Nomads, at least cutthroats, are essentially better armored and higher stated thugs. Not quite raiders in potency, but annoyingly dodgy. They have what appears to be a 2ap pocket sand attack that causes a damage reduction and initiative reduction for a round or two. That hasnt been a deciding factor for any of my fights, and in fact the only ones they managed to kill were slaves i bought, but still. They pocketsand all day, sometimes preferring pocket sand to a second attack.
Im noticing a lot of 'severed nose' permanent injuries. And since that is the mildest of permanent injuries im wondering if thats an intentional tweak.
Havent faced an infrit yet, not exactly looking foreward to it, but it might be a nice pace change from the norm.
Hyenas are direwolves. Maybe slowed down a little and buffed on attack.
The arena is nice. You start out with 2 monsters v 3 brothers. Havent lost a man yet, but the payout is about 600 on hard. May or may not cover the expense of medical and hammers.
The city-states seem to have patrols? idk what the city guard is doing, but they sometimes go out into the wilds, ive even gotten them to storm a bandit camp with me once. They might actually be following me out and patrolling the general area while I kill the camp.
weapons. omfg the fancier stuff. I am in general not a huge fan of, in any game, new weapons that manage to be superior to the original stuff just for the sake of it. Some of the wotn stuff was that, others were more balanced and nuanced. Same here, with the maces being strict upgrades and the swords favoring lower armor pen but more damage.
But the guns. And the spear with the blunderbuss-type attack. a baseline spear is fitted with a single shot of 'fire goo' and sold to me for just shy of 1k. it refills every battle, and when used causes a 2 tile straight line attack that sets things on fire (dots?) and fairly heavy damage to enemies. great for injuries and lowering morale.
can probably make a pretty good quick hands character out of it. A shield and good melee weapon, then 4 fire spears and maybe a net for utility.
Whips may be exclusive to the south now. idk, but I havent found one anywhere else yet. They are pretty common in the city-states though.
There are new potions, such as (apparently) a potion of 100% exp gain (forever?), night eye is sold, and you can freely buy things like fatigue regen potions and the like.
I am playing with the music mod on when im up north and swap it off when i go south. I havent tried tinkering with the trade goods yet, as Im not sure what the threshold is for making profit with them. The citys that sell them do the usual price-gouging, but there are tooltips that suggest you can sell them up north (in general or strictly in the snowy cities?) for a tidy sum. The new provisions are nice, since they add variety, and I got some nice rice for 30gp. dats cheap.
Since I do the deserter start so often, the manhunter start seems pretty easy. Im used to low-morale troops in the EG.