Together in Battle – New Demo Available

Together in Battle, Sinister Design’s upcoming strategy RPG, should be going live later this year. But for the time being, you can experience the game’s new demo thanks to Steam’s “Going Rogue” festival. You can download the demo directly from the game’s Steam page.

And here’s what the game itself is all about:

Together in Battle is a strategy RPG and team management roguelite with vibrant procedurally generated characters and emergent relationship-building. Uncover a sinister conspiracy; fight deep turn-based tactical battles; deal with random events; watch your characters grow together.

Premise

You’ve arrived in the island kingdom of Dese with a secret mission to enter the gladiatorial games and find loyal fighters. Hunted by an imperial praetor, you must maintain a low profile even as you find yourself drawn into intrigues that will decide the fate of Dese itself. Recruit and manage charming characters. Stay stocked on food, make payroll, and keep your characters practicing. But beware: they have feelings! Let their friends to fall in battle, and they may become depressed. Let morale fall too low, and you’ll risk resentment and desertion. Keep them happy, however, and they will grow close to one another, form fond memories, give nicknames–even share their special combat skills! With skill and patience, you will emerge victorious…together in battle.

An evolution of the lauded Telepath Tactics combat engine

With a deterministic core that never wastes your time, combat in Together in Battle nonetheless features dizzying tactical depth:

• Backstabbing: strike from behind to avoid counterattacks and score a huge damage bonus!
• Elevation: claim the high ground to boost your effectiveness and hinder the enemy’s!
• Knockbacks galore: shove and throw enemies into water, lava, and chasms; off of cliffs; or into each other!
• Destructible environments: bust down doors, blow up walls, hack through bushes, chop through barricades! If you can see it, you can smash it.
• Create new structures on the battlefield: build your own bridges and barricades; freeze water to form ice bridges; set traps for enemies to wander into; place explosives to detonate at an opportune moment.
• Defensive terrain: take up position in tall grass to gain a defense boost–or hack it down to deny that same advantage to the enemy.
• Extreme turn flexibility: move a character, move a second character, then return to finish the first character’s turn. An unlimited undo stack lets you redo it all if you don’t like where everyone ended up!
• Clever AI: face enemies that use the terrain to their advantage, take advantage of weak positioning, and compete with you for dropped items.

Tons of content!

You won’t see everything Together in Battle has to offer in a single playthrough–every game offers a new experience. TiB includes:

• 6 playable species
• 24 base classes with branching promotions for a total of 72 distinct character classes
• multi-classing
• more than 150 skills
• dozens of random events and side quests
• hundreds of thousands of possible procedurally generated weapons and pieces of armor, including unique and personal weapons

Deep procedurally generated characters

Every character you recruit has distinct traits, personal histories, beliefs, hobbies, and secrets. You’ll never get the same character twice.

These differences matter: a baker will use food to produce cookies and cakes you can eat or sell; a jokester will do funny impressions to boost morale; a hunter will boost your stocks with wild game; a blacksmith will repair the group’s weapons. Dancers are nimble; sailors are good swimmers. Some characters are prone to depression; some, to self-doubt. Some self-soothe with long walks or prayer; others undertake long-term projects like growing vegetables, crafting dolls, or writing novels. Learn what makes each character tick as they grow and form powerful bonds of friendship!

A campaign creation suite

Together in Battle comes with a campaign creation suite to let you build your own full-fledged SRPG campaigns!

• Build characters in the character creator!
• Sculpt battlefields and place armies in the map editor!
• Compose cut scenes in the cut scene editor!
• Write branching dialogue trees for both battles and cut scenes using the dialogue editor!
• Create new skills for your characters to use in the skill editor!
• Craft new items and equipment for players to loot in the item editor!
• Need ideas? Let the game roll up full-fledged characters and battles for you to edit (or simply use as-is)!
• Construct your own scripts, then assign them to items and skills for whatever custom effects you can dream up!
• Mod support for custom music, sound effects, character classes, AI profiles, and more!