Slaves of Magic News

Hello everyone!

I'm happy to announce that our new trailer and demo are now available!

This new demo lets you play 3 months of in-game time, getting a feel for the early game. We are very excited to have reached this milestone!

Our plans for the next few months are to listen to your feedback about the demo (which by the way you can share on the Steam forums or our Discord here), iterate on it, plus add additional content to it.

Hello everyone!

This month, I'm here to talk about the heart of the resistance. The resistance fighters! They are the player's most important pieces as controlling them is the main way the player interacts with the tactical layer. But before we get to that, let's start with some eye candy!
Northern region

The northern region map generation has been completed. In the upcoming demo, the temperate and the northern region will be accessible for missions. A few examples of how it looks:







[h2]Recruiting units[/h2]

The resistance can recruit new units in the recruitment tab for gold. The available recruits will be cycled monthly, and the amount of them depends on the resistance monthly soldiers tab (top left on the next picture).



Not all soldiers are created equally. There are positive and negative traits a soldier can have, and that can affect their various statistics. Building training facilities in the resistance bases can improve the monthly soldier rate, giving the player a bigger pool of units to choose from, plus every facility increases the freshly recruited soldier level by one.

[h2]Leveling up[/h2]



All soldiers at level one will start with access to 1 skill slot and will gain one every level up till they reach the max skill slot number of 6. The skills will be freely swappable at any time outside combat. There are no classes so every soldier will be able to access any skill the resistance has access to, leading to a high amount of possible skill combinations. There are 2 restrictions though:

• Every skill belongs to an attribute, for example, sword-wielding. On any unit skill bar, there can be skills from 3 different attributes.
  
• There are very powerful elite skills, which have a golden border. Every unit skill bar can only have 1 elite skill.
  

Besides getting access to more skills, the level-up increases a unit's melee attack and melee defense of a unit by 5, making them more consistent.

Experience is earned on the battlefield. The amount of experience earned will depend on the invader's unit amount and level, plus there will be a bonus if the mission has been successful.

[h2]How to learn new skills[/h2]



The resistance has access to different attributes depending on their bases location. Every region has attributes that belong to that region. If the resistance wants to use skills of that attribute, they will need to build a base in a region that has that attribute. In practice, that means the player will going to have to consider this aspect as well when choosing base locations. Choosing one can mean losing access to another.

Research has a big impact on the availability of skills as well. There are 3 levels of understanding for a given attribute. Researching a higher level will unlock stronger skills belonging to a given attribute. Neglecting research will lead to slower skill accumulation.

The plan is to have 11 attributes in the game, 5 for the weapons, 3 non-magical, and 3 for magical late-game attributes with at-least 6 skills each. This should provide plenty of combinations for replayability.

[h2]Closing thoughts[/h2]

So that's it for today's devlog! Some general information is that we are getting very close to our new demo. It is nearly feature complete, it just needs a bit more time for polish and general bug fixing. If you want to be among the first to know about its release, feel free to join our discord here.

Hello everyone!

This month, I'm here to talk about how the combat layer has changed since our previous demo! Let's get to it!

[h2]Connection to the campaign layer[/h2]

To recap, check out what a mission briefing looks like when the enemy army tries to accomplish its mission.



The important part for this devlog is the Resistance mission part and the magic dust rewards at the bottom. The resistance mission shows what kind of mission the resistance will have to conduct to foil the army. These will be randomly generated except for special situations like base defense. For now, we have implemented two types. Ambush, in which the goal is to clear the area of enemies, and escort, where a VIP will be needed to be escorted to a designated location. But we plan to add more types of missions.

Another big change in the design of these missions is that we have removed the unlimited reinforcements. This came from a design philosophy change. I wanted to move away from hard timers which punish players if they are too slow. I still want to make the player take risks, but I wanted to rather reward players if they do. And here comes the magic dust into the equation.

In the campaign layer, there are basically 2 main resources. Gold, which is gained by the resistance's current status in the campaign layer, and magic dust, which will be earned by performance in the combat layer. A combat mission can end in three ways:

1. The player couldn't archive the objective. In this case, the enemy army mission goes through, and the resistance does not receive any magic dust.
   
2. The player archives the objective but failed to meet the time limit. In this case, the enemy army mission has been countered, and the player receives the normal magic dust reward.
   
3. The player archives the objective, and inside the time limit. In this case, the enemy army mission has been countered, and the player receives an increased amount of magic dust.
   

[h2]General combat changes[/h2]

The general combat has received some changes as well. To recap, originally we had a system very similar to the new XCOM-s with 2 activations, where the most "meaningful" actions will end your turn, like attacking. In addition, we have a stamina system that is being used by the unit's activatable skills.

The biggest change we have made is that no skill will end your turn. This means for example if you have an enemy unit adjacent to your active unit, that unit can attack twice if it wants to! But to make it more interesting, and not a no-brainer choice, every attack after the first will have a quite big multiple-attack penalty to the hit chance. This means that attacking twice will always be a strong option, but other non-attack skills can still make sense for a second action as they don't get the attack penalty.

The movement has received some changes as well. Namely, attack of opportunity became a passive skill rather than being always active by default. Instead, leaving a tile that is inside the enemy zone of control will cost 2 instead of one. This change makes maneuvering stronger by default, but it is a necessary change so that the movement action can compete with the sheer value of a second attack.

The way stamina is used has been fundamentally changed as well. Now, every time a unit uses its second action, that costs 1 stamina. If they don't have enough stamina they can't use their second action. This makes stamina an integral part of the system, rather than just the fuel for skills (though it retained this function as well). It gives a nice dilemma to the player when you have an exhausted unit to use its one possible action point or skip the turn to rest and regain stamina.
[h2]
Ranged combat[/h2]

Another big feature is the return of ranged combat! We have implemented both bows and crossbows. Regions with the marksman attribute will unlock them for the resistance. They share the marksman skills between them, but they have some pretty big fundamental differences.



The bow does rather low damage but is able to shoot twice. This means that it is very deadly against badly armored targets, but armor is very effective in reducing its damage.


The crossbow has an accuracy bonus and does moderate damage with armor piercing. But there is a big catch! After every shot, it will be needed to be reloaded. So while its damage is more consistent, especially against armored opponents, the max potential damage per round is lower.

The calculation of hit chance is a bit different for ranged attacks as well. Instead of using the target defense statistic, it will use the double of the distance between the attacker and the target. And there is no flanking hit chance bonus in case of a ranged attack, though it will still ignore shields in this case. There is a possibility to obstruct a shot if there is an obstacle or another unit right next to the target.



The best defense against ranged attack is not being in the line of sight, or if that fails shields and armor. The max range by default is double the sight range of the unit, so other units can spot for the ranged attacker.

[h2]Closing thoughts[/h2]

On an unrelated note, the heavy armor the resistance is using has been reworked:



So that's it for today's devlog! As always, if you like what you see and want to show your support, the best way to do that right now is to join our Discord here. Otherwise, see you next time!

Hello everyone!

This month, we have done a lot of work on a new mission type, called base evacuation! In this mission type, the resistance will need to hold up the invaders long enough for the evacuation. Let's see how it works in detail.

[h2]Campaign side[/h2]



A quick reminder of how rebel bases work. Every region has multiple territories, and the resistance can have one secret base per region, in one of the territories. If at any point the territory with the base loses all loyalty to the resistance, the rebel base will be exposed, and the base will be attacked by the army that caused the loyalty loss. So managing the loyalty of territories with a rebel base will be very important if the player wants to avoid this kind of mission.

In case there are other valid territories for the resistance base in this region (so territories with non-zero loyalty), then the base evacuation mission will trigger. How much of the base will be evacuated will depend on the performance of the player on the mission. On a failed mission, or if there are no valid territories to evacuate the base is automatically destroyed.

[h2]Combat side[/h2]

The combat map will be generated using the rooms that have been built in the campaign layer for the base. A reminder of how it looks in the campaign layer:



Every buildable room has a combat map equivalent. Few examples of parts of the different rooms:









The mission itself will be the inverse of what the resistance is used to. The mission starts with the resistance units semi-randomly placed around in the base, with the enemy's first wave teleporting in. The player will have 1 round to try and make the best of the given situation, but depending on the circumstance, it can be a very tough fight!



The player units can retreat at any point like in a normal mission, but the objective is to defeat 3 waves of enemies. The end result depends on how many waves have been defeated. In case of 1, the base will be evacuated, but the rooms are lost. In case of 2, a random 2 rooms have been evacuated as well, and in case of 3, the full base has been successfully evacuated.

[h2]Closing thoughts[/h2]

Unrelated, but a piece of very good news is that we have found a great composer who did a great job creating custom-made music for the game. Thanks to this, we will have control over the copyrights of these tracks, so there won't be any issue for content creators who will want to create videos about our new demo! While you will need to wait for the demo to check out the tracks themselves, but the composer has a Youtube page with great tracks if you are curious about what to expect here.

So that's it for today's devlog! As always, if you like what you see and want to show your support, the best way to do that right now is to join our Discord here. Otherwise, see you next time!

Hello everyone!

I thought it would be a good idea to talk a bit about our plans for the start of this year! We have a good and a bad new.

The bad news is that we will remove the demo from the store on Jan 30. I hope everyone who was interested in it has already tried it out in the 3 months it has been available so far. The reason for the removal is that we feel it doesn't really represent the current state of the game anymore. But we don't want to backport every change that has been made since then into this demo.

Now onto the good news! We are planning to release a new demo in spring with both the campaign layer and the combat layer, so for the first time, you will be able to try out the whole experience together! It is a very exciting moment for us, seeing all the systems in action together, and getting it into the hands of the players.

But learning from the previous demo, we would want to present a more polished version to the public, and for that, we will need your help. Considering the number of systems interacting in the game, it is just pretty much impossible for the two of us to find every bug. So we plan to have a closed beta test for this demo, which will be accessible from our Discord. I will make another announcement when we are ready to start this closed beta but if you would be interested, you can already join our Discord here.