Hey everyone! It's been a bit since our last update, so we wanted to give you a preview of what's coming to The Iron Oath in our next major update titled Friends and Foes. We can't give an exact date just yet, but you can expect to see it soon as we're just entering the polish and testing phase. We're also happy to announce that The Iron Oath is currently 10% off during the Steam Autumn Sale from November 22 - 29! Now let's dive in to the upcoming changes:
New Ability Upgrades
With the Friends and Foes update, all ability upgrades will be unlocked, giving you full freedom to customize each of your characters with their most powerful upgrades. We've also gone through each ability, making changes to their base functions and/or tweaking their upgrade trees (more unique effects, fewer +Charge upgrades).
Attributes and Leveling Overhaul
We've reworked our attribute system, scrapping the concept of 'Primary Attributes' such as Physique and Finesse. The attributes available are now: Health, Morale, Power, Mending, Defense, Evasion, Accuracy, Critical Chance, Speed, Movement.
Most of these you'll be familiar with. The biggest change here is that we've split up Power into two attributes. Power will now determine your damage output, while Mending determines your healing (and shielding) output. With both damage and healing previously being handled by one stat, it meant your characters could excel in both areas without compromise, which from a balance perspective wasn't ideal!
Leveling up has also been redone. There wasn't a whole lot of room for progression with the previous system, and the points you did earn didn't move the needle much on any one stat (aside from maybe Health!). Going forward, you'll be granted a handful of points (varying by level) to spend toward ranking up an attribute. By default it costs 6 points to rank up and increase a stat, but characters can also excel in some stats (determined upon their creation), making it only cost 5 points to rank it up. Overall, ranking up an attribute will have a much larger impact on your character then it currently does, and the relative strength of a high level character will be much more noticeable compared to a fresh recruit.
We've also changed up the leveling table, getting rid of the soft cap at level 10 where you stopped gaining attribute points. The soft cap is now 20, with the hard cap being 40. After level 20, you will still earn attribute points, just not as much as the previous levels. The XP requirements for levels have also been adjusted with these changes in mind.
The way attributes are assigned to a character upon their creation has been reworked. Each attribute now has a min and max value it can be assigned, depending on the class. For example, a Pyrolancer's starting Health can vary between 375-450, while a Huntress' defaults between 275-350. With this change, along with characters excelling in certain stats, we're hoping each character will feel more unique, opening up more build possibilities for you to explore.
Finally, we've removed the stat modifiers that were tied to a character's age. While we liked the idea of your characters having a "peak", in practice it was a little confusing and it also worked against the feeling of progression once they got to an older age.
Enemy Diversity
Enemy diversity is something we've wanted to improve, and we've done a few things to help with it. Firstly, we've added 30 new enemy variants to the game, pushing the total enemy count to around 80. Most existing enemies have also had some of their abilities and passives modified or reworked, and enemies across the board have had their stats rebalanced to make them less uniform and present different challenges for you to plan around.
In addition, we've also added over 50 traits that can be assigned to enemy Elites and Bosses, adding another tactical wrinkle for you to keep in mind when encountering these foes.
-a few of the new Outlaw variants: Maurader, Deadeye, and Trapper
Combat Mechanics
Our goal with this update is to introduce more variety to combat. Not only in just the enemies you face, but also in terms of how you approach each fight. Dealing damage is obviously important, but we don't want every fight to just be a DPS race where any turn spent not doing damage just puts you further behind. Conditions and debuffs will play a much bigger role going forward as their effects and durations have been increased (for the most part). Choosing who to bring along and what abilities to equip will be a more important factor in your success!
One of the biggest changes we're making to combat is increasing the default party size from 4 to 5. This has been frequently requested and should allow for a bit more creativity in selecting your party's composition based on what enemy you're fighting. In the future, we do plan to have some unique fights where you can field a much larger party, but for now the limit will be 5.
Deployment zones is another aspect of combat that has been changed. Currently every fight starts out as a clump on the left, vs a clump on the right. While this is fine sometimes, it can also get a bit repetitive. Enemies will now spawn in many different configurations, and not always lumped together. Having to occasionally deal with a quick flanking enemy or two while their main force starts further back should add some much needed variation to the way you approach the start of combat. Your party's deployment area will also be different in every fight. Currently there is a bit too much freedom in where you can choose to spawn, and you can basically do the same thing every time (such as spawning everyone far away from the enemy and making them waste a turn by coming toward you). Going forward, you'll have some tougher decisions to make during the deployment phase, and you'll have to make the best of the positions offered to you!
There are a handful of other combat mechanics that we've tweaked or introduced. Here's a quick rundown on some of these changes:
- Line of Sight tweaks: There were a few scenarios where enemies could shoot through their units and hit your own without penalty. These instances felt a little cheap, so we've made some adjustments to how we handle shooting through other units. Additionally, units that are Guarding now count as a full LoS blocker, so your tank can now protect characters behind them from being targeted by ranged enemies.
- Terrain Overrides: There were times where multiple terrain effects could occupy the same cell, making it cluttered and confusing to decipher. Terrain being applied in a cell (such as Wet Terrain from Rainfall) will now clear and override any existing temporary terrain (such as Corruption Terrain)
- New Conditions: We've introduced two new common conditions to help you tackle certain foes. The first being 'Sunder Armor' which permanently reduces a target's Defense for the rest of the fight, and the second being 'Grievous Wounds' which prevents a target from being Healed, Shielded, or Buffed for the duration.
- Ranged Unit Nerf: Ranged units currently have it too easy, and getting on top of them with a melee character has no effect on them. Going forward, ranged units will suffer an Attack of Opportunity from adjacent enemies if they try to attack any other units. Additionally, ranged units will deal 50% less damage to adjacent enemies (think of it as them doing a rushed attack). It will be important to keep your ranged characters at an optimal distance and protect them from getting run up on by melee foes!
UI Improvements
Finally, we've made some major changes to our UI and have overhauled many screens to be more user friendly (and just better looking!) - you won't have to navigate through clunky submenus and tabs anymore! The roster screen now contains all information on a single screen, and other screens (such as Company Upgrades and Reputation) have been given their own windows as well that can be accessed by the menu in the bottom left of the UI.
-a bit more polish to do on this screen, but it's mostly done!
We've also added a Codex/Bestiary that can be accessed at any time to view information on an any single enemy. If you ever forget what their abilities or passives do, you can easily bring the window up (so long as it's an enemy you've previously encountered!).
-a mock of what the codex will look like
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We hope you're as excited about all these changes as we are, and we're looking forward to hearing your feedback once you get your hands on the update!
-Curious Panda Games