Version 0.5 is finally here! Key additions include recruitable heroes, a visual day/night cycle on the map, improved background bonuses, rebindable controls, an updated combat deployment system, tailors, feature unlock changes, fighter management improvements, animated combat elements, storage in guild houses and a scenario system.
Please note: Saves from previous versions of the game will not work at all with this new version.
Systems
- Added a visual day/night cycle on the map.
- Added merchant speech bubble when the player has the caravan sidepanel up.
- Added ability to autopay and to fire caravan guards
- Scenario system implemented. The scenario changes randomly over time and affects the game world. Potential scenarios are: normal, rain, unrest, fog, festival, cold, heatwave.
- Each player background now starts one specific town off at 20 reputation and one specific trait off at 5
- Each player background now confers the player one or two unique bonuses
- Total number of items in cart (weight) now affects the cart speed over certain thresholds - indicated on UI element alongside target rating in Caravan sidepanel
- Player can now store up to 25 goods in each guild house they have built and retrieve them whenever they visit
- Added a new location type; tailors. Found in a few towns throughought the kingdom, these locations allow you to change your character's starting outfit for a small fee.
- Sidebar tabs now unlocked gradually by player level
- Main game unlocks have been moved from a month by month system to the charters sidebar, where sets of two become available at set player levels and can be unlocked with gold. The old requirement to make a payment per month attached to the old unlock system has been removed for now, although it will eventually return as its own game mode.
Balance
- Paying employed mercenaries now increases morale by 50 rather than 30
- Reduced fighter morale degredation per hour (1 > 0.75)
- Increased fighter costs by 50%
- Act Nonchalant skill now increases Conceal by 2 rather than 1
- Tavern Trawler and Leader skills now increase hire slots by 2 each rather than 3
- Double Down skill changed to 'Appear Competent'. Skill previously doubled starting career bonuses, skill now adds two mission slots.
- Guild house in Mandrake now provides +2 fighter slots rather than +2 mission slots
- Management Training skill now adds +1 mission slots, rather than increasing fighter morale by 1
- Reduced starting Mission Slots from 3 to 2
- Added a modifier so you are a little less likely to get attacked on the road in Month 2
- Upped the event chance calculations x10 to allow for more fine control, and reduced the baseline chance of road events by 25%
Content
- Fighters now have idle animations in combat and on the tavern screen
- Enemies now have idle animations in combat
- Added 8 new road events
UI
- Added character portraits, career icons, region and town images to load and new game screens
- Added ranged indicator arrows and ranged combat strength icon
- Added animated effect for fighter being healed during combat
- Replaced basic combat hex glow effect with security icon shine effect when security score has been buffed due to traits
- Added mouseover to show what is causing fighter security score to be increased during battle
- Added randomise options for character name creation and character appearance creation
- Updated caravan stat bar maximums to reflect potential hero bonuses plus updated player skill effects
- Quiting from options menu during the game takes you back to the title menu rather than quitting the game back to desktop
- Option to choose between two hero portrait types added to the options menu
- Added graphical settings to ingame options menu
- Added Preview Upgrades option to the cart upgrade screen
- Added expanded mouseovers for the resources on the caravan sidebar
- Added tutorial panes for Charters, Reputation and Profile sidebars
General
- Game settings now persist across sessions
- Added controls screen to title menu, control keys can be rebound
- Combat wounds for fighters and enemies now properly randomised among each quadrant
- Added zoom in/out functionality on the map (mouse wheel up/down)
- Added a timer that prevents an event occuring shortly after another one on the road (works the same as the system for combat events)
- Time to next location preview is now based on actual distance of road rather than rough estimate from distance between settlements
- Tavern now unlocked at player level 2
- Buildings now unlocked at player level 3
- Escort missions set every time player arrives at town rather than for every settlement in game every week, should improve performance and fix a few minor escort mission issues
Fixes
- Combat music volume now correctly changed with other music volume
- Swapped the text for skills Basic Swordplay and Thunk! so that they match up with their icons
- Fixed the Hard Bargain skill (20% Hire Costs) not working
- Skill Complimentary now correctly reduces initial hero hire costs as well as their pay costs
- Updated Complimentary skill text to reflect that it also reduces hero pay costs
- Fixed an issue with the Act Nonchelant skill not adding to the caravan conceal score correctly
- Can no longer go over cart capacity through crafting
- Fixed game speed showing FF when leaving a town, when it is actually back to normal speed
Notes
- Hiring heroes with mission related bonus immediately resets all available game missions (as normally occurs every week)
Progress Report on v0.5
Another progress update on the next version. There's still more bug fixing, art and feature work needed but it's shaping up well. There are some nice mechanics and additions in it that I thought I'd mention:
Weight Penalty
For every ten items in your cart, you will lose one speed. This makes it important that you don't just upgrade your cart's capacity, or you'll be crawling around the map! This penalty is turned off on casual difficulty.
Deployment Time
You start the battle with a set amount of deployment time, and all fighters and heroes now have a deployment time cost. What this means is that you'll only be able to deploy some of your fighters at the start of a battle. Your deployment time amount increases each round, so if your defences hold then you'll be able to deploy reserve fighters to the battle as it progresses.
Background Bonuses
In addition to giving you boosts to core stats, your choice of background at the start of the game will now also give you a starting boost to one personality trait, a bump in your starting reputation in a specific town, and one or two helpful unique bonuses.
Map Zoom
Adjust your zoom levels! Zoom out to reveal more of the kingdom or zoom in to make it seem like your cart is travelling faster!
Tailors
These locations allow you to adjust your merchant's clothing for a cost.
Update on next version
Well met, Merchant fans! Just wanted to give you an update on the work currently taking place for the next version.
The next update will be 0.5, jumping a couple of numbers because it's a big step. It will add heroes (including lots of hero specific events), more animated elements, updates to the combat system, a visual day/night system on the map, global scenarios (such as unrest, rain, heatwave, festival) and improved fighter management. It's going to be pretty cool!
Version 0.47
This update adds variable difficulty settings! Quite a number of variables are changed across the difficulty variants so please let us know what you make of the balancing of the three new modes; relaxed, standard and demanding.
Relaxed is slightly easier than the game has been up to now, standard is somewhat more challenging and demanding should be significantly more difficult than you've been used to!
Systems
- Added three difficulty levels. Affects starting gold, base chance of combat on roads, number of enemies for event combats, number of enemies for mission combats, main goal costs, cart upgrade costs, building construction costs, healing costs.
- Road safety score now directly affects the chance of combat events while travelling
- Added a cooldown period after a battle which prevents another combat event from being triggered for a time
Balance
- Increased importance of cart upgrades vs road speed by 50% (20 > 15)
- Some balancing tweaks for the various elements now affected by difficulty setting
UI
- Added a difficulty select screen during the start game flow
- Added credits screen to the main menu
- Added exit game button to the main menu
General
- Added difficulty setting to save/load
Compatibility
Should be compatible with saves from the previous version.
Version 0.46
This update significantly adds to the friends system within the game, giving you lots more people to meet and befriend within the kingdom and adding more structure with requirements and rewards attached. Traits have an important tangible impact here, affecting how strong your friendships can grow!
Systems
- Major update to the friends system. Meeting friends and increasing friendship level can now have requirements of either a minimum trait score or a specific resource. Meeting with friends can offer rewards, such as trait points and coins, as well as potentially unlocking specific heroes when they are introduced.
Balance
- Upped number of trait levels from 7 to 9. Changed thresholds for positive traits from 5/15/30 to 5/10/15/20/30.
Content
- 34 new friend events and 6 new friends added
UI
- Added the Friends subtab within the Profile sidetab. Shows your relationships level with each of the nine friends available in the game.
- Now using golden panels for road and explore event rewards
General
- Five remaining friends added to save/load
Version 0.45
First update of the year! This is a pretty small update, primarily about adding moving backgrounds for the animated cart when the player is travelling. Have also taken the opportunity to fix a few reported issues.
There's been lots of work going into the upcoming Heroes system, stay tuned for that in the coming months!
UI
- Added animated backgrounds to the animated cart, with a different background for each of the region types. Also animated cart shadows while moving.
- Minor adjustments to button positions on the combat screen to avoid accidentally starting the battle early
- Fixed mouse over position for caravan target rating in caravan sidebar
General
- Upped level cap from 20 to 24
- Fighter talents less likely to show up, fixed incorrect chances from 50-100 to 1-100
Fixes
- Adjusted fighters available at highest fighter tier to only be existing ones, and made sure even the rest all have placeholder talents assigned. Should fix a crash relating to highest tier fighters not having talents available to be assigned.
- Fixed typo for first enemy in North quadrant which could lead to other enemies in this sector not losing health when they lost a round, making it impossible for the player to win the fight
Happy Holidays!
Happy holidays from Inexplicable Games, thank you for your support in 2017 and we hope you have a great new year!
Version 0.44
The main focus of this update is the combat system - fighters can now have talents, they now have morale instead of sticking around for a set number of trips, there is a dedicated looting phase in battle (which can include looting the enemy if you win) and most of the UI elements have been updated and refined for a much more polished overall look.
There are also some animated elements added to the game, with the cart now animating when on the road and the coin icon spinning pleasingly when coins are earned or spent.
Systems
- Added 8 fighter talents, each fighter type has a small percentage chance to have one of three potential talents when you recruit from the tavern. Each talent offers a specific bonus or ability within battle.
- Removed the trips system for fighters and replaced it with morale system. Morale drops over time on the road, but can be topped up with additional payments, allowing you to keep especially useful fighters around.
- Added a looting stage to the battle, depicting the loot roll if the enemy wins the battle and the resources gained or lost from looting.
- Player now loots the enemy if they completely win a battle (resources looted depend on enemy type).
- Adjusted relevant guild houses to give bonus to morale rather than number of trips fighters make.
Balance
- Changed combat dice so that they now range from 1-3 (33% chance of each) rather than 1-4.
- Upped chances of combat occuring on roads (99 > 98 as a baseline).
- Adjusted Sword for Hire's stats from 2/3/3 to 4/2/1
UI
- Cart is now animated on the cart upgrade screen and on the main HUD when the player is on the road. Modified player avatar now appears correctly on the cart and animates as well.
- Added coin animation when spending or receiving coins at market, tavern, cart upgrade, building construction and guild house construction. Also when paying existing security.
- Updated UI assets for most elements on the combat screen, including the quadrants, deployment hexes and direction panels.
- Various refinements to the combat screen UI, including depiction of dice, round panel, mouse overs for icons and tidier fighter selection panels during the deployment phase. Fighter talents are shown on the hex of their characters when deployed, added a hide fighter button to allow players to get clearer sense of which talents are where on the battlefield.
- Various UI tweaks to sidepanel and town screens, including target rating on the caravan sidepanel, alteration of tab colour from dark grey to green and new button images on the market screen.
- Added initial colour blindness mode, currently just affects the market screen.
- New cart defence icon and swapped out the icon on the security sidescreen from cart defence to fighter security
General
- Fighter names now saved.
Design notes and current development focus II
Part 2 of the design notes - this time, heroes.
No More Heroes
Heroes were implemented in the game quite a long time before it hit Early Access, but I removed them temporarily because the combat system changed dramatically. The good news is that they will be much more interesting with the combat system we have now, and even more so after that system gets some much needed additions as mentioned in part 1 of these design notes!
So, the key elements of the upcoming hero system:
Hero Class - There are three hero classes, and you can have one of each attached to your caravan. These are: scouting, organisation and combat. Scouting heroes can affect caravan speed or help it avoid combat, organisational heroes help with things like capacity and morale, while combat heroes are particularly specialised in smiting bandits.
Rapport - Your relationships with that hero. This works in a similar way to loyalty for fighters, but is much more granular and powerful. If you have a really good relationship with a hero then they can potentially work for free, if things get really bad then they may outright refuse to work for you again.
Rapport is affected by your personality traits, by choices made in special hero-specific events and by decisions made in general events.
Recruitment - Hiring heroes is generally more complex than hiring fighters. You need to meet them first, which can happen through a number of methods - through friendships with certain characters, reputation levels, decisions in events, discovering certain locations. You may also need a minimum level of certain personality traits before heroes will agree to join you.
Personality Bonuses - Each hero has a specific personality bonus that they apply to your caravan, which will be powerful modifiers and specialisms.
XP and Leveling - Like the player, heroes will earn XP over time and become more effective! This may include improving their combat stats, improving their personality bonus and gaining additional combat talents.
Preferred Enemy Type Each hero will gain a combat bonus when fighting against their preferred enemy type.
Design notes and current development focus
Merchant fans! Just wanted to let you know what the current plan is for the main development focus on the game over the next couple of months. The two key areas I'm planning to focus on are two interconnected systems; combat and heroes. First up, combat -
Combat Evolved
The main focus for combat will be adding extra tactical depth and variation, while at the same time making each of the fighter types you can hire more differentiated and interested.
I'm going to add a set of combat talents, fighters can have one and they'll also find their way to heroes. The current working list for these is -
Ranged - Can attack targets in other quadrants
Heavily Armoured - Chance to ignore damage if hit
Weapon Expert - Can cause damage to fall on two enemies in one combat round
Veteran - Increase security by one if in same quadrant as another Veteran
Healer - Chance to heal a unit within their quadrant between rounds
Manouverable - Ability to move quadrants between rounds
Bloody Minded - Chance to regain one health when it drops to zero
Leader - Adds loyalty to combat score for quadrant
Brave - Adds health to combat score for quadrant
Battleborn - Adds morale from combat wins
Hopefully this will give players lots more tactical options in how they deploy their forces and manage them during battle!
I'm currently undecided on if these talents will be mapped to specific fighter types (e.g. archers are always ranged, guardsman are always armoured) or if it'll be more of a randomised thing that only some fighters get.
Looting Phase
This is currently in the game in a very basic and behind the scenes fashion. Basically, if the attacking forces win a battle then they face off versus the cart's defence stat and this determines if they loot anything from you or not. I'm going to make this a clearly depicted phase with specific artwork to call it out, so it should be much clearer how it all fits together and what you lost.
In addition, will be adding back in the ability to loot enemies if you beat them in a battle!
Morale and Loyalty
Each fighter in the game has a loyalty stat and the original idea was that it could be decreased through various unpopular choices during events and from losses in battle. If it reached zero then the fighter would desert, so it essentially worked like a second health stat.
The main problem with this is that with a fairly limited number of trips that you would have specific fighters with you, the chances of encountering several events that could knock their loyalty down before they left you anyway was very low.
The aim of the system whereby you of hire fighters for an upfront fee in return for them protecting you for a set number of trips was simplicity, avoiding having to pay monthly overheads or something like that. A core design principle is that this game should never have a balance sheet screen!
The trips system isn't very popular though and loyalty doesn't really matter. I'm going to replace the trips system with morale. Each fighter (and hero) will have a morale bar, which will drop over time, from defeats in battle and unpopular decisions. If it reaches zero then a fighter may or will leave. You can pay the fighter a set fee at any time to top up their morale. This should be a much more flexible system - it will allow you to keep useful fighters around for as long as you want, as long as you can afford to keep them happy!
The loyalty stat will act as a modifier to this - the lower it is, the faster that morale will drop. It can go up or down through specific actions in events and maintaining it should now be much more important.
As always, let me know if you've got any thoughts on these proposed additions and changes to the game!
