Main changes
De Re Militari
Strategic map has arrived! You can now gather your troops by playing other modes in the game and start a conquest with fellow clan mates. Once a village or a castle is captured, your banner will be placed, claiming the land. Afterwards, those settlements will provide an even higher gain of troops, allowing you to move forward and start wars against other clans, to decide who has the strongest army and the smartest commanders.
Current version of De Re Militari is quite basic, compared to our plans for later releases. There are two main reasons for that. First, we wanted to allow you to play the new mode as quickly as possible, and had to decide between a polished mode with fewer mechanics or a mode with additional mechanics, but with possibility that it contains many issues. And second, while we have many plans for De Re Militari like resource production in fiefs and field battles, our ultimate goal is to create a game mode that you, players, would like to play.
We will continue to develop the strategic map, adding features we've planned, but also responding to feedback and including suggestions from the community. We've already been changing quite a few things before release from nightly feedback, and got some good ideas for later additions. Some ideas are pretty big and could potentially change the mode a lot!
Lobby Fortress
We've been teasing you with screenshots and our plans for the new lobby for quite a while now, and it's finally in the game! We'll be adding more features and expanding the fortress itself, but there are lots of changes that you can see already.
New fortress has multiple areas, all dedicated to their own purpose, like a training courtyard with an easy access to tutorial and targets for practice, a street with merchants selling their products, and so on. In one of the later updates, we'll also make a village just outside the fortress available for exploration!
The first NPCs in the lobby allow you to buy different equipment from them, but we also plan to include more NPC types that can be interacted with. We've also added a new ranged practice mode, which is a good way to improve your shooting abilities, and lowered a probability of bots fighting each other, so you can get a wider variety of opponents to practice.
Hold Your Ground and The Arena modes got moved to their own servers, so there should be no more lag when someone suddenly spawns 30 bots in co-op mode! A small downside is that joining the modes requires a short loading, but they're technically placed on the same map, so it should be rather quick.
Tutorial
While the old tutorial did explain how the most basic controls work, it wasn't very useful for actual learning. There are now three working tutorials instead of one, since there are technically three main differences between fighting styles in the game - melee combat without shield, melee combat with shield, and ranged combat.
You're now free to choose any of the tutorials you'd like to play, and repeat them if you'd like to refresh your memory. If it's the first time you start the game, you will be automatically placed in the tutorial, and to start it again anytime in the future, simply follow a book icon in the lobby.
Village Raids
There are quite a lot of changes and additions for raid battles, which are now used for De Re Militari, but arguably the single biggest one is a whole new village map! You will play on the new map whenever someone attacks a village with their clan, so you won't be able to miss it.
The village is rather big, with different areas like a watchtower or a wheat field, but it's much smaller than the castle overall, and it's generally much more opened. You should be very careful as a defender when protecting the land, since it's a lot harder to defend without walls and other fortifications to hold the invaders!
Full Reset
We've been thinking about a reset for a while now, since many old players have an excessive amount of goods like gold and equipment, and many balancing changes we've been implementing would hardly affect them with such wealth. It is also not very fair towards new players to come into an environment with such well equipped warriors around.
After doing a public poll, it's been decided to do a full character reset with the update, including gold, XP, loot chests, titles, and stats. We kept clans and character appearances untouched, so no need to worry about losing a contact with your clan mates!
Combat changes
Releasing Arrows
Arrows and bolts in the game have been pretty slow before, so in order to balance it out and allow a fair chance to hit your targets, we've made some changes to how shooting works. All ranged weapons now shoot with relatively same speed, and projectiles became a little less heavy, allowing to shoot farther. Heavier bows and crossbows still take much longer to nock and do a higher damage.
Falling Down
There have been some complaints about falling damage in the past, mainly because even jumping from a rather low hill would result in some damage, which is very unrealistic. After some value balancing, we've tweaked the damage to be 33% lower than before, and also increased a height at which fall damage starts to affect characters, meaning that jumps from small heights shouldn't do damage at all now.
Small improvements
Battle Additions
Quite a lot is added for the battle mode in this patch! Since it's the new mode that's used in De Re Militari whenever someone attacks a village or a castle, it's very important to keep it up to date and improve its mechanics overtime. Player feedback is also very influential, and we've been adding many features based on community suggestions.
There are some visual improvements for the mode that serve gameplay functions as well. For example, a UI element for the minimap and the overview map that shows when enemies are close to your flag, a zoom in effect when spawning, progress bars for capturing objectives, and so on.
We tried to generally improve the mode, adding mechanics that would affect quality of battles, so there is now a button to call for help when close to a flag, crates that allow to refill arrows and bolts, an autowin condition if either side neglected to show up for the battle, and some other changes as well.
If you have suggestions for the mode, we would love to hear them on our Discord or forums!
Continue fighting
While we've been adding new mechanics to the battle mode, there are also lots of changes to existing features! Most of them are direct suggestions by the community, and if you have other ideas, feel free to let us know!
To make the mode more tactical instead of allowing to easily rush one by one, many values have been tweaked to encourage planning and working as a group. If your team is not doing too good on the battlefield, you should consider doing a formation and unite your efforts. As an example of changes we've made, there is a longer respawn time, which will make you think twice before rushing alone into a group of enemies.
Other changes were also designed to improve a general feel of the mode, so unconnected flags now take longer to be captured, making them harder objectives to take, a short invincibility should stop quick spawn kills when enemies are attacking the same objective you're spawning on, and so on.
Better Clans
Clans are very important for De Re Militari and the game as a whole, since only clans can own villages and castles on the map, and engage in territorial warfare on their own terms. Even though players that are not a part of any clan can still take part in those battles, they cannot attack settlements themselves.
In order to allow players to create clans more easily, we've changed the requirement from having to retire to simply paying 20 gold. It will still take a little time if you're a new player, but it's still much quicker if you'd like to start leading your own group of brave warriors.
A small change to joining clans is also a cooldown when you try to leave and join a new one. It should prevent things like leaving for a day not to pay an upkeep for the clan, creating multiple new clans and spawning useless strongholds on the map, and some other game abuse cases.
Reward Balancing
Unbalanced rewards in the game could lead to not very interesting gameplay due to either too many or not enough of them. We spent some of the time for the update to tweak many things related to rewards and specifically loot chests to improve the balance.
First, some balancing changes include increasing an umber of chests for all the modes except for The Arena, since our data showed that it's been the most rewarding way to get wealthy in the game. Other changes in that regard include addition of loot chests for every 5th wave on Hold Your Ground, removing troop rewards for common chests to avoid troop farming, and adding more diverse rewards for chests that have higher rarity levels than common.
World chests have also been tweaked, since they could be easily gained without a fight. The first 20 chests you open in the lobby will have high rariry levels to reward map exploration, but all later chests will be only common to forbid chest farming.
A few other additions include a First Win of the Day that gives troops for winning your first battle within 24 hours, increased chance of getting masterworts from the chests to allow balancing extreme builds more often, and some small improvements like a visual animation when opening a chest.
Community Ideas
As requested by the community, Skirmish battles can now be started with only four players signed up for them. Since it's still fun to have small tournament-like skirmish with 2v2, but not big Conquest battles, we kept that number for Conquest mode unchanged.
Another small change was increasing the width of the scoreboard, so all the names with tags and titles can fit better. Before the change, almost every name had to be made smaller in the game due to not enough space to put it with default font.
Last small change, requested by the community in the past, is a marching feature. You can now simply press a button and march together with your fellow friends and clan mates. No matter what your character build is, everyone will have the same speed when marching, resulting in perfect formations.
