March: Forging Rings

Hello our sweets and savories!

We have a lot to cover this month, so let’s get the faster stuff out of the way. The final version of HEAT is now out of our hands and into yours!

It is out to our backers and supporters, and late backing and pre-orders will be coming out soon as soon as we navigate printing and distribution while the American empire collapses.

Now, what has been eating into our work schedule?

With the new layout and assets, we could get down to the same game design and playtesting.

There have been some retouches here on there: streamlining how Magic attacks are calculated and how the Magic Cycle moves, some of the gear, etc. During those changes, two omissions stood out.

The first was that Bows had become the de facto specialized counter weapon. Want to stop airborne troops or animal-dependent forces? Use Bows. Of course, if one were to embrace this role, there was no anti-Cavalry weapon. As such, a new Bow type was added.

Armor did not feature prominently on the Alpha playtests, but became ubiquitous as Warbands gained bigger Supply budgets. For diversity of builds, two options were added, including an anti-magic weapon which is as effective as it is expensive—but weakens your own ability to use magic.

We also found that Relationships were too open-ended, which often caused decision paralysis when using them for tactical maneuvers—a bad thing to happen when a game is played with a timer!

To facilitate that, we have distributed Relationships across various categories, each associated with different elemental affinities.

A chance to see how units grow and develop was what we were looking forward to the most in the Beta, and what a joy it was. Units always improve one of their stats each battle, but those performing heroic Deeds get multiple improvements. Furthermore, you can have different Promotion events, which offer a chance for your units to join the officer ranks. Rather than picking a unit for Promotion and having the outcome randomly dictated, you roll to see what would happen if a unit were promoted. If that story is one you would be interested in pursuing, you can pick it!

While the Alpha already introduced the concept of Mastery as something available to units that have already advanced five times in their current class, listed Mastery abilities and what not, it did not go in depth into how Mastery events integrated with Campaign Play.

While getting some nice bonus passives for your current class is nice, the Mastery thing most people have been asking about is the listed classes. Advanced Classes are all-powerful specialists that drastically change how you play battles and how you build your Warband. Longer campaigns become all about rushing Advanced Classes and customizing your strategy around them. However, for shorter campaigns, Advanced Classes might show up only in the climactic battle to escalate tension and turn the tables at the last moment of a losing streak.

Each Advanced Class has tight requirements, but it is not locked to a particular progression. If you build a unit a certain way, you can make it any class you want. However, every Basic Class can ignore the requirement of three different Advanced Classes, making it much easier for certain Basic Classes to promote to specific Advanced Classes.

Not all planned Advanced Classes will be available for the Beta, but we are taking care to provide a list that offers plenty of options.

This is what everyone was waiting for the Beta for. I know for a fact that many people have refused to play the Alpha until they can play through at least a six-battle campaign. You don’t have to wait anymore.

On top of Promotions to officer ranks and Mastery of classes, a phase for Prisoners of War has been introduced. The Capture Tactical Maneuver was a trick one to pull and it was not clear in the Alpha what the benefits were. Well, now Captured units can influence the outcome of a war as much as battles themselves. During the Alpha, the only option was to continue to keep someone prisoner, “locking” their Supply as the warband of the captured unit cannot be put to other units. Now you can exchange prisoners of war, ransom them for supplies, warchest and treasure… or even execute a particularly troublesome unit (with devastating consequences for this treatment of captives).

All six officer skills now have uses, helping you do better in the Campaign phase. Wage guerrilla warfare as you retreat a region, preventing enemy conquest; forage for supplies while remaining in the field, etc.

Now, what makes Campaigns special:

Campaign events.

Campaign Events offer powerful rewards and dramatic narrative opportunities. While the outcome of an event has randomization, each player that stays in a region can experience any event with any of their characters. Each Event builds upon a type of Relationship, with better outcomes becoming more likely if there is a Relationship of that type involving the character experiencing the event, as well as those with the right elemental affinities. There are also events that are available only in victory and some that can only be selected in defeat. Some Relationships and their events become easier to foster when you are immersed in the violent and destructive mindset of war; others are only possible when you are forced to shake off those impulses and recuperate by fostering more creative and serene spaces of mind.

Each event has a reward that you get at the end, however, it is not about the prize but how you get it. Every die rolled will create small narrative scenes, which will shape the ongoing Relationships. Will you forgive those who wronged you? Will you pursue vengeance even when it might kill you? Will you accept harsh truths that change how you see this war and yourself?

The Alpha featured only one type of region—the Floodplains. As we needed to change regions often during campaign playtest, we needed something else, something different so that we did not keep changing between different Floodplains. So, for the Beta, three new regions have been added. We wanted the Exploration results to be drastically different, so that the regions would feel genuinely different. Taking Floodplains as the “default”, every other region has a different mechanical “gimmick”. The Steppe represents many endless grassland biomes, and it is full of Plains tags for Cavalry units to exploit. Often, exploration results will reveal how the armies have miscalculated the vast distances of the sea and grass and Plains “propagate” from the explored hex. The Forest is the opposite region, one where Cavalry and Aerial units are at a disadvantage, where the mechanical theme is the duality between the dark old growth heart of the forest and the vibrant, expanding force reclaiming clearings and bare rock—a dance that feeds the Magic Cycle interaction with terrain, creating powerful sources of Magic Energy. Finally, Coastal regions are defined by their relationship with a sea or another massive body of water, their unique mechanic involving “tile matching” (think Carcassone), allowing you to create different features connecting adjacent hexes, as you define coastlines, islands, trade routes, etc. Coastal regions are also full of hazardous terrain tags, as such, rewarding Warbands that equip their units with the right gear to exploit these hazards.

To sum it up, Coat of Arms Betas will include:

• Floodplains: The default region with every single possible terrain feature possible with similar odds.

• Steppe: Cavalry and high-mobility favoring region.

• Forest: Magic-rich, Cavalry and Aerial hindering region

• Coastal: Hazard-prone puzzle region that rewards Gear-investment over numbers (not recommended for early phases of campaigns where everyone is Supply poor!)

As you can see, there are some niches that beg to be filled. Perhaps a Region that makes Magic more difficult to use and rewards deploying large numbers of weapon wielders, perhaps a region where it is rewarding to “turtle down” in Hills and Forts, maybe a region where features often make Range 1 attacks more difficult, etc. However, any new region would have to have a unique mechanic for exploration AND be fun to play when trying it for a solo battle. We will see how many meet those criteria for the coming months.

After settling on a design for what Campaign Events will look like, we found an opportunity to add the “weird” units and classes of games like Fire Emblem and Final Fantasy Tactics. Mercenaries cost you Warchest (so they can put in risk your eventual campaign victory!) and have some serious limitations, but they also are extremely powerful and allow some neat customization and strategy if you build your Warband around them (like Advanced Classes do). However, Mercenaries get worse and worse the longer a campaign is, while dominating short campaigns.

This allowed us to make Mercenaries as a way to allow strategic richness for campaigns of all lengths. Advanced Classes are more satisfying for a longer campaign and perform better in the later battles of all campaigns. Mercenaries are more satisfying before you get your first unit with an Advanced Class and perform much better in the early battles of a campaign, where counters to their very narrow strategies are yet to be found.

It was obvious which one had to be the first (adapted to the way activations and actions work in Coat of Arms), but it was also quite obvious which one had to be the second.

Yep, you can now gain one-of-a-kind Gear as part of Campaign events! So keep fostering those Relationships. As a teaser, I’m leaving you with my favorite Treasure so far.

Ah alright, also the way we been playtesting which will also be available to all people getting the Beta. All the assets and the Tabletop Simulator thing. Behold!

Well, the first priority will be to get the Beta to your hands. There is still substantial work to be done. While most of it is at the point that I am happy with for a Beta, there need to be more Campaign Events: 25, to be precise. That’s a lot of events to design and test, especially when there are only like 6-12 that come up during a campaign. Slow design and slow testing. Hopefully I will get enough to give you enough of a selection.

After that… well, the most immediate goals now that physical release of HEAT is out of our hands and at the mercy of the multi-crisis going on, it would be to finish Eve//Lilith, go back to Strays of the Realmscape or go back to writing Wintry Squama.

But I get the feeling after ‌three intensive months of working on the Coat of Arms Beta, I will need a break and slow down first.