Hello, Harmonious people! Long time no see, right? Well, guess what? Roots of Harmony isn't dead, and I'm actually working on a pretty big update! "The biggest update ever!" blah blah, you know the rest. But this one has been quite a lot of work, as it involves refactoring some of the game's major core features, so it's definitely exciting!
So what's the big update about? Well, there are two major features amongst many other minor ones: a map, and a new combat system.
When I launched RoH, the locations were presented as a list because I thought it would be clearer and sufficient for what I wanted to do: make invaders come to you one step at a time. Therefore, you would see them on the list and perfectly understand the situation. However, the flexibility of that system was pretty much zero: limited strategic depth and difficulty implementing new features. I remember a few players suggesting that I make a map, and there's even a negative comment about the lack of a "real" map. Well, a real map in ASCII would be very difficult to implement and isn't really necessary for RoH, which is a 4X game focused on territorial warfare. So, to represent this territorial war in the best way possible, I thought about a grid map!
As you can see in this screenshot, there are map filters, highlights, tooltips, and colours; enough to give you all the information you need on one screen. That's already worth it, but when we talk about maps, we also talk about layouts, aka map templates. There are currently four of them, each quite different and offering different strategic challenges.
The Cluster layout.
To implement this new map, I had to overhaul many features, and I took the opportunity to make the game clearer. For instance, there are no landmarks anymore: every piece of land is owned by a tribe and can have a Point of Interest. These POIs actually include the landmarks from previous versions, such as mines, plantations, monoliths, and altars. POIs can be guarded by Independents, and interacting with them now requires the presence of at least one disciple.
But that's not all. In previous versions, tribes were randomly distributed across the map. This is no longer the case! 4.0 now gives you the choice to either keep the random distribution or opt for the new territorial distribution, which makes all tribes claim contiguous blocks of land, forming clear regional borders. And to make things even better, tribes can capture each other's lands, making the game a lot more dynamic. You can also choose to give them resources if you want them to recruit new disciples faster.
With 4.0, I really want to give more cohesion to the game. One example is doctrines. Before, tribes with different doctrines could be allied with each other. That's no longer the case. They need to share four doctrines with another tribe to not feel threatened by them. Now there are stories being told in the background: federations of Despotic Hedonists marching across the world and trying to impose their strange views upon others! Will you join them, or will you fight them?
As some of you might know, one of my inspirations for RoH was Dominions, especially the auto-battler part. I've tried many things, and in the current version, I must admit that battles are a bit confusing. The choices you make aren't always very clear, the heavy RNG makes battles quite hard to predict, and the representation of the battle itself isn't ideal... Enter the new combat UI:
The main change? Six lines and a maximum of six disciples per battle for each side. The reason for limiting battles to six disciples is that big battles shouldn't last only one turn. Having to select only part of your army also means that losing isn't a game over. You just have to fall back if your other disciples are no match for your enemies, so that you don't lose your whole stack (note: only one battle per land per turn). In other words, more tactics, more choices!
The new battle preparation screen
I've also changed some of the core combat mechanics. Dodge is now called "Evasion" and is much lower than previously, but it now affects both melee and ranged attacks. Accuracy has been removed in favour of "ammo", forcing your ranged units to go into melee at some point instead of kiting the enemy in a very cheesy way.
In the previous screenshot, you can see that the only choice you can make in 4.0 is the position of your disciples on the battlefield (plus the blessings, which are unchanged). If a melee unit is placed on line 2, then he will target the enemy on line 2, and engage in melee. Simple, yet very tactical, as you can now force the enemy to attack a specific disciple, and your position affects your target. The position of your enemies might also proved to be tricky, as you can no longer order all your disciples to target one single unit. Of course, many stats have been improved to adapt to this new system, and also so that battles feel more intense and fair.
When you come back to a game after a few months, you see things differently, and some mechanics suddenly feel very weird. Therefore, I've removed a few things that made no sense or were simply taking the player's attention away from the core of the game: territorial control. Preaching, investigating, assigning a disciple to an artificial passive task, finding Nemeses, opening trade routes... All of those features have simply been removed! As Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said: "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." Well, RoH will never be perfect, of course, but things are now smoother, new features blend better, and most importantly, they make more sense!
I won't mention the new milestones, POIs, disciples, events; the better menus, improved performance, new options, yadi yada... You'll discover all that when playing! 🙂
The patch 4.0 will be released either in end-August or in September. Stay tuned, comment, be peaceful, be happy!
Guillaume, aka Joubarbe