Should you lose that unit to the ravages of war and find another of the same class with the same base Skill, it might be down a different upgrade path! We’ve decided that finding new heroes to replace lost ones would make them always be the same rank as your other units, but with randomly picked Skills and upgrades.
The upgrades to Skills vary from unique mechanical changes to changes in numbers. Number changes come down to changes in cooldown, charge count, action point cost, damage, stronger status effects, etc. Mechanical changes would be ones that grant additional effects, like added knockback, extra status effects, or changes in how the Skill functions. An example of the last one is a WIP Skill currently called Lunge, which moves the unit to the target tile and damages a unit adjacent to it. The upgrade for it (called Jump) makes the unit - wait for it - jump to the target tile and deal damage to an adjacent unit. The implication of moving versus jumping is that jumping doesn’t trigger any reaction Skills on the way to the target, which makes it fairly strong against some enemies that use Overwatch or similar Skills.
Of course, most of these are still being playtested and may not appear in the final game in the shape I describe them here, but hopefully gives you an idea of the things we’re playing with to make upgrading Skills meaningful and useful. Most of the Skills will surely get a numerical upgrade, but we’re looking to make as many mechanical changes to Skills as we can muster.
Thanks for reading! If you have any questions about the game, the whole team is on this Discord server here, and I’m on Twitter.
MarkoP