Are you itching to try out a new RPG? You might want to look at Yaengard, a turn-based strategy RPG developed by a relatively small development studio called Planeshift Interactive. What separates this game from other titles in the genre is its Trait System, where your decisions not only unlock new powers, but also dictate what your characters are ultimately going to be. Will you be a ruthless warrior who charges into battle without thinking things through? Or will you become a more calculating strategist, carefully developing plans to keep losses to a minimum? The choice is entirely up to you.
Recently, Planeshift Interactive released Update 6, which you can download from Steam. This patch features the much-needed overhaul of the combat system, with the goal of improving game speed and adding new strategic and tactical decisions all throughout.
To start, all abilities in Yaengard now have cooldowns, so you can't just abuse an ability in each and every turn. This forces you to try out various strategies to win battles. Special avenues have also been added based on your character's personality and skills. This means that personalities now have a more meaningful impact on combat.
If the pace of combat is too slow for you, a couple of new settings have been added that let you adjust the combat speed to your liking.
Patch Notes
New Features And Mechanics
- Added a basic attack ability to all weapons.
- Completely re-done the potions and consumables; combat items are way cooler and unlock new potential for multiple builds.
- Added requirements for some non-combat card options so only adventurers with certain personalities can get/select them.
- Added unique abilities to legendary boss drops.
- Added more rare legendary boss drops.
- Added rare champions you can encounter; defeat them for rare combat items to build your characters around, or die trying.
Progression
- Added The Archive, a collection log to track everything you find during your journey. Look up special abilities, design your builds, and embrace your inner completionist. Get that 0% to 100%!
Improvements
- Reduced XP required to level up, reducing the total # of encounters by 20%.
- Tweaked some enemies, including wasps, to increase consistency in combat difficulty.
- Re-did early-game trinkets to be more impactful by letting them scale per level.
- Many minor balance improvements (especially around might).
Bug Fixes
- Nerfed wasps (which accidentally sometimes were 3-5x as tanky as intended)
- Fixed a bug that caused summons to be on the wrong team
- Fixed major bug causing armor to suck, and bloodcurse not properly countering armor.
- Fixed some outdated tutorial popups
- Re-did HP scaling for units to be less extreme with crazy modifiers, and scale as expected with multiple layers of buffs/debuffs. For Act 2, complete HP-rework for all enemies.
- Updated ~6 trinket perks to behave more intuitively.
- Fixed a bug that caused perks to be swapped out when loading a saved game.
- Multiple fixes (missing icons, typos, logic errors) with challenge modes & enemies might
- Multiple improvements to text and dialogue (editing).
- Updated a ton of ability descriptions for accuracy, language, behavior, and clarity.
Yaengard is available on Steam for $24.99.
