Serpent in the Staglands Update #15: Itemization, Late Game Balance

The latest Kickstarter update for Serpent in the Staglands is a fairly extensive development progress report on the title, with particular attention devoted to explain the developers’ intentions regarding itemization and late game balance. Here’s a snippet:

Late game balance implementation

Upcoming beta 1.5 implements a balance patch for the low-level game. This is resulting in a need for more tactics for your party in the way of coordinating pre-buffs, offensive and defensive skills to overcome enemies (they pack a punch), while continuing to minimize the micro-manging required with pausing frequently. As always we’re designing with the strengths of real-time in mind, which we think is pausing infrequently while issuing macro orders to your party, and have their skills working automatically and together. We’ve had good responses for it thus far, and are continuing to design the same for late game, albeit with much more challenging enemies, potent buffs to hack around, and larger groups. The five coven witches random encounter in the wilderness will look like a tea party later on.

One of the biggest threats to your party, with some ailment exceptions, are skirmishes. With a low level spell caster in your group you can heal your entire party with some time, so the skirmishes, especially later on are fast and hard hitting with a pretty massive RNG-god pulling the strings. The other macro-element of the game working against you is town supplies. Aside from being completely wiped out and losing their potential sellable goods, merchants have a finite number of resources to sell you. Scavenging the settler’s ruins, bandits, and natives will ultimately become your main source of equipment, save the traveling merchants and small-town fletchers you happen across.

The real interesting thing we’re starting to test is how these late level skills can all stack and work together simultaneously. Having enemies with particular stats, defense, and damage dealing skills and spells is one thing, but knowing how a party of 5 with up to 15 skill points worth of skills and spells can augment each other is just as important. There’s a lot of defensive shields and hard-blocks of certain attacks (complete missile, spells, and melee resistances), as well as area effects and ailments to deter even the most powerful party. We’re getting as creative as possible to counter the strategic designs that players can come up with while using such a loose system.