It's time for the monthly report I promised last time. I will be keeping these relatively short, but I will be sharing as much information as I can. I will obviously withhold some minor details to keep them as a surprise.

War system

I'm happy to say that I was capable to make the system work as I wanted to. It is still ugly and is missing quite a few features, but the major ones are finished.

Fighting screen. You can see the number of soldies you have, their buffs, debuffs and you can freely switch them around. Fighting is automatic. You press a button, all units attack other units in their row and both sides lose soldiers. You can then switch units around, reinforce weakened formations, buff certain squads and once you are ready, you press the button again. You win if you attack row without any soldiers, you lose if your empty row gets attacked. You also lose if you run out of morale. Morale gets lowered by one every turn. Command points allow you to use abilities to buff your soldiers. 

Entire system is suposed act like a minigame. An activity that is suposed to be repeated quite often so I don't want to make it too complex and time demanding, but that doesn't mean it will be easy to win or that there will be no need for player to do anything but watch the numbers go down.

You can train new soldiers. You need enough weapon / armor resource and you also need enough recruitable population. (Different units will require different population pools. Kobold grunt needs kobolds, orc grunt requires orcs and so on.)

To get weapon / armor resourcess, you need to dismantle / store your old weapons. This makes even trash weapons you get from killing wild kobolds useful. It also makes smithing more useful since you can simply make these weapons your self. You gain different "weapon resources" depending on the type of weapon you dismantle, Those kinds are: Small melee, Heavy melee, Bows, Guns.

There is still a lot of work to do, so don't expect the release any time soon. However, I'm also working on a minor patch, which will be released in the first half of this month.

Next patch

Next patch will be quite small, but will have some nice things in it.

Main feature will be overhauled kobold loot.

Kobolds are very weak and they give some decently expensive and in the early game, strong weapons. You can simply take Billy with you and kill smaller squads with no problem. And if you are lucky, you can sell the loot for about 400 silver. 

I decided to balance this by giving them different loot drops. I created four new weapons you can loot from them. They are very cheap, so they don't sell for much, but they are quite strong for early game characters. Comparable to weapons they were droping up until now.

Kobold axe, which can be used as an axe and pickaxe for gathering, kobold canon, which counts as a rifle, kobold cleaver, which counts as a sword and lastly short kobold spear. The only one handed spear in the game right now.

This should make grinding kobolds little less rewarding for stronger characters, but weaker characters will get rewarded more by getting these weapons, all of which are unique in some way (Axe can be used as two tools, canon and cleaver are the earliest weapons of their class you can get and the spear can be used with a shield).

I will also try and add one new haircut, which you can see on one of the pictures above. It still needs some work though, since I'm not fully happy wih it.

And lastly, I added an option to skip the entire intro sequence. 

The first time you start a new game, you will go through the intro sequence as before (Beach scene, Billy offering you the tutorial). Every new playthrough after that will ask you if you want to skip that part (defaults to yes). You don't have to finish the game for this to happen. Simply starting it is enough for the game to ask you in your future playthrough.

There are other things I added / changed and there are still some minor things I want to add before I release this version, so there is more to come.