Greetings Commanders,
We’re happy to announce that Zodiac Legion will take part in the Steam Strategy Fest with an updated demo. The current build has mostly minor changes as well as various stability fixes, so you can take command right away and head out into battle without worrying about interruptions (subject to the disruptive influence of the cosmos).
But while today we have “only” small things to share, there are a lot of really major changes incoming, though these are still being tested or in the middle of implementation. They encompass almost all the aspects of the game, from basic mechanics, through battle maps to general user convenience.
For starters, we’ll be introducing a significant rework to the combat rules to give you more flexibility of approach. The core of this will involve changes to how armour works, with heavier gear providing the wearer protection from almost all physical attacks. To break through plate mail, you’ll now have to strike a critical hit, because bashing your sword against a heavily armoured knight will only make your arm hurt.
However, the added protection will be offset by the addition of special attacks and combat stances. With the former, you’ll be able to overpower and overwhelm your opponents by knocking them prone or reducing their stamina until they start seeing stars (which others in the business would call “beating into submission”). The latter will allow your characters to adopt combat styles focusing on some aspect of combat over others. These may increase the likelihood of landing a critical hit against armour, increase defence against multiple opponents at the cost of offence, favour duelling over formation fighting, and more. And best of all, assuming certain stances will make it more likely for some body parts to be targeted by the attacker, letting you exploit weaknesses and gaps in your opponent’s armour. Prices on all helmets have now doubled.
We’re also working extra hard on adding randomized maps to the game for added replayability. Most of the battle maps will combine procedural generation with hand-crafted content by mixing and matching premade rooms, buildings and areas in specified zones. Thanks to this, what is a guardhouse in one version of the map, could be a sacred grove in another, or a lake, or more, and the layout of the guardhouse could be different each time as well. Needless to say, this requires the most care by far to make sure that you don’t teleport into a building without exits, but we’re satisfied with the results already. Furthermore, once we have the random maps in place, this will pave the way for the strategic layer and a seamless gameplay experience with continuity involving the proper management of your realm and knights between missions.
Finally there’s optimization. A new pathfinding algorithm will make it possible to save calculation time, especially during enemy turns and on mouseover, which should speed things up considerably. A cache rework will also reduce the number of line of sight checks made when actions are taken, further boosting performance.
Once all of the above is implemented, we believe the changes should take the game to the next level in terms of both the tactical and strategic depth, and we can’t wait to share them all with you in practice. For now, you can enjoy the updated Strategy Fest demo – make sure to give us all your feedback.
Thanks for reading.
May the stars shine in your favour.