Advanced Terrains: Rivers & Mountains
Forests and plains are easy to begin with, let's see how the game evolves when the game introduces new terrains
Hello again!
I’m back with another entry in the devlog series. Are you excited to learn more about Drop Duchy? You should be.
Since the last issue, we’ve launched the updated demo that included the faction Republic and a sneak peek at the meta progression. With this demo, we entered the Steam Next Fest, a special event dedicated to showcasing upcoming games, and the response was fantastic. Thanks (and welcome) to everybody who discovered the game during the festival.
On the menu today, I’ll tell you more about a terrain you could unlock in the demo, the river, and also answer the burning questions: how long are the runs, and which are the other terrains?
Risking it all for the river
When you start your journey, you’ll only see Plains & Forests, the two basic terrains of Drop Duchy. Once you’re comfortable with the ropes of the game, you’ll be ready to start playing in the big league and unlock the River mechanic from the Progress Tree.
As you can expect, the river is at its best when it’s all connected rather than being a bunch of isolated ponds, and that’s the reason why most river-related buildings have a mechanic called “Minimum Flow,” which requires a large enough continuous river to activate their effect. Those effects are typically better than their forests/plains counterparts, but they’re harder to trigger if you don’t plan your grid strategically.
To help you assemble the longest connected river, you can rely on the Canal technology card (which forces the river piece to come early in the round) or use the Bridge, which counts as a building and a chunk of river terrain! Going all in on the river and placing all your buildings correctly next to it is one of the most potent strategies in the game, albeit risky.
Mighty Mountains
If you’ve played the demo, you’ve probably noticed that some buildings require stone to be upgraded to their maximum level, yet you couldn’t find any way to get some. It’s not a bug, but a feature: stone is only introduced in the game’s second act, with the addition of mountains.
Mountains differ from the previous terrains because all their effects take into account the whole piece rather than individual squares, and unlike the others, there is no way to transform the mountains. As you can imagine, mountains earn you the precious stone resource when explored, but they also come with a flurry of buildings that synergize with them: the Stone Cutter is ideal if you want to increase the stone yield, while the Fortress is a fantastic military building that recruits troops for each aligned mountain piece.
Tweaking your deck to include a mountain synergy can be challenging, but remember that you can sell any card (and get the upgrade resources refunded), making pivoting strategy much easier. Mountain-related buildings tend to be better than the others, but since you can only start adding them to your deck in Act 2, you have fewer chances to grab them, and therefore, you must be an excellent strategist. Speaking of which, there’s one crucial choice you’ll have to make as you progress: which terrains do you specialize in?
How Terrain Specialization Works?
As you may have noticed in the demo, there are fewer pieces of each when there are more terrains on a grid (simple maths, really). That’s the normal intended way to play the game (trust me, there is little challenge in grids with a single terrain type), but it raises the question: how do we introduce more terrains without breaking the game’s balance? Our solution was to let the player choose which terrain to keep or eliminate at the end of each act.
When you beat the first boss, The Wall, you must select which terrain you’ll eliminate for good from the upcoming locations to make room for the Mountains. The same happens after beating the second boss (which we’ll cover in a future devlog) in order to make room for Wasteland.
Before eliminating a terrain, look at your deck synergies and think about how you gather each resource. If you don’t have any wood-producing cards, don’t forget that eliminating forests will cause you to lose all the wood you’d get from exploration. Each option has pros and cons, and that’s part of what makes each run of Drop Duchy unique.
Wrap-up
Thanks for reading this devlog. Once again, if you have questions or comments, feel free to join the active community on Discord. As a reminder, the game will release on May 5th, only a few weeks away, and the demo will continue to be available if you’d like to play some more runs until then.
I’ll tell you more about the game’s advanced mechanics and content in the upcoming dev logs, so subscribe to the newsletter to stay informed. See you!
JB Oger - Game Director
Should we expect another demo version or there will only be '05/05' release and buy option? Thanks.