Expeditions: Rome - Dev Diary #18 - Battle Improvements

Logic Artists posted a new dev diary entry revealing upcoming improvements for the legion battle system. As said in the last Twitch stream, this will not be included in the next patch but later.

DevDiary 18 - Legion Battle Improvements

Ave, and welcome to our 18^th dev diary – the second after the release of Expeditions: Rome. As we mentioned last week, the first major update is currently undergoing testing. We were hoping to release it last week, but QA did their jobs well and found a new issue that had slipped into the game due to one of our stability fixes, so we had to push the patch until this week so we could get that fixed first and give QA time to re-test the build.

In the meantime, those of us not already working on the first piece of DLC have set our sights on a much-requested set of improvements to a certain system in the game, namely the legion battles.

The legion battle system has been a challenge right from the start. We knew we wanted to represent the large-scale battles of a Roman legion somehow, and give the player a feeling of being a grand strategy commander handing out orders from on high, but at the same time we didn’t want to cram a whole wargame into our tactical RPG. During the prototyping phase we intended battles to simply be resolved by a die roll based on the strength of each army – but it seemed too simple. Later we briefly considered representing it by a re-interpretation of a Roman dice game called Tali – but we decided that would be far too abstract. We knew we needed to do something that would sell the fantasy without ballooning out of scope to take over the whole project.

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We’d love to hear what you think of these changes. Please leave your comments and questions below and we will be guaranteed to read them. We will as always have a Dev Stream on Twitch this Wednesday, February 9th at 1:00 PM Eastern / 6:00 PM GMT at http://twitch.tv/thqnordic, where Senior Producer Brad Logston will host Creative Director Jonas Wæver to talk about our plans for this system and what other things we’re working on for future updates. We will answer any questions left on this diary, and we’ll of course try to answer any other questions you throw at us during the stream.

Until then, Valete!