GOD

[GOD]

I’m not so much talking about how difficult fighting in the woods would actually be, but about what it is like on the actual game map – that being that while the forest terrain is an obstruction, it won’t slow down either parties approach to a degree that they can’t still usually engage on the first turn. The map is basically built around a fast pace.

That’s the thing though, the big time consuming part is left out of the battle. The tracking, choosing position, drawing out, chasing, hit and fade, retreating, and so, that is what takes up a lot of time. Time that is abstracted to the strategic layer of the world map (moving around the enemy, following them, luring them to a location of your choosing, trying to shake them off, etc). We only really see the part just before both sides engage in close-quarter fighting. The battle is like the climax of all the preparation that surrounds it. Kind of like what enemies on the map do isn’t actually retreating, as you usually can still catch them, while the catching of people on the world map (who’ve actually retreated) takes a long time.
Boxers are actually an interesting example, as the reason as to why those fights last so long is that they’re lengthened with pauses, specialisation and not being allowed to use techniques that run the risk of killing their opponent. Fights would be much shorter if they didn’t (and would probably always end up with a boxer dying). Basically, think of what would happen if both boxers suddenly pulled knives and went for the jugular.
If they want, they could have the engagement vary a bit depending on the group. For example, fast hunters, like werewolves, having a larger engagement circle than slow wiedergängers. Coupled with differences in sight range, this could result in a night battle where you didn’t notice that the enemy ahs reinforcement, before the battle actually starts.

Sure, you can beat a group in front of a base. They just won’t get help from their comrades because you’re probably too strong for them to come out. They’ll come out if they think they can take you and reinforce the fight. They’re basically chickening out, so to speak. ;)

Physical and mental are currently represented by fatigue, hitpoints and morale. They’ll get more depth with the injury system and more status effects. Those would probably add the bits that you’re looking for.
Incremental fatigue only serves to handicap low-fatigue units even more and just makes the fatigue stat even more important than it already is. I can’t see how this would be a good change.

[GOD]

There’s a couple. You can usually find them by hovering over the button that you want to use the shortcut for (like the party interface being C). Same applies for the Battle UI.

[GOD]

That would be relevant if you had to actually find each other in the forest. That’s not the case, so it isn’t about familiarity, but distance. The distances in combat are short and would not take much time to traverse. The same applies to the ability of the unit’s to quickly engage each other in combat, as I described above. They might not always want to, but they can if they so choose. This is different from a game that has the assumption of larger distances as there you cannot engage each other quickly, even when you want to (Rome Total War). As for the time spent on the battle itself, that just seems long because it’s turn based rather than real-time. The events taking place of which the turn-based system is an abstraction, actually happen much more quickly in this case.

Because units within range of the battle already take part right now. This means that for reinforcements during the course of the battle to be implemented, you’d need to make it possible for units farther away to join the fight. For those units to ever join, turns need to take a relatively large amount of time, otherwise they will never show up. You’d also always have to act fast as the entire map is effectively enemy territory.
The enemy bases already sent out groups depending on whether they think they can take you, they just don’t leave the base unattended (to my knowledge).

A time consuming battle is already resource intensive in that you have to replace everything used and lost, plus that you already expend further resources through moving around, recovering, buying, etcetera on the world map. Having the amount of time you spent on the battle itself have an effect on this is an unnecessary punishment that does not facilitate interesting gaemplay

Because the time suggested by the combat itself would not reflected by the passage of time, as I have outlined above.

Fatigue already reflects this so you don’t have to change anything if you want to see that kind of dynamic. Adding incremental fatigue increase however, would result in it eventually becoming impossible to act, since a unit’s recovery would eventually be unable to keep up with the cost of actions. This will happen much sooner to a low fatigue character, giving high fatigue characters a game breaking advantage on top of all the advantages that it already offers. As for the undead, most of them do not tire, so unless you’d manage to kill them all in a few turns it’ll become next to impossible for you to beat them.

Spear and dagger? What are you talking about?

[GOD]

The point is that you’re not face to face, but seconds away from engaging. Terrain might slow units down before they reach each other, but not by that much. Everything about the map suggests this, through the size of the map, the scale of the units and objects, the amount of AP you get per turn, the lethality, how far you can move, etc. To clarify, It does not take minutes to swing a sword twice and for the other to dodge and counter-attack, but seconds. Same goes for running past a tree or readying your shield.

You’d want to rush when time becomes something that can result in your position on the world becoming worse, which is what would happen if time moves at such a pace that reinforcements become viable. This is because for reinforcements from either side to a viable factor, time would have to move at a rapid pace as otherwise they’d never show up. Time moving that fast results in the player always getting punished for taking their time, rather than their approach being dictated by the circumstances of the battle itself, because time passing is bad for the player as it means losing resources. Furthermore, you’d get a disconnect between what you see happening in combat and the amount of time that you’re told is actually passing.

Also, having fatigue cost increase by a percentage per turn would also quickly result in combat being completely crippled. Having low-fatigue characters would be impossible, undead would become invincible and the only viable way of fighting would be killing the enemy as fast as possible.

I just don’t see adding passage of time being worth the effort or actually improving the game. It’s pretty much fine the way it is now.

[GOD]

EDIT: Woops, double post and unable to delete it.

[GOD]

I appreciate the input, faithful servant :P It helps me tinker with the suggestions and improve them as much as possible.

Sling:
Bolas probably aren’t European enough, but Goblins will be introducing the nets. Perhaps composite bows could be implemented as more powerful versions that take more AP and fatigue to use. More variety like that would be nice to have.

Randomized backgrounds:
They’d be minor differences for the most part, so it’s mostly for the psychological effect of not knowing for certain what you’re getting. That keeps picking recruits fresh without affecting stability too much , while also making the different backgrounds feel a bit more meaningful, since you’d associate the changes with the different background (even though this wouldn’t be the case).
It’s actually quite interesting that the background penalties and bonuses tend to be minor, but still play a big role in what people choose. While it’s the stats and traits you get that tend to have a larger impact. A small change like this might encourage them to spread their attention a bit more.

Deformed faction:
Not mutants, as that that’s implies a humanoid starting point or a deviation from the normal. You don’t want that, because being able to mentally place them as being similar to something else prevents them from being incomprehensible. Check out Ascendancy and Tone Rebellion (Sacrifice too, to a lesser extent) and you’ll see what I mean. In fact, just play them anyway since they’re amazing games.

The click between this group and the world itself is that they would evoke the feeling found in old mythology and folklore of the world beyond your borders being unknown, frightening and incomprehensible. This is hard to get across with modern examples, as our world is far more charted than it was back then, but it’s part of why the woods are meant to be so terrifying in old stories – it’s beyond the realm of man and anything can be in there. We now ‘know’ more about the contents of the forests and what’s below the mountains and so these stories don’t have the same effect on us, but any setting that does not account for this fear loses a fundamental aspect of the way the world was perceived back then. What better way to reflect this than to add something incomprehensible that the player cannot place? Something unexpected that makes them less certain of what they think they know and don’t know? Just think of people finding creepy glitches in games and flipping out about it, since it shows that what they thought hey knew turned out to not be so certain. That surprise is not close to the fears found in the past, but it does induce the kind of uncertainty that undermines people taking certain aspects about the game world for granted, which helps bring it closer to the medieval time period. In fact, I’m starting to like it more and more as I think about it, providing that the devs are capable of executing the correct atmosphere.

Dodge:
How would it overpower it? Since it only applies to the first hit and not to any that follow (regardless of whether the first hits or not), it can’t be used to create a reliably high defence rating. It’s indirectly actually a slight nerf to the Swordmaster build that stacks melee bonuses and never gets hit, while making the actually viable perk for regular builds. Fiddling with the percentage a bit to not have it give too much is fine, but you probably wouldn’t need to go under 10%.

Nine Lives:
The once per turn thing would be prevented from getting too powerful by basically giving you an almost guaranteed injury (which I expect to stack and be nasty – like losing an arm) in the midst of battle and how it would only help if the last hit on the turn is the one that nearly kills you. Hanging on with 1 HP and probably neither armour nor a shield, is almost always a death sentence if you’re still in combat.

I can see your point though that having it be once per turn effect might be too good for a tier 1, while a once per battle is still far too weak. How about keeping it tier 2 and have it keep the merc alive once per turn when hit with an attack that what would have been a killing blow, at the cost of sustaining an injury and only working when the attack would not have resulted in a fatality. That would make it more of a toughness based perk, rather than luck, and make it fit in better with the Defence tree. More powerful than the current version, though you’d keep the problem of surviving with 1 HP being next to useless when it’s not a wide-spread ability.

I’ve just got an idea though that might be the solution to the Nine Lives problem of being left with 1 HP being useless. Make Nine Lives tier 1 utility. Keep the ability as it is (once per turn), but change how end-result of when it goes into effect. Rather than the unit being left standing with 1 HP, it falls down as if dead and can therefore no longer targeted. Next turn, he gets back up, pushing away anything that was standing on him, and rejoins the fight with 1 HP. Basically, you give him a one-off second wind similar to that of the wiedergängers, except the merc was never technically dead (meaning that if the fight ends before the next turn, he counts as being alive and with 1 HP in the post-battle screen) and can only do it once. The only one capable of attacking him while down would be then be the ghoul with its cannibalize ability. Naturally other units could also take his gear while he’s on the ground. This would remove the problem of Nine Lives leaving you with 1 HP and then immediately dying to the follow up attack. Seems like a great solution to the problem, without making the perk itself overpowered.

Leader type units:
Yup, they’d be a nice way of creating some variety and a tool they can use to work on internal faction differences, while also allowing for more scaling between the different stages of the game. They’re probably planned already, but I thought it wouldn’t hurt to make some suggestions on cool mechanics!

Supernatural:
The thing with Lovecraft horror is though that it relies on the monster not being seen and that it can never be beaten, only delayed. A monster that is just there, out in the open, and that can be fought is not Lovecraftian. Might as well try and do something a bit more fitting and interesting (deformed!).

The rat-kin:
Rat-men are great and criminally underused. If you haven’t played it yet, you can have your party members be Rats in Legend of Grimrock 2. One of the few games that lets you do that.

[GOD]

I don’t think its a good idea to implement something like this. To start, the realism of it is questionable since the battles themselves don’t seem to be on a scale that would take hours to resolve. The lengthy amount of time spent on manoeuvring into position, cornering the enemy and choosing the battlefield are already part of the world map, with the battles themselves being about the tactical manoeuvring at relatively close-range. The point at which battle takes place itself would be resolved relatively quickly if it were to actually take place.

Rounds increasing time also creates hypothetical situations where you can win a battle, but come out of it severely starving and broke. That’s not a fair kind of pressure, since there’s no way for you to influence it in battle unless you rush to finish the fight, which is not something you want to encourage in a tactical battle system. Time tension should be a natural occurence in certain battle scenarios (reach the caravan before they kill it), not a constant factor.
You’d also be breaking some intuited abstractions about what is actually happening on the battlefield. If fights actually take hours and potentially days, then it gets really weird that no-one just keels over from exhaustion or just outright starves. That’s currently not a problem, since the pace of the battle is inferred to be short enough that this isn’t an issue, from the kind of actions you take, scale, etc.
Additionally, there’s the effort involved in implementing it since this change would mean that the game would have to simultaneously keep track of what happens on tactical-battle map and everything on the world map, plus making them interact with each other. That would take a lot of time and effort to implement for something that you don’t need.

[GOD]

lfish wrote:

These concerns are all legitimate, but with a little tweaking I don’t think they have to be as significant as you make them out to be. Having stun unaffected directly by armor would be fine for me; and the change to stun chance could be a spread calculated as a percentage of remaining stamina rather than directly related to the stamina number (say -10% at full fatigue, to +20% at 0 fatigue for a maximum 30% spread), so more stamina would still be better, but it would be a much less significant difference, and armor would actually increase your stun chance slightly.
There are also some different ideas for how stunning should work that have been talked about in other threads, including switching it to AP damage. These could give more granular control over how debilitating a stun is, possibly with different levels of stunning depending on the force of the blow. I’d be interested in whether there was a way of making stuns affect your initiative, and if it lowered your initiative enough, you would be dropped off of the turn order into the next one. This would make initiative more important in determining whether a stun was effective or not, but I’m not sure if there’s a way to make that work without creating a lot of initiative exceptions for stunned units.
Stunning is obviously irritating when it happens to your brothers, and overall slows battles down a bit, but currently it is only really a factor when facing orcs. It is one of the things that most quickly feels ‘unfair’ for new players if they don’t understand it. I would want it to remain fairly rare, but occurring in a wider variety of circumstances.

It’s true that there’d be room for tweaking, but the fundamental problem would remain that the amount of remaining stamina would still be determined by the fatigue stat, even when stun chance isn’t directly based on fatigue. To use an extreme example: If you have 100 fatigue and spend 20, then you filled up 1/5 of your total fatigue. As a result, 4/5 of your fatigue is filled up. If you have 200 fatigue and spend 20, then you used 1/10 of your total fatigue. As a result, 9/10 of your fatigue has been filled up. Having the stun chance be based on a percentage of the remaining amount of stamina would therefore still rely on the amount of fatigue provided by stats and backgrounds.

Also, when you try to more broadly apply my suggestion on switching to AP damage to make it more widely used, you run into the problem of the amount of AP damage either being too small or so large that it results in an effective stun – as in, characters effectively being neutralised because they can no longer take action. My shieldbash suggestion gets around this, but that’s too specific to be widely applicable. You’d need a retooling of the way AP is distributed if you want to achieve a change like that, which could break other parts of the design.
As for initiative, an ability that pushes someone further down the initiative order might be interesting – not as a replacement of the current stun, but as a new weapon ability. It would only be as useful as the stun when it pushes someone down to the next turn, in which case it’s just a stun equivalent and not a meaningful change.

Jago wrote:

Isn’t making the max. hitpoints reduce to chance to be stunned an option? High hitpoints could represent the resistance of a brother against status effects (stunned, posioned), thus making hitpoints a little more viable, once a medical system has be implemented. Or that’s at least how it works in many RPGs.
Anyway, having the stun chance decreased by shield and shieldwall bonus doesn’t seem enough to me. Have any stat influence the chance as well, so you can directly develop certain brothers to become more robust against stunning.

If stun chance needs to tied to a stat, then hitpoints would probably be a good pick. It would add a reason to pick it and make high hp enemies threatening in a way that differs from heavily armoured enemies. It does lack the dynamism that Ifish is getting at with his suggestion, since hitpoints tend to be more static than fatigue and only start to decrease when the unit is about to be killed – there would therefore be little variance in the chance of getting stunned over the course of the battle. That’s not bad in itself, but it would make it a different kind of solution.

Sky wrote:

Perhaps to add more significance not only to armor but perhaps to initiative aswell, it could be the bound stat for stuns. The faster you are compared to the enemy, the more chance you got that he can not react in time.
The hp aspect is a very fine one aswell. As stated more times already, I’d love to see more stat bound skills, and if instead there are game mechanics well even better. The current stat trinity must be broken, and diversity has to dominate giving the player even higher character management options or even so to say manual specializations.

Having initiative influence the chance of stunning seems a bit too arbitrary since your description more closely matches having stun chance be influenced by the melee or ranged skill. I’d also like the game to stay away from stats influencing the chance to stun, if possible. That is one of the things that serves as a differentiating factor between weapons and keeps stats from becoming too influential.

/

Isn’t this more of an issue regarding the UI not conveying that the shieldwall reduces the chance of getting stunned by the Orc-charge, though? When I first encountered Orcs, I instinctively had everyone put up their shields because they seemed particularly threatening and when I noticed the charge I kept looking for ways to ‘catch’ the Orcs before they could do it. This works well and I’ve never had that many stuns as a result, even when I was a complete novice at the game. Knowing that shields affect it is useful information that could be conveyed in some way, but I don’t neccesarily see how the stun chance itself is a problem.

[GOD]

Unsettler wrote:

Cool ideas! The different factions gave me an idea of exiles or pariahs. How about running into lepers or some hermit dying of a plague that he might infect one of your brothers with? Would force the player to keep his distance while trying to take out the enemy at the same time. That would definitely spice things up from the usual overwhelm everyone or hold the line strategy.

Much obliged. :D Disease and pariahs being in the game would depend on the injury system. If it reflects injuries caused by disease, as well as combat, then events and enemies that reflect this become an option. You could keep it limited or go all the way (plagues? Player company as plague carrier leading to the infection multiple cities?), but it’s probably best to stick to a limited scope, for now, if they add it. After all, feature creep is the thing that usually kills ambitious projects like this. Still, disease is an interesting concept. Kind of a historical Great Enemy in its own right.

Jaysen wrote:

Great ideas, thanks a lot for the input!
Really sorry that we cant reply to each idea individually but i just want to drop in and let you know that we are reading this and taking notes. There are some ideas that we have already on our list but also really nice new ideas!

Haha, no worries, I wasn’t expecting a point by point commentary. Keeping up that level of feedback as Early Access progresses would burn you out in no time. I was actually surprised by Jago going through the whole list.
Also good to hear that my input is useful and that I’m not just rambling like a madman; I tried to have my suggestions be as suitable for your design as possible and feasible to implement, as far as what I know of the game. It makes me antsy though to find out what was already planned and which ones were new. :P

Jago wrote:

Yeah, I overlooked that, my bad.
That’s a good idea, introducing more ghost-type monsters that are also incorporeal, tougher than the lost souls. And yes, if they can be killed in one hit (with daggers), they shouldn’t be boss types. A fitting boss type would be more something like a more powerful necromancer or something entirely else, a lich/mummy for example (you know, they usual :D ).

Appreciate you going through the whole thing. I particularly liked your thought on adding the Rat-men to the Wetland faction, since it was a nice way of combining the two ideas. Some back and forth like this was what I was hoping for when I registered. :)

Nice, the Restless Lord unit happens to be an idea that I rather liked, with the idea of them having a fatal weakpoint that is both thematic and possible of dealing with in lots of different way. The way it can naturally change into a different type of unit also makes a more dynamic addition, requiring a bit more flexibility in your tactics. I also have some ideas on boss-ghost types, though the undead in general are just a rich source of those kind of units. Aspects of liches, mummies, heroes, and so on, altered and made particular to the setting. Going to ponder on that a bit more.

[GOD]

My worry with this is that you run the risk of making fatigue an even more important stat than it already is. In addition to facilitating the using of moves and determining how much armour the merc can practically wear, it would now be the determining factor in the merc resisting a very powerful effect. Furthermore, armour also reducing stunning would mean that you get double the value out of a single stat increase, since by increasing one stat you affect two different ways of lowering the chance to stun. Add to this that stunning would be more prevalent and it becomes a necessity to have that stat maxed out as soon as possible. After all, you’d never want to be stunned if you can avoid it. This would also make backgrounds that boost fatigue even better, while making backgrounds that reduce it even worse. At the moment, fatigue is already pretty much superior to a stat like hitpoints or initiative and this change would make this even more apparent.

Another result of increasing stunning would be the need for the rebalancing of a weapon like the club, since it’s current ‘thing’ is that it stuns. Stunning would also become ubiquitous, which is a fundamental change to how the combat currently plays out. You’d switch to fishing for the stun so that you can reduce the number of attackers, while constantly minimising your own chances of being stunned.

[GOD]

That’s the thing though, going without a helmet into combat is just about the worst mistake you can make. Not having a helmet is something for movies, as you’d just die without one in a fight.
Toggling them on and off would also conflict with the idea of everything that you see on the map actually being there and would remove an important visual short-hand for what state your merc is in.

However, If you need help identifying your merc, how about having a portrait of the unit’s head in the command UI on the bottom, in addition to the name? It would need to be unobtrusive, so I don’t have a mental image of how you’d make it work without conflicting with the design, but it’s something that the future UI programmer might be able to pull off.

[GOD]

Yup. The city was named after the massive Pripyat river and had to be abandoned when Chernobyl had its meltdown. I figure this game won’t have nuclear reactors though, although we won’t need those to justify adding freaks of nature. :P

Speaking of ghost towns though, cities being absorbed by the swamp is definitely a thing in folklore (like Saeftinghe). That opens up new location types, like partially sunk cities hidden deep in the marsh that continue to sink ever deeper into the ground as their fundaments rot away. The buildings themselves covered in plants and now inhabited by the creatures of the swamp (Rat-men!). It would be a hellish place to fight because of the exhaustion caused by the difficult terrain, but there might still be something good to find. Things that the current occupiers overlooked or couldn’t see the value of.

[GOD]

I did a bit of research on wetlands for my suggestion thread and thought that you might be interested in some reference pictures for different kinds of wetland. You could use them for the world and battle map, if you intend to tweak them or expand on the art. Europe basically used to be covered in forest and much of its land consisted of wetlands, making them great for evoking an older Germanic flavour. The writings by Tacitus are also rather interesting for this. Though clearly containing much propaganda, they give some nice descriptions of the land back then.
Most of the pictures are from Eastern Europe, since the land there tends to be less cultivated and relatively closer to what medieval German lands would have been like. I kept them as links, otherwise this post would get waaayyy too big. ;)

Here, here and here are some nice pictures of the Biebrza marshes in Poland.

This is the Nienwholder Moor, Germany.

Here, here and here are the Pripyat swamps of Belarus.

Another Polish swamp, this time near Sosnowica.

The Wadden Sea, Netherlands.

An overview of Saeftinghe, Netherlands.

[GOD]

It’s something that I’ve really been missing in the current game, so I hope it gets added. :D

Going to go through your comments bit by bit:

Deformed faction:
Hmmm, yeah, having them as a full faction might contradict their purpose, as it implies that you’ll encounter them frequently and as a Great Enemy. The idea behind them doesn’t rely on them not being seen often, like Lovecraftian horrors, but they would still have to be rare for the disconnect between the fantasy style of the world and their own deformed design to have best impact. Like you say, it should not just become a standard encounter, but something weird and baffling even when encountered multiple times. Instead, it might be sub-faction of the Beast groups, which would justify them being rare and only found in hard to reach places. A variant that is less mythological and more unfathomable.

Regarding demons. Having the demons like that would be amazing, though I assume that the devs have already sketched out designs that are less strange, for that faction. However, you could still use the idea by there being the more ‘regular’ demons and beings that are not strictly demons, but things that the cultist happened to lure there somehow with, for example, ancient mystical rituals that they don’t understand. They might even actually be demons, but there’s no way of confirming or denying it, since they do not make any kind of sense to mortals or even other demons. They’d explicitly not be Lovecraftian though, so no need for madness mechanics and such. Just a thing that’s incomprehensible and unpredictable, but no less dangerous for it. You could have those ‘demons’ be a part of both the Deformed sub-faction and the Cultist faction, just like Werewolves are currently Undead and Beasts.

In fact, let’s take that idea a bit further and have the Deformed serve as a sub-faction that is usually spread across different factions, where they show up as rare encounters found in the hidden places of the world. Like a being that sometimes shows up with the undead in the bowels of the mountains, that is not undead itself but seems to somewhat act in concert with them for reasons unknown.

Cultural transition:
I think the difficulty will depend on what the reworked world map will look like. Something like this would work well with smaller locations that you can interact with, spread across the map. Like the old location suggestion thread. The Wildmen village would be far smaller than an actual city, since it’s essentially a hunter-gatherer community, and way more easily destroyed. Kind of like a small Orc camp. I think your idea would also work well with this, with small locations further away from the main cities and villages allowing for more customisation, like different building styles and materials used in construction.

Robber knights:
How about, rather than having the robber knight destroy the caravan, have it so that they take a percentage of the goods carried by the caravan (when the caravan is too weak to resist or surrenders when it’s guards have been killed). So the caravan wouldn’t be destroyed, because it’s not in the interests of the robber knight to destroy trade and reflect how they’re not a desperate band of robbers, but it would deliver less resources to its destination. That way they’re a drain on resources and worth taking out, but wouldn’t cripple trade.
I’m also assuming that the other mercenary companies that are going to get added will often take the role of guarding caravans, essentially having them fill in the role of upgraded form of the caravan guard, so the robber knights would be the bandit equivalent of a group willing to try to take on a juicy target like that.

As for expanding, how about having it depend on how successful the bandits are? That way a small group can grow into a greater threat as it continues to successfully raid caravans and sometimes cities.

Bog wiedergängers:
A somehwat similar case to the wiedergänger diversity, I suppose. Would make a for nice detail, though.

Wiedergänger diversity:
I did say I was using old ideas. ;) The same objections as then still apply though. It’s something that would be nice if it does not take as much effort as creating new units and would be a great finishing touch, rather than being of the same priority as a new faction.

More pastoral elements:
Sounds like you’re thinking of a pastor, rather than pastoral. :P Pastoral can refer to the life-style of shepherds and herders and a pastor is symbolically the shepherd of his flock of Christians, hence the name. Pastoral literature is more about depicting natural or rural life and often in an idealised fashion, though it’s the elements of non-idealised natural life that I’m most interested in.

However, that doesn’t mean that monasteries and clergy wouldn’t also be worth adding! I think there’s a good chance of that getting added, since we already have the monk background, that legendary weapon example that mentions a monastery and I think I saw a church in Psen’s art thread. Monasteries would a good resource of information and supplies (monasteries being self-sufficient) or they could be a part of quest lines and turn out to be infested with vampires. Agreed on not wanting to see blessings and other holy powers. That’s way too much D&D and would be too direct a representation of deities, rather than humanity having to rely on itself.

Vampire Lord:/Primal Werewolf:/Ghoul Tyrant:
They’ll probably get added eventually, yeah. :P I only saw what looked like a werewolf-boss in the art thread, though. Just thought I’d make some suggestions on mechanics that would work well with the flavour of the regular vampires, werewolves and ghouls. I particularly like the idea of a Ghoul Tyrant being a hulking brute who rules the ghoul pack through fear and violence.

Internal faction differences:
Ah, I was thinking more of differences between groups belonging to the same (sub-)faction. Like different Orc tribes and Bandit gangs having different troop compositions relative to other tribes and gangs (like relatively having more berserker or raiders). Currently we see Orc tribes fielding their own flags, but they don’t actually seem all that different when you fight them.

–

What are your thoughts on the Restless Lord, by the way? I imagined that as being a regular unit, rather than a leader type (meaning there can be multiple of them in a battle).

//

The battle UI will get a major work-over once the devs find a UI programmer that matches their needs. It still needs quite a bit of tweaking.
That’s basically what my Restless Lord idea, outlined above, would be. You could try to puncture its armour, but doing so would be very difficult because of its ghostly essence.

[GOD]

Making a new thread when you want to talk about something is no big deal. This isn’t a forum with mega-threads. ;)

The current plan is for the company to always be on the move, so no bases or static camps. A camping mechanic is planned, though. However, the number of mercs you can bring along will be increased eventually, up to something like 20-24, so you’ll have a number of mercs who don’t join the fight.

I’m not sure to what degree this will get implemented, but buildings on the map and interior fighting will get added. Pallisades and such might therefore also get added. Here’s what it might look like.

[Author]

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