The Alp
In reworking the Alp, we wanted to have fighting them feel more varied and interesting than up to now, but at the same time not compromise their theme or identity. The Alp is a nocturnal predator that haunts you with nightmares and feeds off of it, and fighting it is supposed to have a puzzle-esque aspect to it as you navigate a maze of nightmares. In order to achieve the above, we’ve changed the mechanics of the Alp quite fundamentally.Alps no longer inflict the ‘Sleeping’ or ‘Nightmare’ status effects – those are gone. Instead, they cast the new ‘Realm of Nightmares’ spell on ground near your men. Any tile such affected has the boundary to the world of dreams erased for two turns, which allows living nightmares to manifest and haunt your men.
Nightmares are a new type of opponent that goes down with just one hit, but whose attacks always hit and ignore armor. The more resolve a character has, the less damage they’ll take from these attacks. A single hit doesn’t do terribly much damage in any case, but nightmares can slowly eat away at your men’s sanity, health and morale. If the ‘Realm of Nightmares’ effect runs out, the living nightmares will also fade from the world.
With the new Alps, you’ll have to face off against nightmares holding you in place and damaging you a bit more literally, but you’ll also be able to get use out of more skills, perks and equipment than with the previous incarnation, and battles should end up feeling more varied and faster-paced. They’re also a bit less unique than before, which is a price to pay, but should still feel unique enough compared to fighting all other opponents in the game.
Changelog
- Changed mechanics of Alp. See above for details.
- Changed AI to perform better when defending with and against ranged units.
- Changed Black Monolith to always drop the Emperor’s Countenance as loot again when destroyed. It’s no longer dropped as loot by the Conqueror himself, as players might retreat from battle without realizing that this meant that the armor would be lost forever.
- Fixed some legendary locations potentially getting sucked into nearby combat without the player having to first unlock them properly via event dialog. Requires a new campaign to take effect.
- Fixed game potentially not continuing as characters with equipped wardogs get devoured by a Kraken.
- Fixed Kraken sometimes not dropping loot.
- Fixed issue with necromancer twist of ‘Root Out Undead’ contract.
- Fixed player strength calculation for scaling purposes not always updating properly.
- Fixed another cause for combat between AI parties on the worldmap potentially not ending.
- Fixed issue with characters retreating without properly taking into account all opponents that can catch up with them, and thus taking improper routes.
- Fixed potential issue with contracts not continuing properly after losing your entire deployed roster in battle, but still having people in reserve to carry on with.
- Fixed various minor issues.
Loading tweets...
Loving that you’re actually ready to look at the game, even after it’s done, and say “ok, that didn’t work as well as we’d hoped, we’ll change it COMPLETELY”, instead of comming up with half solutions that doesn’t really solve the actual problem in the end. Many devs would never have the guts. Much respect for that! Keep up the great work :)
I love the new change, the new ability force me to change my way of dealing with Alps. But sometime having 6 Alps spamming nightmare is just ridiculous.