Greetings, Heroes!
Before we share some news, we'd like to thank you for joining in the conversation and meeting us in person over at our Discord Server . Hearing your thoughts directly charges our batteries, and seeing fellow players connect and share advice is amazing as well.
If you haven't yet joined us there, get your FOMO on and come visit!
Development Updates
Development is progressing and patch 0.9.3 is just around the corner, introducing a new in-mission reward system as well as plenty of fixes and upgrades. Today, however, we're here to share a special new build with you, one created following your feedback in the past few months.
While we are mostly pleased with how our tactical missions are shaping up, world map gameplay is still not as solid as we'd like it to be. Thanks to your feedback underlining issues and communicating preferences in the past few months, we were able to develop this new iteration that works better in our opinion - can't wait to hear yours ːsteamhappyː
So as we work on it and iterate based on your thoughts, we wanted to invite all of you to jump in and try the new prototype!
TEST BUILD ACCESS
To access the test build, follow these steps:
- Right click Fort Triumph in your Steam game library.
- Select 'Properties'
- Choose the 'Betas' tab
- Enter the test build's passkey: 'RebuildingTheFort' (no '' marks)
- If entered correctly, you will unlock a beta branch named 'strategic_testing'
- Select this branch, let Steam download necessary game files
- Open Fort Triumph normally to run the test build
- At any time, you may revert back to the normal release in the same dropdown menu (Choose 'none').
What's this iteration about?
In this test build we're shifting world map gameplay emphasis from exploration to strategy - while both were and will be important elements to balance, we realized thanks to your feedback we need to try a more strategy-heavy approach.
You start with a base in which you can recruit heroes and units based on the faction with which you are aligned. With time, you can upgrade into stronger units, larger party size, and even unit buffs like health or extra armor. For now as a temporary testing parameter, everyone will start allied with a Goblin faction, but this will change later in testing.
You can lead and control several parties, splitting and merging at will, and your goal is to try and beat the rival faction on the map. The enemy faction obeys the same rules as you for the most part, but cannot recruit hero units, to compensate for that they will not be as restricted when it comes to party size.
It is going to be imperative to take over and hold resources early to fuel future supremacy, and making the right choices will determine the difficulty faced in battles to a great degree.
As part of this test build we've added a few new enemy types, including Goblin Bombers and Spitting Spiders, and also reworked enemy tiers and types, increasing the number of tiers per enemy type from 3 to 5 which makes the variety of encounters much greater.
You can also spot a couple of new hero abilities in the skill trees, as we intend to keep fleshing these out to have more options and therefore more tactical choices to make.
Note that this testing build does not contain the Prologue and Chapter I story, but the final iteration of the world map will have them incorporated into it. Also know that enemy AI is very forgiving at this point for testing purposes, however it will get deadlier later in testing.
Thank you once again, adventurers, for taking this journey with us, and we cannot wait to hear everything you think about the new strategy layer!