Dear Legends of Ellaria players,
As we're nearing the Beta release, we've made progress on Legends of Ellaria's logics. Among our achievements is the army movement, battles, sphere of influence, as well of huge optimizations on memory and CPU.
We would like to share with you some of the new World Management and Sphere of Influence logics.
Sphere of Influence
Any owned town, fort, or strategical building generates influence. This influence is transferred to other territories until it dissipates. having influence on a terrain tile will automatically "own" it, which gives you kingdom bonuses and allows you to build buildings on it.
The influence dissipates depending on the terrain type and connected roads. For instance, a flat terrain with roads will only lose one influence point, while a mountain will lose four influence points.
Army Movement
The army movement speed depends on the terrain's influence points, terrain type, roads, and the size of the army. For instance, a large army would move much slower than a regular army and would move even slower on enemy territory, giving a significant advantage to the defender.
Also, you cannot go past an enemy army or a fort. When moving one tile away from an enemy, you would have to either attack the enemy, retire to where you came from, or stay put and prepare a defense.
Since armies cannot go past forts or other armies, you can defend your kingdom by building "super defenses" on strategic locations, such as mountain passes and river crossings.
Places of interest
Each location, represented by HEX tiles, may contain one or several places of interest. These places may be towns, taverns, ruins, and camps. For instance, a location may contain an owned farm, your army camp, and a special quest location.
Hovering and clicking on a location will cause your player to fast travel to that location.
Battles
When you "walk" towards a defended location, you will start a battle, which will end once one of the sides is defeated or have retreated. The outcome of the battle depends on the hero, size of the army, and location. Each battle may last from a few in-game hours to several days and will involve multiple skirmishes.
You can choose to auto-resolve the battle by staying in the map view and wait for the outcome or to switch to First Person / RTS mode and command the battle by yourself.
If you win a battle, the remaining enemy armies will retreat to another location, while you will occupy and capture the battle location, along with all of its structures.
Along with these logics, we're working on the rest of the kingdom management, quests, a new city build menu, and army management. With that in mind, We are close to finishing the World Domination version, and we estimate that we'll publish the Closed Beta in November.
If you own a copy of Legends of Ellaria but still haven't joined the closed Beta, please join us on our Discord server, PM us with @Admin and we will set you up! In case you don't have a Discord, you can also contact us here.
Thank you for the support, and we hope to build a great game alongside you.
See you in Ellaria,
The Larkon Studio Team