Dev Diary #26: Primal Culture
Hello everyone, my name is Tom Bird and I’m the lead designer at Triumph Studios. Today I’m here to talk about the new Primal Culture from our upcoming Primal Fury content pack!
Primal Culture is nature focused and for people who want a culture that is all about having a connection with the land and the creatures who live there. Primal cultures focus on a deep connection with a Primal Animal who they see as their totem, guide and protector. You can choose which Primal animal your culture communes with, and this has a big impact on how your culture plays. To help explain this we’ll go with the example of the Mire Crocodile.
(Note that all cultures can choose to ride crocodiles, I just picked it here because it was appropriate!)
The Mire Crocodile is aligned with nature affinity, so that means that our cultural affinity becomes double nature (if we’d chosen the Storm Crow we’d have gotten astral instead, for a nature/astral culture), and it means that our some of our units do blight damage with their attacks.
Each Primal animal is associated with a particular type of terrain, and the Mire Crocodile is associated with Swamps.
This means we start off in swampy terrain, and gain the following bonuses:
- Our units gain Swamp Walking, so they can move faster through the terrain
- Provinces with Swamp grant our cities +3 food
- When we summon Mire Crocodile units, they are more powerful when we’re in Swamp provinces
To prevent issues with overlapping bonuses, Primal cultures cannot use Terrain Adaptation form traits, however we can still terraform the landscape to our chosen terrain if we can find a Mire Crocodile Den.
Dens are special locations that are only visible to primal culture players with the correct Primal animal, when annexed they grant a bonus to city stability but more importantly they unlock the animal’s temple in the city. If we can build the Mire Crocodile Temple then the provinces near to our city will slowly start transforming into swamp, boosting our income! It’s important therefore that we keep our eyes open for these dens, since they’re priority locations for us to found new cities.
Of course, our Mire Crocodile will also help us in combat as well. In the most direct sense, we can directly summon him into combat using a spell!
Primal animals are all tier 2 mythic units, and they always use their favored damage types. This example has gained the Frenzy ability, since he’s been summoned into a swamp province!
The Mire Crocodile also empowers our cultural units with his Boon.
Each time a unit with a boon attacks, it gains a stack of Rising Fury (single attacks, such as from a shock unit, give 2 stacks). Once the unit gets its 5th stack, the Rising Fury is replaced by 5 stacks of Fury of the Mire Crocodile, this powerful buff enhances all of the unit’s attacks, granting them extra damage and the ability to inflict the Diseased status effect. Once the unit has attacked 5 times (one per stack), the effect expires and the unit needs to start building up Rising Fury again.
Some units, such as the support unit, the Animist, can spend their fury in other ways.
Animists can summon a Primal Mire Crocodile into combat for us, but this requires having Fury of the Mire Crocodile to be active, and doing so will immediately use up all the stacks the unit has, meaning it needs to start gathering Rising Fury again.
Animists also have the Spiritual Healing ability, this heals a unit for 15hp but also gains 3 stacks of Rising Fury, letting you quickly gain access to your Fury boost.
There are 7 Primal animals to choose from, so you can make your primal culture perfect for your chosen playstyle:
- Affinity: Nature
- Favored Terrain: Swamp
- Terrain Bonus: +3 food per swamp province
- Damage Channel: Blight
- Boon Effect: +3 blight damage and inflict diseased
- Special: Culture units have disease immunity
- Affinity: Astral
- Favored Terrain: Grassland
- Terrain Bonus: +2 mana per grassland province
- Damage Channel: Lightning
- Boon Effect: +3 lightning damage and an additional 4 lightning damage to adjacent enemies.
- Affinity: Shadow
- Favored Terrain: Snow
- Terrain Bonus: +3 production per snow province
- Damage Channel: Frost
- Boon Effect: +4 frost damage and 30% chance to freeze target
- Special: Can build farms in arctic provinces
- Affinity: Chaos
- Favored Terrain: Ashlands
- Terrain Bonus: +3 gold per ashland province
- Damage Channel: Fire
- Boon Effect: +3 fire damage and an additional 4 fire damage to one nearby enemy.
- Special: Can build farms in ashland provinces
- Affinity: Materium
- Favored Terrain: Sand
- Terrain Bonus: +2 gold per sand province
- Damage Channel: Physical
- Boon Effect: +3 physical damage and inflict blind
- Special: Can build farms in sand provinces
- Affinity: Nature
- Favored Terrain: Mushroom Forest (starts underground)
- Terrain Bonus: +3 knowledge per mushroom forest province
- Damage Channel: Blight
- Boon Effect: +3 blight damage and life steal
- Affinity: Order
- Favored Terrain: Forest
- Terrain Bonus: +3 draft per forest province
- Damage Channel: Spirit
- Boon Effect: +3 spirit damage, +2 additional spirit damage per ally adjacent to the target.
We’ve already seen the Animist unit, but what about the others? With the exception of the protector, The primal core units favor maneuverability, and taking the fight to the enemy.
The Darter is the starting ranged unit, their Blowguns have one less range than other ranged units, but ignore the accuracy penalties from cover. They also have Disengaging Shot which they can use when threatened by an adjacent enemy - this attack lets the darter damage the enemy and leap back to safety. As with the animist, the damage type of this attack changes depending on your chosen Primal animal!
The Protector is the other starting unit, it is a shield unit whose special ability Primal Renewal allows it to sacrifice its stacks of Fury in return for healing itself.
The Primal Charger is a powerful shock unit, their Cleaving Charge ability lets them strike up to three adjacent targets at once, while still gaining the damage bonuses and interruptions of a standard charge attack.
The primal culture’s tier 3 unit is the Ancestral Warden, this powerful Polearm forgoes the normal tactic of allowing shock units to charge into them by using Primal Lunge to leap directly into the middle of a group of enemies! The attack does damage to all enemies adjacent to where the Warden lands, and then places the Warden into defense mode ready to counter attack.
As a final feature, Primal Cultures have a special quest that will always trigger each session.
The type of quest and its goals differ between Primal Animals, but completing it will grant your ruler the full favor of their totem in the form of a powerful combat boost!
So, in conclusion Primal is a flexible culture that you can be customized to synergize with almost any affinity or tome path! Its powerful terraforming lets you take control of the lands, but you need to go and find rare spirit dens if you really want to make use of it.
That’s it for now, check by next week where we’ll have a dev diary showing off the new tomes! The Primal Fury content pack is due to be released on February the 27th.
[h2]Wishlist Primal Fury now![/h2]
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2401850/Age_of_Wonders_4_Primal_Fury/
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