Developers' comments

@Overall for power, provisions, and reduced Damage





We have increased the power of cards across the board while reducing the provision cost for many of them. On average, many cards should be a lot more efficient now, with this trend being most obvious for cards at the lower end of provision costs. Apart from that, we tweaked many high-damage cards. Bronzes in particular – in our opinion – shouldn’t dish out 4 or more damage. We want to limit those high-damage abilities to specials cards, which we believe are better suited for it. Right now, the meta mostly revolves around units with high damage output, but for the future we want to limit the overall damage output in favor of small pings here and there.





@Reach & row restrictions





Reach was introduced with homecoming to make rows more meaningful; unfortunately, the idea didn’t quite pan out. There was a huge gap between units with Reach 1 and Reach 2. The former in most cases didn’t see any play, while the latter for the most part didn’t really seem restricted. Instead of trying to make it work, we’ve decided to remove the mechanic altogether and replace it with row locked abilities which in our opinion feel better to play and are more intuitive. We already introduced some of those in this update and more of them will be coming in future updates.





@Northern Realms overall and respective faction identities





We want all factions to have a different feel as players pilot them. Northern Realms has already achieved that thanks to their greedy approach to amassing points: if you leave one or two engines on the board, they can run away with point value very quickly. We don’t want to change that. NR will remain the greediest faction; however, we believe some tweaks to their floor and ceiling is in order (no pun intended).

Apart from adding 2 new categories, Northern Realms will now have access to 3 new unique keywords. On top of that, for the future we want to be more liberal with giving Zeal and Formation to cards which should make the faction a lot more dynamic - akin to Syndicate.





@Warfare category





We want all factions to rely not only on units but also on special cards. For that reason, many factions have certain categories tailored towards them. This best example is in Syndicate, where Crimes were a huge success. We would like to repeat this in other factions. Northern Realms were sort of working with Spells but we’ve decided to move towards something that would flesh out the army feeling even better. Warfare will include all sorts of war-related activities which we will expand upon in future updates.





@Machines, Crew and Resupply keywords





Machines never really formed a proper archetype; their underlying issue was being too reliant on Charges. It didn’t matter if the player controlled 10 machines or 1; the charges were given to only 1 of them - the most efficient one. We hope adding Crew and Resupply will open up some deckbuilding possibilities where a mix of Machines are played in a variety of decks.





@Zeal, Inspire, Formation





Formation already appeared on few cards prior to this update, yet Zeal was a much more common keyword. We want to shift this balance in favor of Formation. It is a more interesting keyword in comparison to Zeal because it demands players to make more important gameplay decisions. It works especially well with another new keyword – Inspired. The combination of Formation and Inspired will hopefully result in a lot more engaging gameplay where players will have to decide not only on how to build their decks, but also make many crucial in-game decisions, such as whether they are able to sacrifice one turn in order to make their abilities more powerful in the future turns.





@Shield





Shield is a really nice status that goes nicely with what Northern Realms wants to achieve. We plan to continue supporting this “archetype” both with this update and with future updates as well.