Roots of Harmony News

🎄❄️🎄

• Added: Campfire encounter. That's a generic one that can give you either an essence of joy (+10 HP) or an essence of hope (+1 map speed).
  
• Added: The disciples list can now be sorted by disciple's direction.
  

• Changed: The wisdom cost for all essences is now 2 / 3 instead of 1 / 2 (lesser / greater).
  
• Changed: A blue [!] mark is now displayed next to lands that have an encounter.
  
• Changed: Essence of Hope is low a lesser essence.
  
• Changed: Markets can now be bought. The difference between the previous "investment" option is that you can own the land, and spawn your disciples from there.
  
• Changed: Buying a market, a mine or a plantation does not increase imperial threat anymore.
  
• Changed: Reduced the chance of looting with the [Looter] trait from 50% to 33%.
  
• Changed: You can no longer receive a corrupted essence from altar conversion.
  
• Changed: Essence of Flower has been renamed to Essence of Joy.
  
• Changed: The witch event now gives the trait [Possessed] (randomly attacks allies), instead of killing a random disciple.
  
• Changed: Starting a game with a name that already exists now raises an error.
  

• Fixed: Imp event couldn't be finished.
  
• Fixed: Engaging combat while a disciple was investigating would engage him as well, instead of ignoring him.
  
• Fixed: When a disciple would receive the [Stubborn] trait, the message sent was the wrong one.
  
• Fixed: Working disciples could cumulate the [Stubborn] trait with [Strong] and [Injured].
  
• Fixed: The Trader wouldn't actually buy all your consumables.
  
• Fixed: Events could create generic disciples when creating a random disciple.
  

Roots of Harmony 1.2 is now live!

It's been a while now that I wanted to add more things to do in RoH. Something was missing, so I've tried a few gameplay mechanics before coming to the one that is introduced with this new version: land encounters. The main focus while designing this new system was on two things: fun and randomness. From black magic invocation, to a bizarre imp that wants to go back to her sugar daddy through a demonic portal, and a man pretending to be a unicorn, those manually triggered events should spice up your games! For now, there are 30 different encounters (some with different outcomes), but obviously the list will grow over time.

I had the pleasure (and honour!) of being in two Twitch streams (the game, not me). It's sometimes difficult to get feedback when you're small, so that was really interesting for me to see people playing the game and recording their reaction on video. I realised that some things that I thought were easy to understand were too hidden, or not so well explained. No matter how many explanatory popups I've written, it was obvious that RoH needed a proper tutorial. So the new tutorial introduced in 1.2 shows some basics, some combat, and forces you to go through menus you might have missed. It takes your hands for 4 turns through a scripted scenario, then quickly fully unlock the game, as I didn't want it to last more than 15 minutes.

Most of the changes introduced in this patch are coming from players' feedback, so thank you guys! Keep playing, keep enjoying, and don't forget to leave a review, as Roots of Harmony is almost big enough to have its little official score on the store page (10 reviews needed!)

Thanks! 🤗
Guillaume (aka Joubarbe)

[hr][/hr]

• New feature: Land encounters. Those are special events that you trigger actively (disciples not needed) by visiting places or talking to unique characters that are generated on normal lands. Some of them can spawn anywhere, but others are associated with a cardinal direction (ie. you won't find an igloo in the South).
  
• New feature: Tutorial. It took me a while, but I wanted to see where people were struggling the most. Note that the tutorial is not available in New Game+.
  

• Added: 40 new end-turn events. Those are mostly "reaction" events. Prior to 1.2, a few decisions you could make had no impact. It's no longer the case, as factions will now react to your choices (such as child labour), and other events will trigger in chain.
  
• Added: 30 land encounter events. Those encounters will also be generated for existing save games, but be warned that the experience could be a bit imbalanced in that case. For that reason, a new game is recommended.
  
• Added: A few tips here and there, more explanations, QoL, and more colour codes (eg. highlight of abnormally high combat stats).
  
• Added: New adjacency bonuses between Pub and Graveyard; and Temple and Brothel (up to you to imagine what you want!).
  
• Added: New traits: Stubborn (cannot receive combat order), Nimble (avoid all range attacks), and Ephemeral (will disappear after a fixed number of turns).
  

• Changed: Increase excess thresholds of Cruelty, Greed and Vanity to 40.
  
• Changed: Essences can only be converted once. Remember that you can pause your buildings.
  
• Changed: Resource colour code (at the top of the screen) has changed. Now you see in RED Cruelty, Greed or Vanity when they reach the threshold value (40 in this new patch, was 30 before). Other resources are shown in RED when they drop below 0.
  
• Changed: Exploration screen has now a menu to quickly switch between directions without going back.
  
• Changed: Production menu now displays input and output on the main menu. For instance "1Be -> 1Co [1Cr]" means that it takes 1 Benevolence to produce 1 Communication and 1 Cruelty. The latter being an adjacency bonus.
  
• Changed: Production statistics can now be accessed by clicking the resource panel at the top, at any moment.
  
• Changed: Reduced [Healer] heals from 3-5 to 3-4.
  
• Changed: Disciples with the [Healer] trait cannot heal themselves.
  
• Changed: Chance of getting a gift from the Give To Receive perk decreased from 7% to 5%.
  
• Changed: Removed the "Rename land" option, as it clutters the menu for no good reason.
  
• Changed: "Balm" becomes "Bandage". (how do you stop bleeding with a balm?!)
  

• Fixed: You could convert an essence to a special non-generic one at an altar (was overpowered).
  
• Fixed: Random disciples created through events could be champions.
  
• Fixed: The game would tell you that you can recruit a new disciple when in fact, it was a Champion you already had (unique).
  

A little hotfix to mainly fix the imperial threat being increased when you reach a new phase. This should only happen in New Game+ and can make the game a lot harder. Sorry about that!

Enjoy and don't hesitate to leave a review! 🌲🦋🤗🦋🌲

Changelog:

• Changed: Max. ruins limit per land set to 1.
  
• Changed: All giant creatures receive a trait that clearly displays that killing them will drop an essence.
  
• Changed: Wooden Sculpture now gives 1 Inspiration and 1 Benevolence for 1 Greed.
  
  
• Fixed: Threat would increase after reaching a new phase in standard games.
  
  
• Typos and grammar.
  

The two weeks after the launch were quite difficult, as the game suffered from critical bugs that would only happen on very specific scenarios that were very hard to reproduce. But this is the past! Now that everything seems to work fine, it's time to look at the future, starting with version 1.1.

Version 1.1 adds two major features: New Game+ and Perks.



If you're a newcomer, you might regard Roots of Harmony as a tough game. If you're too shy about capturing new lands, or if you're too aggressive, you can find yourself in difficult situations, sometimes unmanageable. But when you understand how to please other factions, and when you anticipate enemy waves, the game is not that hard, and can become not challenging enough. This is where New Game+ comes to the rescue!

New Game+ increases the challenge of the game in various ways:

• The island is slightly bigger.
  
• Threat from all empires increases when you reach a new phase. Building peacefully in your little corner hoping that no one will notice you is no longer possible.
  
• New set of milestones that forces you to ally to three different factions. This alliance will force you to explore more lands, and to deal with factions that do not necessarily share the same doctrines with each other.
  
• Doctrine instability: if you take too many doctrines, your people will lose their cohesion and start to disagree with each other. Fewer doctrines mean fewer disciples, so you'll have to use them even more wisely than before.
  
• Monolith: this new landmark, only available in New Game+, allows you to ascend your disciples. In exchange for their wisdom, their stats can be improved, depending on what Monolith they ascend to.
  
• You need more buildings to reach the next phase.
  
• Jewels and artefacts give fewer reputation points.
  
• You need to finish a standard game before unlocking New Game+.
  

So far choosing a doctrine would unlock a disciple, and also allows you to select more options during the events that occur at the end of the turn. But now in 1.1, doctrines also unlock a set of Perks. For now, there are two perks per doctrine, but there's obviously room for more.

• Each perk has a set of requirements. If you fulfil all of them, the perk is "active", otherwise it's "inactive".
  
• To benefit from the effects of a perk, it must be active. The reason behind that is that I'd like the player to face difficult choices, where choosing one option could deactivate one perk and then change the outcome of a battle, an event, or a strategic decision.
  

For now, each doctrine has two perks: one that offers a unique behaviour, such as Necromancy or Conversion; and one that unlocks a Champion. And because there are 12 doctrines, version 1.1 brings 12 new disciples!

Champions are special: they have a lot more HP, move faster and deal more damage. However, you are limited to 1 type of Champion at all times. In other words, if you unlock two doctrines, you cannot have more than two Champions.



- Added: New Game+.
- Added: Perks.
- Added: a new menu to show all buildings from all phases.
- Added: information about the strength of the waves that your enemies can send at you. This information is available in the faction menu.
- [1.1.1] Added: mouse support.

- Changed: the Cultist is now more melee oriented.
- Changed: the Skirmisher is now more range oriented.
- Changed: the name of the Preacher to Sermoniser, to avoid any confusion with the "preaching" task. It won't change the name of your current disciples if you load a game after the update.

- Various fixes and typos.



Roots of Harmony has a lot of room for improvements and new features. If the game receives a few more good reviews, I will be able to continue updating it for quite a while :-) For now, I have plans until 1.4, and that includes a big new feature that will bring a totally new concept in the game, in the form of rituals and dreams. So stay tuned and enjoy this new version!

- Added: Steam option to launch accessibility mode.

- Changed: accessibility font is now green instead of white.
- Changed: the number of disciples and lands of other factions is now hidden.
- Changed: the background is now shaded when a popup opens.

- Fixed: crash due to an invalid memory access.