Improved graphics
All towns have had their graphics slightly upgraded.
Battlefield terrain will now vary based on actual map terrain. There are 4 types of terrain:
– Forest (battle happens in a clearing in the forest)
– Mountain (battle happens in a narrow mountain pass)
– Beach (battle happens on a beach)
– Plain (Old battlefield terrain but with improved trees, grass and overall aspect).
All battles still happen during the day.
New monster tiers
The following monsters have been split into tiers:
– Goblin (6 tiers) – lowly, defensive warrior
– Hobgoblin (9 tiers) – good warrior
– Kobold (9 tiers) – fast, aggressive and accurate warrior
– Orc (7 tiers) – All around powerful enemy
– Ogre (6 tiers) – Very slow, fragile but with powerful attacks.
– Tree ent (3 tiers) – Slow but powerfull. Always uses blunt attacks.
Different tiers appear differently on the main map. The lowest tiers each have the same characteristics as the old monsters but look “less equipped”. Top tiers are now a lot stronger (in most cases 2-3 times better then a fully tier 5 equiped soldier) and show up as the old versions (fully equipped).
The monsters now have different equipment based on tier, most importantly the weapon types can change between tiers.
Monsters have had their evasion and accuracy greatly reduced, with the exception of the monster specific stats. Armor and evasion will only stack for orcs now. Most monsters will be vulnerable to spear attacks now.
Experience changes
The magic experience is now computed based on the actual impact it had on the battle. For example, buffing a unit with evasion yields no XP if the unit was never attacked.
Due to a bug in the way the retaliation experience was computed, large amounts of damage experience were earned as tanking experience, which received a 10x bonus multiplier. This is now fixed, resulting in a dramatic drop of earned experience for both combat and heroic, which were the only types affected by the bug. To compensate, the overall experience yield was slightly buffed.
The experience earned will now be severely penalized if the value is below 0.4% and completely eliminated if below 0.1%. Lord specialization in a particular field is now very important, as fully trained lord is… not feasible.
Messaging system
There is now an in-game mail system. This has no connection whatsoever with the out of game mail. Not yet anyway.
All battle reports (NPC or otherwise) are saved and can be accessed at any time from the mail system. Special categories are the NPC battles, attack reports and defense reports.
This also fixes the issue of closing the game before looting the bag after a fight. Since the new reports are persisted, the player can log back into the game, access the battle report from the email and loot the bag. Of course, moving will still destroy the bag, so make sure you loot before doing that.
The new system opens the door for players that were not involved in a battle to see its outcome. Epic battles can be published for all to see. But this will happen in a future release.
More resources
New resource caches were added on the main map, pvp maps, barbarian map and the knight map. These resources will also respawn after being picked up in intervals ranging from 15 minutes (on the knight map) to 2 hours (on the starter map). This will allow for a more focused resource farming, if a player uses mostly one type of resource.
Furthermore, the resource caches on the starter and barbarian maps have been boosted by a factor of up to 100 and now provide a significant boost to the economy (are worth picking up).
The PVP quest maps will now contain respawnable resources worth between 200k and 300k gold. Just be brave enough to go there and collect them.
NPC Guards
The mines on PVP quest maps and on the knight island now have guards. The guards respawn every 2-4 hours (random) and are easy to defeat by a player able to do the quests in the corresponding map. All guards are however very “tanky”, so the battle will take quite some time, leaving the player vulnerable to attack by other lords.
This also fixes the problem of having empty, untrained, lords roaming the PVP maps just collecting resources from mines (and flipping control also). If a player wants to roam, it will need to risk at least some troops to do it.
Equipment changes
All soldier equipment items had their stats altered in a similar way the lord equipment was altered in the previous patch. Damage mitigation was substantially reduced, while flat HP was buffed.
Main armor pieces will now yield a bit better stats then the leggings (across the board).
Stats increases from using higher tier items has dropped. High tier items should now be just “a tad better” with a big added price tag.
Plunder changes
The value of plunder resulting from battles has been tweaked a bit. Killing high tier soldiers will yield great results while killing monsters and lower tier soldiers will not be as profitable.
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