v2.8 - The Homestead update out now!

The game is currently on sale on its own, as well as in a bundle together with our long-respected comrade game of Songs of Conquest . Additionally, the v2.8.0 Homestead update is also releasing today. Woohoo! The v2.8 update is a culmination of several different development processes that all come together into a single, large update. Looking over the final list of changes, it is comparable to both v2.6 and v2.7 in size.

Town Reworks

Faction Update

Rogue Update

Community Updates

Spells Update

If you’ve already read the previous post about v2.8, you might expect this to be nothing more than repetition. But this is not so. While I expected v2.8 to be mostly done when I wrote that post, several things then happened to expand the update. The newer parts of the v2.8 update will be tagged with (new!) .

First, let’s do a general overview of the different parts of the update, and then we’ll go into more detail.

Town Reworks

New building requirement system and UI

New system for upgrading units

Tavern rework

Reworked town perks

5 new town perks

Faction Update

Arcane class skill reworks

2 new Tide units, changed unit roster, the Bubble Shield ability (new!)

New unit abilities, and changes for several faction units (new!)

Woodfae added as Wild’s tier 1 unit; change to Symbiotic Grove (new!)

New subskill for every hero class (new!)

Rogue Update

3 New Buildings for each Rogue town

Unique resources for several Rogue towns

Changes to Rogue town expansions

Changes to Rogue hero classes (new!)

New Major skills: Adventurer & Discovery and four subskills (new!)

Community Updates

10 new dragon units, four dragon themed vaults

15 new suggestions implemented, incl. new artifact management screen

A new hero for every faction and for every Rogue town (new!)

4 new units

Expanded Lore Document

Spells Update

New spell graphics and higher clarity for spell casting

New graphical effects during battle (new!)

12 new spells (new!)

To give an idea of how large the update is, if we ignore reworks and just focus on content quantity, the update adds 12 normal spells, 16 special spells, 17 units, 5 town perks, 38 town buildings, 4 overworld buildings, 27 new heroes and 16 new unit abilities. When it comes to skills, it either adds 8 or 44 new skills, depending on how you count the new class-specific skills.

Let’s dive into the changes in greater detail, then!

Town Reworks

This was the original goal of the v2.8 update: To rework various aspects of the town that I felt caused clunky gameplay. Front and center was my desire to overhaul the building requirement system, that has been unpopular (from what I can tell) ever since v1.9 added in static building requirements. Before then, each game would have a shuffled grid of buildings and requirements. After v1.9, those requirements were frozen to always be the same - which reduced RNG, but highlighted that the system itself was bad.

Apart from building requirements, various other parts of how towns worked felt like they could use a rework. Thus, the following list of changes:

New building requirement system and UI

There has been growing sentiment about the building requirement system for towns being bad. The general desire has been for all limitations for one building to require another to be removed - or most, anyway. My own issue with the current system is that as development has gone on, more and more buildings have been moved to be early on in the town’s development, which creates a flood of choices early on. Especially when a new development level was reached and - POOF - now you have 6 new buildings available - that felt somewhat off. I’m trying out a new building requirement system which sorts buildings into three categories - commercial, warfare and magic buildings. Instead of building requirements either being a global amount of buildings built and/or a specific building, the new requirements are based around number of the various types of buildings built. So for instance, you might want to build Archmage Tribunal, but to do so, you’ll need two more warfare buildings and one more commercial building. This will still keep limits in place for building up your town and planning out your build order, while not being quite as limiting. It also comes with a new UI which sorts the buildings in the three categories, which I hope will make it easier for new players to get an overview of their options.

New system for upgrading units

Unit upgrades have been tough to balance. They’re very core to the game, with most units actually being pretty basic and only getting their interesting abilities once upgraded. As well, they allow the player to focus on what units they think are most core to their strategy. However, I feel like as the game is now, usually unit upgrades are something you get not because you want to, but because you need another building and the upgrade is cheaper than the other options - and otherwise, you’d rather steer for more impactful buildings. There’s also a lot of micro-managing of bringing your units back to town to get upgraded, and then returned to your main hero. The new upgrade system seeks to improve this by removing dwelling upgrades, and instead creating a single two-tier building which allows you to upgrade units. Once a unit upgrade is bought, it affects all your units across the map instantly - no more micro-managing upgraded and unupgraded unit stacks! This also leads to a minor reduction in the unit stack clutter.

Tavern rework

This one is a bit more experimental, and might change with more player feedback. There is a problem in how central the tavern is to the current way the game is played. It allows you to get more heroes for:

Scouting

Moving around units

Getting extra units

Secondary heroes for leveling

I’ve tried disincentivising getting the tavern early and hiring several heroes early by changing the cost, the availability of the tavern - neither seemed to really fix the issue. The building is simply too strong and also too necessary. I also do not enjoy the inconsistency of sometimes getting a hero that can do nothing, and sometimes getting one which gives gold each day or gets entourage - completely at random. The new version of the tavern goes as follows:

You can hire “Scouts” even without building the actual tavern

Building the tavern allows you to upgrade Scouts into full heroes

Champion Statue etc. have been improved to offer even more heroes

Scouts are heroes in all ways apart from having skills and leveling up. You can even get xp on a scout and they’ll then level up when you upgrade the scout into a full hero. The scout is cheaper, too. Really, instead of trying to nerf the tavern, I’m now making it so that you don’t need it if all you really wanted was a scout - and the tavern, then, is more useful if you’re looking for a real hero to level up secondarily. Other changes:

Fewer units for hiring a scout

Larger cost increase from hiring several heroes

Heroes now level up when hired, making new hero levels more consistent, and giving you better control over their skill choices

Reworked town perks

With the removal of the old town level system with thresholds for number of buildings constructed, a new system was required for unlocking the town perks. But I do actually like the new system, because it always felt a bit jarring that you suddenly got a town perk pop-up out of nowhere when you were actually planning on doing something else. Now, instead of them being unlocked after building X buildings, they’re unlocked when building specific buildings. For normal faction towns, such as the Order town, this is the Centre of Order, Palace of Order and Empire of Order. Additionally, the town perks pop-up is displayed on top of the town window instead of removing the town window, and you’re able to click “wait” button to delay picking your town perk so that it does not interrupt you quite as much as before.

5 new town perks

There’s 5 new town perks on offer. The Sponsor perk is shown above and gives access to a rare faction unit that normally would only be accessible by starting as a special hero. The Spell Research teaches more spells and teaches spells to heroes even when they’re not in town. Devotee Hall increases a spell skill for any heroes stopping by town, as a second Archmage Tribunal. Gallows decreases luck and morale of anyone attacking your towns or heroes. Finally, and most excitingly, Development Plan allows you to build any building in town way before you normally would be able to.

Faction Update

This contains various changes and updates to various factions. Arcane, Tide and Wild each get their own unique changes, while the rest of the factions get more general changes. This part was not originally envisioned when I started working on v2.8, but various changes within the town rework and rogue rework made clear that these changes were needed.

Arcane faction skill rework

Previously, the Arcane class skills gave, respectively, a resource that can only be used in a single town building, or boring ore. This was way past due for a rework. In v2.8, the Aether system has been expanded, and the skills now do something on their own, too. Aether is now granted in four varieties: Fire, Earth, Air, Water - and is granted by defeating various enemies. Usually, it’s kind of obvious what units give what Aether, like, the Spirited Fire giving Fire, and most human units giving Air.

Aether can then be used in one of three ways:

Casting a random spell when entering combat with element and power based on the highest amount of Aether carried

Aether Forge now offers appropriate bonuses for the various types of Aether

Special spells with unique effects that cost Aether instead of mana

There’s 12 special spells that your Arcane heroes will learn by ranking up their class skills.

Additionally, the class skills have been renamed from Alchemy and Aethermancy to Aethercrafting and Aethermancy. The Alchemy name was simply too close in wording to the Alchemist hero class and the Chemistry skill.

2 new Tide units, changed unit roster, the Bubble Shield ability

Tide has been a moderately popular faction, but never really due to its units. There were a couple of issues, that I had tried to work around previously in a rather awkward manner. Here, I’m mostly hinting to the Harpooner unit, which was so useless that I decided that players in Rogue Realms would get it without picking it, just so that it would have some use. Additionally, the Geyseral and Canceri units for tier 6 were way too similar.

The Harpooner and Geyseral are being removed from the Tide unit roster, replaced by the new Sirenaga (pronounced Siren-aga) and the Tidemancer. The first is a tier 2 aggressively statted unit with charge, and the latter is a back-line support unit able to give allies bubble shields and resurrecting fallen comrades. The Harpooner and Geyseral can still be found as neutral units.

The bubble shield ability is a new Tide-specific ability for the Spawnling, Sirenage and Tidemancer, which gives a shield that absorbs damage until it pops. This finally makes Spawnlings more survivable and helps Tide out during the early game.

Finally, the Tide caster class has been renamed from Pyromancer to Sailblazer. The old name was an attempt at forcing people to accept Tide as a fire-themed faction, but that never worked out. With the changes to the fire-themed units of the faction, it felt natural to finally retire the old, confusing name, and to finally accept that Tide is a water faction first-and-foremost, with air and fire second. The name, Sailblazer, should hold up this compromise well.

New unit abilities, and changes for several faction units

I finally went and overhauled unit abilities for some of the oldest units with the least interesting abilities. Here, I’m especially referring to units which only had the passive, stat-altering abilities like Slow, Sturdy or Savage. These abilities will no longer show up in the units’ tooltips (since their effects can still be seen by looking at the unit’s stats). The units have been given more interesting abilities instead.

Druid gains the Long Ranged and Rooting abilities, while losing Summoning . The Wildspeaker still has Summoning . Flamejuggler gains the Burning ability, while the upgraded Flame Stoker gains Explosive Shots . Avalancher loses Terror , but gains the ability to Unit Thrower , throwing Goblins. Dreamer gains the Long Ranged and Dreamstrike abilities. It loses Summoning , but the upgraded version still has it. Sopor also loses Confusion . Divine Light ability is granted to: Friar, Crusader, Bladesinger, Djinn, Voodoo, Sunbringer, Archopriest, Panda, Teaknight, Bloomer, Monokero, and Prismatic. Beastslayer ability is granted to: Jotun, Tarantula, Catabolite, Imp, Lizardcher, Apex, Tunnelrider, Archer, Kroll Bowman, Equestrian, Demise, and Strongarm. Blackhearted ability is granted to: Lost Soul, Zombie, Rot Knight, Canine, Upgraded Demontamer, Minotaur, Shadowmancer, Absurdum, Shale Drake, Infernal, Black Dragon, and Larva. Rage ability is granted to: Raider, Monster Trog, Cave Regent, and Shambler. Terror ability is granted to: Cyclops and Watcher. Evolve ability is granted to: Worm. Interruption ability is granted to: Ophidian, Minewatch, Divine Monk, and Mountainguard. Plating ability is granted to: Hoplite, Polar Cavalry, and Hillkeeper. Inspiration ability is granted to: White Yeti. Potent Soul ability is granted to: Torchbearer. Salt Strike ability is granted to: Seamare and Crystallius.

Some of these unit abilities are new. We have the Rooting ability, which is akin to Rootcaller but the unit still attacks normally - and the Dreamstrike ability, which has a chance to make enemies fall asleep, its effect akin to the Slumber spell.

The Divine Light, Beastslayer, Blackhearted and Salt Strike abilities all give the unit increased damage against a specific type of units. In general, that bonus will apply against about 20% of enemy units - so the bonuses are going to be relevant rather often, but not in all combat scenarios. This occasionally brings a benefit to any player that positions their units correctly to intercept enemies that their units are strong against.

Woodfae added as Wild’s tier 1 unit; Change to Symbiotic Grove Okay, this takes a bit of explanation.

For a long time now, the most efficient way to play Wild has been to use the class skills to create a large amount of anima, and then making sure that you constantly move your anima back to town to upgrade them into forest spirits. When your forest spirits die, they create anima that you can then send back to town to re-upgrade as a sort of emergent infirmary.

This was really cool but also really clunky, taking a lot of boring effort in micromanaging heroes in ferrying back and forth units. Part of the reason for the rework to the unit upgrade system was actually to solve this type of micromanagement.

But the new upgrade system left the Wild strategy in a weird spot. Either, anima would always be auto-upgraded into Forest Spirits, effectively making Forest Spirits immortal - or they’d be really weak. Additionally, there was a long-standing issue where Forest Spirits could not be resurrected by the infirmary - because if the infirmary worked on Forest Spirits, you could duplicate them by upgrading their anima.

To solve this, there’s now a change so that the anima is a neutral unit, and instead Wild’s unupgraded tier 1 unit has been changed to the Woodfae. The Woodfae, just like its upgraded counterpart the Forest Spirit, create a permanent anima when they die. But since the anima cannot be upgraded back to a Forest Spirit and is a separate unit, all the problems disappear, and now Forest Spirits can be resurrected normally by the Infirmary. Additionally, the Woodfae is a rather sturdy unit what with being able to create anima on death even before it gets upgraded, so it works as a buff. It still gains flying by being upgraded - but upgrading is now less of a necessity.

But what about the cool Wild strategy of turning Anima into Forest Spirits? Well, the Symbiotic Grove has been updated to now also turn anima into Woodfae/Forest Spirits day by day - both for heroes inside and outside of town. Thus, the life cycle of the anima has been changed as shown above.

New Subskill for Every Hero Class

For the longest time, there has been a lot of suggestions about giving heroes unique combat abilities. In v2.7, it became easier to mod this sort of thing. And for v2.8, I’ve gone and used this as the basis for a new set of subskills. Along with a request for a more consistent way of getting mana regeneration for casters early, the following set of subskills has been added.

In total, there’s 38 new subskills - one for each class - but they can also be considered two subskills with a unique effect for each class.

One set of subskills are the Warrior subskills, which are given to fighter hero classes. They give a stat bonus and a combat ability. For instance, Extinctor heroes gain access to the Decay Warrior subskill which gives +2 proficiency and Leech Life during combat; while Artisan heroes gain access to the Arcane Warrior subskill, which gives +2 defence, +1 proficiency, and makes the hero summon a small group of Scrolls around them at the start of combat.

The other set are the Mage subskills, which are given to caster hero classes. They teach the hero one or several useful spells, often at a reduced mana cost. Additionally, it makes them regenerate 3 mana each day. Mana regeneration plus a spell with reduced mana cost makes them really efficient spellcasters during the early game. Examples include Withermages gaining access to the Decay Mage subskill, which teaches a Deathripple which costs 12 mana instead of 16, and Summoner heroes gaining access to the Essence Mage subskill, which teaches Elemental Air, Elemental Rock, Elemental Fire and Elemental Water spells, each with mana cost reduced by 2.

Rogue Update

While I think the Rogue Realms DLC worked perfectly as a large overhaul DLC that updated most aspects of the game, it fell a bit short on its potential of adding in 12 new factions. Adding in 12 new factions was never its goal nor something it promised - it promised to add a single new faction with 12 different towns - but still, we all had the dream, and woke up to twelve towns of varying quality and varying uniqueness. With v2.8, I’m trying to get the Rogue towns a bit closer to that dream of 12 unique new towns, that can, if not be called full factions, at least pseudo-factions.

3 New Buildings for Each Rogue town

This change has been a much requested one. Previously, all Rogue towns had the same buildings. Boo! Made them feel less like 12 factions and more like a single faction.

Anyway, I’ve now added three unique buildings per Rogue town, which mimic the design style of the unique buildings per normal faction (i.e. Hostler, Counting House, Conscription Centre, Tower of Idolatry). That is, in total, 36 new buildings with different effects - most of them at least slightly unique.

I won’t go into detail about all of them here, because that’s a lot of buildings. I’ll just let you know I tried to develop on the various themes of the Rogue towns with the aesthetic and gameplay design of the buildings. Additionally, several of them use the new improved system for custom resources, such as the Scrap resource for Industry.

As an aside, the introduction of these new buildings have also made me go through the Rogue towns and remove various buildings from them. Thus, all Rogue towns no longer have all five of Colossus, Lieutenant Hall, Deity, Summoning Circle, Mercenary Hall - instead, each town only has two of the five, different ones depending on what town, with the latter 3 replaced with the 3 new unique buildings.

Changes to Rogue town expansions

Previously, the Rogue town expansions were tied into the…