Le bump for those people who use the Beta updates: Continent progress is no more.
The long-missing Strategic Difficulty option has been reintroduced to the game, now that we are moving back in the direction of having variable-difficulty long-form thinking challenges. Currently this affects:
Number of tier orbs (spells you can craft) available at each tier. The limits per difficulty are:
Forgiving: 50 tier orb limit per tier
Restless: 35 tier orb limit per tier
Wily (default): 25 tier orb limit per tier
Vicious: 15 tier orb limit per tier
Absurd: 8 tier orb limit per tier
When more tier orbs would be added than the settlement stockpile can hold, it instead shows a chat message telling you how many were not added because of the limit.
As with the other difficulty levels, players can change the strategic difficulty level around at any time. If they wind up with more tier orbs in their stockpile than they are supposed to have for the current difficulty, it simply won't let them have any more; it won't remove any that they already have accumulated.
Thanks to Bluddy and others for inspiring this change
Non-destroyed overlord and lieutenant locations are now marked on the world map with red text in the same way that the missions are marked with yellow text.
The tier of the region that the overlord or lieutenant is in is now shown as part of this as well, adding to the clarity of when you can go attack them.
Lieutenants are no longer all tier 4. Instead, their region is Continent Tier + 1. This makes it so that you can go and attack any of the lieutenants as soon as you are ready, rather than being forced to target a specific one or waiting all the way until you are tier 4 or 5.
The entire concept of Civilization Progress (CP) has been removed. Instead, the continent tier is based on how many lieutenants are currently alive. The more lieutenants you kill, the higher the continent tier goes. This puts you in the driver's seat and does not require you to avoid world map missions in favor of secret missions just because of the CP-factor (as used to happen).
The lieutenants no longer physically move to help the overlord in the overlord's throne room. That was filled with various problems, and among them it was something that some clever players were exploiting.
Instead, the aid that the overlord receives from the lieutenants is now indirect: each living lieutenant causes the overlord's tier -- which is normally 5 -- to get inflated by 2.
So as you kill lieutenants, you're literally seeing the overlord weaken on the world map and become more attempt-able, even while the general monsters throughout the land are getting stronger due to the continent tier increasing.
There are now always exactly four lieutenants per continent, rather than it generally being 3 but occasionally varying to 2 or 4. Given the way that the continent tier now increases based on killing the lieutenants, this is pretty important.
Old worlds will be upgraded so that this is true, and new continents will also gain this. For most old worlds this means you'll have a new lieutenant on every continent, and your continent tier may be much lower than it was previously -- a bonus for you, since your spells will still be powerful.
Old worlds that happen to have more than 4 living lieutenants now will have all of them get killed except for 4; making it so that some of the ancient giant continents won't suddenly become a giant pain to finish.
The internal "overlord escalation points" that were mentioned a few releases back and which are what control when the elites start showing up are now based solely on shifts in tier (and when the overlord is killed) rather than being based on increases in CP (since that no longer exists).
This means that rather than elites showing up gradually as you complete missions, you'll have them in larger bursts after you kill lieutenants. And then you'll have another burst after you kill the overlord as well, which previously didn't happen at all.
Basically, Strategic Difficulty returns from the beta in a different form, and going straight for the overlord when all lieutenants are still alive will end up in you facing a Tier 13 Overlord with Tier 1 spells. Continent Tier (and thus monster tier) increases as the liutenants die, and lietenants are now Continent Tier +1 instead of always Tier 4. Look at the link for the rest of the update.
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Topic: A Valley Without Wind [Arcen Games: Trial+Beta now available. 50% off] (Read 11764 times)