Wartales Community Update #3 Live

Following a new round of community feedback, Shiro Games brings us this early access update for their mercenary RPG Wartales. This update introduces a new system that lets your companions react to various events around them, a proper relationship system, an overhaul of the prisoner system, and more.

Here are the patch notes:

Hello mercenaries!

We’re very excited and proud to present the third community update for Wartales! This update focuses on some of the more popular community requests, bringing character relationships, customisation, balancing passes, economic improvements and more to Wartales!

In addition, the much requested Chinese localisation is nearly complete. And we plan to run a beta with our Chinese players in June with a view to release fully shortly afterwards. We'll share more news with you all about this soon.

Finally, for our non-English speaking players, please note that due to some issues with localisation, some text may not be translated correctly/at all. We are aware of this issue and will have it fixed when the final translations are provided to us early next week.

With all that out of the way, let's take a look at what's new!

Changelist:

NEW SYSTEM Confessions!

In Wartales, many things happen every day. The loss of a companion, a particularly poorly negotiated battle or, on the contrary, the heroic fight led by your captain can leave a mark on your companions' minds.

To represent this, we have devised a system in which your companions react, according to their own personality, to these events in the form of a speech punctuated by decisions to be made.

Will you make your companion drink after the death of his boar friend? Or will he help himself to the common fund to compensate for his grief? The choices you will make will deeply affect your companion for the rest of their life, leading them to strengthen up or, on the contrary, to leave the troop.

NEW SYSTEM Relations!

In addition to the confession system, we have developed a system of relationships between your companions. Wartales is first and foremost a story about a group of mercenaries who live from day to day and who fight, grow rich or die together.

To represent this, your companions can form friendships or enmities with others. The consequences are numerous: they generate Happiness together, fight better side by side and can even fall in love. On the other hand, they may hate each other, in which case it would not be a good idea to have them sleep together, unless you risk finding one of your protégés with his throat slit during the night.

Different actions have a chance to increase or decrease the relationships.

REWORK Prisoners

Do not let them escape! Prisoners now have a chance to escape. To represent this, they have an 'escape ability' stat. To prevent a prisoner from escaping, you can place companions close to them during a Rest. Obviously, some companions will be more effective than others in this exercise.

Recruit your prisoners! Prisoners who spend time with you and are treated well may one day ask to join your troop. Yes, it is possible to reconstitute a real Inquisition troop!

A new piece of camp equipment is introduced: the whip. Assign a foreman to whip your companions and make them work more efficiently. Indeed, a whipped companion produces twice as fast when assigned to a production camp equipment! Be careful not to overuse it or it may succumb to the blows.

A new piece of camp equipment has been introduced: the pillory. Tie your prisoners to the pillory to prevent them from escaping!

Prisoners that escape your troop can be found in the world. Their fate is yours to decide…

If you deliver a prisoner in prison, he can now escape and seek revenge…

Tombs of the Ancients
  • If you do not want to solve a puzzle, you will now get some help: in exchange for Krowns or Influence, somebody might be able to solve it for you.
Starting options
  • You can now select starting traits for your companions.
  • You can now select the color of your pony’s dress.
  • The willpower of your starting companions should now be 10.
Game over

Some Game over mechanics were frustrating, especially for Ironman mode players. We decided to tune them:
  • When you have no more torches, you are now expelled from the ruin with armor to repair and injuries instead of getting a game over.
  • Important allies can now start Dying.
  • If an important ally starts Dying, you can now instantly retreat.
Traits
  • Some traits are now hidden. Your companions may come into the world with hidden personality traits or talents that can be revealed when the conditions are met.
  • A lot of new traits have been added.
Camp
  • You can now feed and pay your companions even if you don’t have enough krowns or food to do it. Your loss of Happiness will be adjusted to match the amount.
Camping gear
  • Some camp equipment has become production camp equipment : workshop, brew barrel, meat dryer, skin drying rack and beehive.
  • You now must assign a companion to them to make them work.
  • Whipped companions work twice as fast on these.
  • You can now assign a Thief to the chest to launder any stolen items.
  • Watch stool now also reduces the prisoners' chances to escape when a companion is assigned to it.
  • Lectern now generates knowledge points when a scholar is assigned to it.
  • You can now play the lute minigame in taverns.
Economy
  • We also did an economic balancing pass with several goals in mind: to make the start of the game smoother and to make the game more challenging with higher levels while making the management of very large groups more economically challenging.
  • The purchase price of items depends on their level: at low levels, they are proportionally cheaper while at high levels, they are proportionally more expensive
  • The selling price of items has been globally reduced.
  • Krowns gained in missions are always proportional to the size of the troop and increase less and less as the troop grows.
  • The influence cost of mission bonus negotiations increases proportionally to the gain in krowns
  • The cost of recruiting now increases with troop size, rather than linearly.
  • The cost in krowns for prisoners is increased.
  • Wages increase more and more with the level of the companion and no longer linearly.
Items
  • Like the crafted items, each item now has a prerequisite level to be equipped
  • You can now upgrade the level of your legendary weapons in exchange of Krowns in a Companion Training Grounds.
World
  • Directional signs are now placed in the regions to indicate the direction of the different villages
  • Enemies aggro range now scales with the power of your troop. The more you have, the less they want to fight you.
  • Rat invasions now respawn in Harag.
New options
  • You now have a huge list of options for the game. For example, you can now choose new keybinds for your skill bar or disable the weather visual effects.
  • An icon indicating the weather status of the day has been added next to the calendar
  • Credits have been added.
Graphics
  • Faces and hairstyles have been updated!
Skills
  • Functional duo has been reworked : Now deals 40-60% of Strength to a target and applies Riposte to the engaged ally.
  • Attack order has been reworked : Now deals 30-50% of Dexterity to a target and if this backstabs, the engaged ally launches an opportunity attack.
Bugfixes
  • Fixed attacks during Rest happening too often.
  • Fixed a crash when an unit has too many skills
  • Bionn should now always be a woman.
  • Animals should no longer disengage in combat for no reason.
  • General gameplay, AI and optimisation based fixes
As always, Thank you all for your feedback and suggestions, we're looking forward to hearing your thoughts and feedback so we can start planning out our next community update!

But before that, we'll have our second major content update and the highly anticipated co-op update, which we'll have more news to share with you on very soon. Stay tuned...

Shiro Games