Roots of Harmony 1.2 is now live!
It's been a while now that I wanted to add more things to do in RoH. Something was missing, so I've tried a few gameplay mechanics before coming to the one that is introduced with this new version: land encounters. The main focus while designing this new system was on two things: fun and randomness. From black magic invocation, to a bizarre imp that wants to go back to her sugar daddy through a demonic portal, and a man pretending to be a unicorn, those manually triggered events should spice up your games! For now, there are 30 different encounters (some with different outcomes), but obviously the list will grow over time.
I had the pleasure (and honour!) of being in two Twitch streams (the game, not me). It's sometimes difficult to get feedback when you're small, so that was really interesting for me to see people playing the game and recording their reaction on video. I realised that some things that I thought were easy to understand were too hidden, or not so well explained. No matter how many explanatory popups I've written, it was obvious that RoH needed a proper tutorial. So the new tutorial introduced in 1.2 shows some basics, some combat, and forces you to go through menus you might have missed. It takes your hands for 4 turns through a scripted scenario, then quickly fully unlock the game, as I didn't want it to last more than 15 minutes.
Most of the changes introduced in this patch are coming from players' feedback, so thank you guys! Keep playing, keep enjoying, and don't forget to leave a review, as Roots of Harmony is almost big enough to have its little official score on the store page (10 reviews needed!)
Thanks! 🤗
Guillaume (aka Joubarbe)
Changelog
- New feature: Land encounters. Those are special events that you trigger actively (disciples not needed) by visiting places or talking to unique characters that are generated on normal lands. Some of them can spawn anywhere, but others are associated with a cardinal direction (ie. you won't find an igloo in the South).
- New feature: Tutorial. It took me a while, but I wanted to see where people were struggling the most. Note that the tutorial is not available in New Game+.
- Added: 40 new end-turn events. Those are mostly "reaction" events. Prior to 1.2, a few decisions you could make had no impact. It's no longer the case, as factions will now react to your choices (such as child labour), and other events will trigger in chain.
- Added: 30 land encounter events. Those encounters will also be generated for existing save games, but be warned that the experience could be a bit imbalanced in that case. For that reason, a new game is recommended.
- Added: A few tips here and there, more explanations, QoL, and more colour codes (eg. highlight of abnormally high combat stats).
- Added: New adjacency bonuses between Pub and Graveyard; and Temple and Brothel (up to you to imagine what you want!).
- Added: New traits: Stubborn (cannot receive combat order), Nimble (avoid all range attacks), and Ephemeral (will disappear after a fixed number of turns).
- Changed: Increase excess thresholds of Cruelty, Greed and Vanity to 40.
- Changed: Essences can only be converted once. Remember that you can pause your buildings.
- Changed: Resource colour code (at the top of the screen) has changed. Now you see in RED Cruelty, Greed or Vanity when they reach the threshold value (40 in this new patch, was 30 before). Other resources are shown in RED when they drop below 0.
- Changed: Exploration screen has now a menu to quickly switch between directions without going back.
- Changed: Production menu now displays input and output on the main menu. For instance "1Be -> 1Co [1Cr]" means that it takes 1 Benevolence to produce 1 Communication and 1 Cruelty. The latter being an adjacency bonus.
- Changed: Production statistics can now be accessed by clicking the resource panel at the top, at any moment.
- Changed: Reduced heals from 3-5 to 3-4.
- Changed: Disciples with the trait cannot heal themselves.
- Changed: Chance of getting a gift from the Give To Receive perk decreased from 7% to 5%.
- Changed: Removed the "Rename land" option, as it clutters the menu for no good reason.
- Changed: "Balm" becomes "Bandage". (how do you stop bleeding with a balm?!)
- Fixed: You could convert an essence to a special non-generic one at an altar (was overpowered).
- Fixed: Random disciples created through events could be champions.
- Fixed: The game would tell you that you can recruit a new disciple when in fact, it was a Champion you already had (unique).