Public Test Branch (0.7.007a)
Hello mercenaries,
The Tales by the Fire update is now available on the public test branch!
To opt in: Go to your Steam Library, right click The Iron Oath and select Properties. From there, go to the Betas tab and select "Public test branch" from the drop down menu.
You can use your current save on the test branch, but you will need to first copy over the file. Navigate to: "C:\Users\Your Name\AppData\LocalLow\Curious Panda Games\The Iron Oath", and copy your save file from the "saves" folder into the "testBranch_saves" folder. When loading an old save from within a dungeon, you will be kicked out of the dungeon (but not penalized with fatigue or anything).
With that said, we do recommend testing on a fresh campaign for now, as there are still some things we need to clean up (such as balancing the frequency of the various dungeon events).
There are still some remaining bugs that we're working on, but in the meantime it is playable and ready for testing, so we'd appreciate as many eyes on it as we can get! We have been fairly thorough, so hopefully there aren't too many bugs that we haven't discovered. We expect it to remain on public test for at least a week, but it'll depend on how many new bug reports we receive.
Here are the changes and additions with this update:
- New Class, the Balladeer: The 8th class in the game fills the role of a pure support character, buffing allies and debuffing enemies
- Job System: Characters can now be assigned jobs within the company. Each job has its own unique bonuses that assist the party during dungeon exploration.
- Dungeon Exploration: We've made some pretty significant changes to dungeon exploration, and each dungeon's layout is now fully visible. Tiles that have events are marked as such, but the identity of the events (aside from boss locations) are not revealed until you move to or scout the tile. We made this change to allow the player to make more informed decisions when navigating a dungeon, instead of blindly moving along a generally linear path as it was previously.
- New and Reworked Dungeon Events: We've introduced a number of new event types such as Shrines, which allow you to sacrifice something to receive a blessing. We've also reworked many of our old events to better synergize with the new job system, and most events can now be revisited if you did not complete it the first time (so you can choose to hold off on interacting with a Shrine, and still come back to it later if you wanted to)
- Dungeon Time Meter: The time threshold for new dungeon modifiers has been significantly increased to 48 (on the default difficulty). Moving to an unexplored tile costs 2 Time, while backtracking costs 1.
Dungeon Modifiers: All dungeons now start with 1 Positive and 1 Negative Modifier which is displayed in the party select screen. It's important to pick classes and jobs which best suit the modifiers at play! With that change and the aforementioned changes to Time, players will now accrue less dungeon modifiers via the passage of time (max of 2), but the ones that are applied will be more potent. We've removed many of the old trivial modifiers, added a few new ones, and tweaked a few existing ones.
- Specialized City Offerings: Cities are now more specialized in what they offer to the player. Certain gear and classes will be more common in specific cities (eg. Valkyries and Icebinders are commonly found in the Northern Hold, but you'll still be able to occasionally find them elsewhere too)
- Character Trait Quantity: We've reduced the starting number of traits each character has. They now spawn with 2 combat/physical traits and 1 personality trait. The previous number of traits was too high, making it too hard to keep track of while also making characters feel less unique since there was a high chance they shared traits with your other characters. In the future, characters will be able to "grow" and acquire more traits as you play the game through dungeon events and company moments.
- New and Modified Difficulty Levels: We've added two more difficulty levels and adjusted the default difficulty of Battle-Hardened to be slightly easier. If you played on and enjoyed one of the three previous difficulty levels, you'll want to move up 1 level from where you were (eg. If you played Adventurer, you should now play Soldier, if you played Battle-Hardened, you should now play Warlord). The difficulty levels are now: Adventurer, Soldier, Battle-Hardened, Warlord, Emperor.
- Morale effects on combat: Your characters' Morale now affects them in combat, making it more important to manage properly. If a character has 75+ Morale, the duration of negative conditions applied to them will be reduced by 1 (to a minimum of 1 Round). If characters have 25 Morale or less, there is a chance (it's a dice roll which takes into account their current Morale) on their turn that they will delay their turn until the end of the round. Once their turn comes up again, if their Morale is still below 25, another roll will determine whether they skip their turn entirely for that round.
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