The latest Expeditions: Viking patch shakes things up a bit by introducing new caps on skill ranks, and adding a new feature – surprise rounds, while also fixing a plethora of bugs. Read on to find out more about the major changes:
New caps on skill ranks
The most significant change we’ve made is to introduce caps on all skill ranks based on the total amount of skill points you’ve spent. Ranks 1 and 2 are freely accessible, but in order to upgrade a skill to rank 3 you must have spent a total of 100 SP. To reach rank 4, you must have spent 175, and to max out a skill at rank 5 you must have spent a total of 250 SP. Recall that you begin the game with 50 SP and that there is a total of just over 300 SP in the campaign. The result is that you’ll have no skills above rank 3 when you go to Britain, and you won’t be able to level up to rank 5 until quite late in the game.
This update trades away some freedom of choice to enforce a better levelling curve. Previously, we let you max out your weapon skills quite early in the game, with the predictable result that you would outpace the enemies before you even reached Britain, and the enemies wouldn’t begin to catch up until near the end of the game. Now, you’re forced to distribute your points among the different categories, perhaps buying some Utility and Passive skills for a more well-rounded character. This does have the drawback that characters will be a bit less specialised, but the improvement to the game’s difficult curve is profound.
Surprise round on enemy initiative
A new feature is the so-called Surprise Round, which occurs when you trigger an encounter where the enemy acts first. Previously the enemy would get a full turn before you had any chance to position your hirdmen. Since there is no formation system in the game, this felt unfair. From version 1.0.5 and onwards, the player always acts first, but in encounters where the enemy would previously begin, the player will not have any attack action, nor a bonus action in the first turn. In other words you can only move or change your weapons in your first turn because your party was caught by surprise. This has also allowed us to change the initiative back to Enemy-first on all the encounters that were previously set to Player-first to avoid unfairness. The result is a slight but significant increase in difficulty in many encounters throughout the game.
Bear in mind that this update is not the final word on difficulty. These are major changes that will fix our difficulty issues, but they are not intended to increase the upper ends of difficulty on the Hard and Insane settings. The next update will contain more tweaks intended to make the Hard and Insane settings live up to their name, as well as the promised Iron Man mode.
The changelog itself is quite lengthy, so here’s an excerpt to give you a general idea of what to expect in the new version:
New stuff
- As explained above, added new “surprise round” feature to allow player positioning before enemy turn when ambushed
- Added full Danish localisation
- Added three new campsite scenes to the Denmark campaign for improved visual variation: Plains 2, Marsh 2, and Deep Forest
- Added new animations for Taunt and Dust abilities
- Added a new generic support ability animation for when you’re wielding a spear
- Added an animation for consumable utility items (ie. drinking potions)
Skills and items
- As described above, skill upgrades are now capped by your total amount of SP spent, so you must spend 150 SP to upgrade a skill to rank 3, 200 for rank 4, and 250 for rank 5
- Made substantial improvements to the algorithm that assigns skills to enemies by rank and archetype, which will increase the effectiveness of enemies throughout the game
- Made the Archer archetype use axe and shield instead of dane-axe or spear, and changed the loadouts of all Archer characters in the game accordingly
- Items crafted with the Artisan skill can no longer get the “Cursed” property
- Decreased the cost reduction for repairing and the gain % from deconstructing items
- Discarding a weapon will now yield at least 1 Salvage or Hide even if you have no Repair skill
- Increased item degradation during combat from 1 point per crit to 10% of max durability per crit
- Added a 50% chance each round that a character is on fire that they’ll get a Burn injury – subsequent rounds of being on fire then has a 25% chance of the injury deteriorating
- Taunt will now make the target move towards the caster even if they can’t entirely reach them – they’ll just move as far as they can
- Changed the Aimed Shot ability to have a 40% damage penalty instead of a 5 percent-point crit chance bonus, and changed Sharpshooter to reduce that penalty from 40% to 20%
- Sharpshooter now requires Bow on rank 3, Steady Hands no longer has a skill requirement, and Backstabber now costs 4 SP instead of 8
- Accuracy for ranged attacks now falls off by 6 points per hex instead of 5
- Walk Your Shots now reduces the per-hex distance fall-off for ranged attacks back to 5 instead of simply adding 5 points every time you take a shot
- Parrying no longer cancels all damage from the parried attack – the parrying character takes damage as normal, but with the doubled base DR from Parrying
- Changed Opportunist so that attacks of opportunity now apply Stunned to the target if you have the skill, instead of just giving you an extra AoO every round – also raised its cost from 3 SP to 6
- Increased the damage of Hailstorm from 50% normal attack damage to 75% normal attack damage and reduced its charges from 2 to 1
- Changed Stone Fists from a 10 point bonus to Melee Damage to a 10 point bonus to Armour Piercing damage
- Raised the cost of Powerful Kick from 6 SP to 9
- Revive is now restricted to 2 charges
- Gave pit traps a massive damage buff
- Increased all Tinkering material costs
- Reach weapons no longer inflict non-lethal damage at close range, since this was not explained anywhere
Encounters
- Changed quite a few of the encounters in the game to have the enemies start, which is no longer frustrating now that we have the surprise round feature
- Nerfed the damage of all wolf types except the Wolf Mothers, whose damage is now doubled
- Added a couple of guards in Perth’s treasury and set all the loot in the main area to Owned – when you visit during the betrayal, the guards have been killed and the loot is no longer Owned
- Buffed all occupied campsite fights in Britain and tweaked the cover in some of the scenes
- Buffed the assassins in Ribe
- Buffed the fight against the youngsters in the Ravine Cave
- All the bounty fights have received a significant buff
- Added reinforcements to both of the wall fights during the invasion of York
- Doubled the number of enemies in the prisoner room fight in York’s dungeon
- Made Leofric and Steinn brown-haired and made Steinn waaa-hay-haaay more badass
- The monks and nuns in Lindisfarne Church and the Scarborough Convent will now run into corners and cower in fear when you attack (the Cower animation is new)
- Made the female guard outside the Skerninge passage grave drop a damaged, cursed chain mail upon her death
