Read the First Part Here
Signature Skills
The next big item on the block is signature skills, previously these were a small pool of active abilities, when reaching particular milestones the hero would get to pick a signature skill from a list of random options. This had several issues; A lack of control, wildly varying power levels and dilution of the heroes role.
Everyone would always pick the same skills, and particularly the summon abilities were problematic. Thus to put it bluntly, these are no longer the same. Many of these skills have been reworked and used elsewhere.
Affinity Dedications
For Mortal Champions and Wizard Kings, the signature skills take the form of Affinity Dedications. These grant effects that empower the army that the hero leads and unlock a pair of hero skills that support the builds and identity associated with that affinity.
To choose an affinity dedication, the hero must first reach the appropriate level, then the empire must have the appropriate affinity. At level 4, only Initiate dedications may be chosen and only of the affinities the empire has. At level 8 they may choose either Initiate dedications they do not yet have (with the same requirements) or any Adept level dedications their empire has enough affinity for.
At level 12, Master level and lower can be chosen, and lastly at level 16, Paragon or any other level.
Notice how for level 4, only the Initiate dedications of the empire’s affinities are valid.
This allows for mixing between multiple affinities, if you have a build that uses two very different affinities mechanics that you want to lean into, you can choose to give the hero two initiate dedications, giving access to the relevant skills.
Note that none of the Dedications require a previous one, they are purely restricted by the level and empire affinity. If you wish to skip nature initiate in favor of another affinity, but still want Adept of Nature on level 8 you can do so.
At level 8, because the hero already has the order initiate dedication, the only valid options are between Adept and Initiate of Chaos.
The affinity dedications are free, which means that as the hero levels they will empower the army they lead, this means that to make optimal use of your heroes should seek to have each lead their own army, setting them apart from the rank-and-file units they lead.
The hero then gains access to 2 additional hero skills based on the affinity dedication taken, Initiate of Nature for example grants Blight Strikes and Pack Leader. Letting the hero specialize to support builds that the empire may be leaning into such as applying poison and decay, or fielding lots and lots of animal units!
The Affinity dedications are divided into 4 levels, Initiate, Adept, Master and Paragon.
Each grants access to 2 new skills, one more offensively oriented and 1 more defensive/utility oriented. Paragon is the exception, granting only a single skill that is universally powerful.
Initiate grants access to build-supporting hero skills, such as the pay-off for attacking burning enemies in chaos, or the leadership buff to animals in nature.
Adept is usually more individual, letting the hero themselves take on the theme more strongly through a passive effect, such as Order’s Incorruptible spirit, which grants a huge boost to the status effect resistance of the hero. While Astral can gain evasion as they are attacked blurring their image.
Master skills are the active abilities, this is where some old favorites like Blink can be found as well as several new abilities such as Awaken Earth.
Paragon Skills are unique in several ways, firstly, while the other 3 levels grant the same (stacking) bonus to the army, the paragon dedications each give their own unique army boost. Paragon of Order for example grants all units in the army Resurgence, letting them all become immortal martyrs to the cause.
Additionally Paragon skills unlock only a single new hero skill option, one that is more universally powerful such as Materium’s Ancient of Earth or Shadow’s “Eternal One”
Become immortal, eternal king.
Tome hero skills
Formerly, tomes granted hero skills, many of those got reused, some did not make it. This has a few reasons, chief among these is the dilution of hero roles through them, and the fact that many were simply “filler” not really supporting their tome’s build in a significant capacity. Instead many of the build supporting skills were, as you could read above, reworked to fit into the affinity hero skills instead. This has the added advantage of not requiring particular tomes to gain the hero skill that supports the playstyle. You do not need to have Tome of souls to get the necromancy supporting hero skill to help with your tome of Necromancy build for example.
There are some that were more difficult than others, notably among these was Cleansing Flame Herald, part of the Tome of Cleansing flame. This is instead a passive gained when the Tome is unlocked, which should feel much nicer.
Art of the Hero Rework
For a (short) interlude here on the art side of this project I am including a section of Elle and Ana’s write up on the art of the Hero Rework, worry not I will return after the pretty pictures to provide more nerdy insight!
Hi all, Elle here, 2D Artist at Triumph! I’ll be the one to present you with the full “Art of Ways of War” dev diary at a later date, but I wanted to barge into Thomas’ dev diary too so I could share a little bit of background on the art side of the Hero Rework.
Before we bury the old interface permanently, have this very old pre-release mockup as a loving way to remember the admittedly-difficult-to-love listbox layout:
Image description: A mockup from September of 2021 (1 year and 8 months before release). Functionally very similar to the Hero Skill list at release, just prior to any polish.
About 6 months after release, we started exploring the idea of organizing these skills differently. Some early but scrapped ideas:
Image description: Two images of hero skills sorted by type (warfare/battle magic/support) and level
Note that these mockups did not consider changing the fundamental workings of the hero skills, we just didn’t like the UI visually. But feedback kept coming in about heroes feeling “samey” and lacking identity, so Thomas started cooking. He then approached me with that legendary “what if…”, a “what if” that gave us many sleepless nights but would ultimately become the pride & joy of all of us who worked on it. So let’s catch you up on the new Hero Skill interface, where did we start off and end up?
Well, this was the “what if” that Thomas handed me:
Image Description: ??? absolute designer mumbo jumbo
It then took probably 4 hours for him to explain this and for me to understand it (having this dev diary would’ve helped …), but after breaking my brain I did two mockups for how we could present this new Hero Skill system to the player:
Image Description: Hero Skill Tree layout mockup where each tree had a different tab
Image Description: Hero Skill Tree layout mockup where all three trees are present in one interface, similar to how the final in-game version was set up
As you can probably tell by the final result, we chose the latter in order to minimize clicking between different tabs. As a disclaimer, I’m able to do my mockups pretty easily and freely in photoshop, but getting them functional in-game is a whole different ball game. Simon (gameplay & interface programmer) did an incredible job translating the mockup despite technical and time limitations. We added additional functionality such as mutually exclusive skills, and even got to our stretch goal of incorporating different icons for the active abilities.
I also participated in unintentional intern abuse by assigning the reworked icons to our intern Alex, please give him some love for the monstrous amount of icons he made. Here are the hero skills alone, but most of these also come paired with either ability icons, unit property icons, and/or status effect icons.
Image Description: Screenshot of our Hero Skill psd
And an additional shoutout to our VFX Artist Ana, who made and reworked an equally monstrous amount of FX to go with this rework. If you think making hundreds of new icons is hard, imagine doing the same for effects that also have a gazillion possible combinations in modularity.
And of course the hero rework also came with the addition of governor bonuses and ambitions, all of which needed UI mockups, implementation, and icons too… but I’ll do plenty of rambling in the upcoming art dev diary so I won’t bore you with the details any further and instead let Thomas take back the reins!
Governance and Renown
The new hero panel, note the section on the left displaying all info related to Governance, Renown and the hero’s Ambitions.
Governance has always been a little messy, players could understand that they would assign a hero to govern a city and gain benefits from that, but exactly what and why was not always clear.
Basically each affinity point a hero had granted a tiny uptick in income that added together to a decently substantial amount.
I wanted to add more personality to the heroes, and at the same time make the presence of a governor much more noticeable and meaningful. Thus we concocted the Governance traits, heavily inspired by the governance background traits i’d made in a past update.
Look who is all grown up!
Governance traits are a new trait given to each hero that determines the effects they grant their governed city, these usually entice a city to specialize in a particular way, leading to more variation in the empire’s cities and a more noticeable impact from the Governor’s rule. Each hero has a random Governance trait, while rulers always have the very generalist Godir Governor trait, which boosts the throne city significantly.
Shiny new Governor selection UI, note it shows the levels of each Governor as well as the current active effects.
You may have noticed that the Governance trait has levels, these are unlocked by gaining Renown, further empowering the Governing effects of that hero. How do you gain renown you ask? Allow me to enlighten you about:
Ambitions
The new ruler ambitions, available for selection in the last step of Faction Creation.
Each hero has Ambitions, completing these ambitions is how they gain Renown and Renown levels.
Each Renown level grants their army a slight boost in morale, but most importantly Renown levels determine the benefits gained from the Governance skill!
Ambitions are chosen as a set, rulers may choose them during the creation process while heroes will have a random set of ambitions. Each set contains a Major and Minor ambition
Minor Ambitions are repeatable, short term goals, these are the main source of Renown gain.
Major Ambitions can only be completed once per hero, but grant a much larger reward and unlock a unique skill for the hero that suits the deed they’ve accomplished. A Duelist who manages to slay a ruler in single combat for example gains increased damage and defense against heroes!
This hero has managed to complete her major ambition, giving her a unique trait to boost her army’s aggression.
Should you end up with a hero whose ambitions you are unable to complete, after a set period of time an event will occur where you may choose to have them chase a different ambition instead, letting you continue their progress another way instead!
This one is one of my personal favorites, it was suggested by Lucas who did the code support for this particular system. With minor adjustments we put it in, it creates a really enjoyable dynamic where one of your heroes becomes the “Right hand” of your ruler.
Outro
The Hero Rework is an enormous undertaking, representing the largest rework of anything Triumph has ever done to a game post-release. Not just design and implementation, but code support by several of our famed Codir, with special thanks to Simon and Lucas, and also art, where Alex has soldiered through remaking every single hero skill and hero ability icon in the game or Ana who gave the hero abilities some much needed love in their visual effects!
So, after a grueling few months of hard work we arrive at the Tiger patch, alongside Ways of War’s release on November 5th this will make your conquest in Age of Wonders 4 even more heroic! I and the rest of Triumph look forward to seeing what you create with these new tools!
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