Quick Start Guide

[WaveLightGames]

Quick Start Guide

Here is a brief overview of the game, its controls and key concepts to help out new players.

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Controls

• Pan Camera with A, S, W, and D keys.
  
• Rotate Camera horizontally with Q and E keys.
  
• Rotate Camera vertically with R and F keys (useful to get a top-down view)
  
• Press TAB to cycle through the characters in your party or click on one of the portraits on the left hand side of the UI to select that particular character.
  
• Press ESCAPE to bring up the main menu (or click the hammer icon on the top right of the screen). This allows you leave the battle, adjust audio settings, or load an auto-save (which is taken at the end of each game turn).
  
• The top HUD shows details of the currently selected character. Their portrait can be clicked to bring up the detailed stat sheet and the bars and icons indicate the character's life, action points, attacks and morale. Hovering your mouse over any of these areas brings up a window that explains them in more detail.
  
• The character's skills are shown on the bottom right and abilities from magic items on the bottom left. Moving the mouse over these icons shows a summary of their effect. Initially characters have no abilities from items but can acquire them as they find or buy magic items.
  
• The End Turn button is on the bottom right of the screen and should be used once you have performed all movements, actions and abilities that you want to perform that turn. You move ALL members of your team each turn. Pressing the SPACE key also ends the turn.
  
• The raven icon on the top left of the screen opens the command skills menu. These are buffs that are applied to your entire party and represent the team's ability to work well together and be more than a mere sum of their collective parts. You earn command points by killing large numbers of enemies in a single turn during battle.

Objectives

The game's campaign is explained through a simple gamebook mode where the story is explained and the player is presented with choices at key points. The meat of the game is the combat system. Here players must use their party's skills and combat traits as well the terrain, obstacles and morale to defeat the enemy that confronts them. Some levels have specific objectives while others are won by defeating all enemies.


After each battle, the surviving members of the player's party gain experience points and the party is rewarded with gold and occasionally a magic item. These items can be equipped by a player character and can either boost stats or provide entirely new skills to that character.

The player can visit a shop at any time during the campaign to sell unwanted items and buy new ones with their gold. The player can also replay any previously completed levels for experience points and item rewards. The game's difficulty curve is set to provide a challenge at normal difficulty but not require heavy grinding of earlier levels to win.

There are five difficulty settings that can be freely adjusted at any time in the game options or campaign window. Extreme difficulty is meant for replays of earlier levels by high-level characters.

Gameplay Modes

The game features two different gameplay modes for its battles, "complex" and "simple". Simpe mode is enabled by default but can be changed in the Game Options menu. The main difference in these modes is how Action Points are used:

• Simple: In this mode, action points are used only for the characters skills and abilities from magic items. The character starts the battle with a full pool of action points and regains a random amount between 1 and his or her maximum action point pool at the start of each turn.
  
• Complex In this mode, action points are refilled to the maximum amount each turn. However, they are used for attacks, movement and skills. This mode allows players to attack more often if they are stationary or move further if they opt not to attack that turn and so on.

You can freely switch back and forth as you prefer. The AI is configured to play appropriately in either gameplay mode.

Combat Mechancis

• Line of Sight: The game uses a line of sight system that determines which enemies are visible to the player, which can be attacked and whether an event affects morale.
  
• Cover: Cover is critical to victory as it provides a significant degree of protection. Cover can be either full or half and is directional, meaning that standing behind cover provides protection from only certain directions. This is indicated by the shield icons displayed in the battle UI when hovering the mouse over a position on the battlefield.
  
• Morale: Each character and enemy has a morale value that determines their current fighting spirit and enthusiasm. When a character is hurt or sees an ally fall or enemies arrive in the battle from a new direction, his or her morale goes down. Conversely, when they are healed, see an enemy fall or see allies arrive, their morale goes up. Units with high morale are more likely to hit their enemies and those with low morale are more likely to miss with their attacks. If a unit's morale goes to zero, they will panic and be unable to perform skills for several turns.
  
• Intimidation: The intimidation stat determines how imposing a character is to their enemies. Characters with high intimidation will more greatly impact enemy morale when they score a hit or kill an enemy.
  
• Suppression: Even if your missile attacks miss their mark, they will still lower the morale of their target. They will also lower the morale of any other characters (friend and foe) that are within a 2 tile radius of the original target. Therefore, launching heavy volleys of arrows and magical bolts is a great way to weaken the morale of a cluster of enemies before you send in your fighters to finish the job in melee.
  
• Counter Attacks: When your character attacks an enemy, that enemy will perform an attack back if they have any counter attacks remaining and your character is within their attack range.

Character Selection

When starting a new game, you must select a team of 6 characters from a pool of 15 possible classes. There are male and female variants of each class with small stat line differences between the two. You may select multiples of the same character if you wish and may rename any character once you have added him or her to your party.


Characters range from tough fighters to frail wizards and eagle-eyed archers. Fighters are naturally well-suited to frontline combat. Wizards have very versatile and powerful spells but fall easily in combat and must be protected. Archers are also quite vulnerable to melee but have the longest range attacks and are great support characters that can also snipe enemy wizards and leaders at range.

Objectives

Some battle levels require you to complete specific objectives to win. These often include surviving for a certain amount of time or ensuring that the enemy do not kill a specific ally or killing an enemy leader. The battle ends once this objective is achieved regardless of how many other enemies are still present on the field.

[Marcus Aquila]

Nice and useful guide!

[Hedsmun]

Agreed - very nice!

[Fargol]

Nice quick guide, but some questions:

1) Regarding morale, is the gain/loss impacted depending on game mode (Simple vs Complex)

2) In simple mode, it sounds like movement does not drain action points. Is that true, and if so, is there a limit to how far the PC can move?

3) Is there much of a story, or does the player move, essentially, from one combat to the next? I'm okay with that, but just interested in knowing if there's an Ultimate Bad Guy or some other ultimate goal.

[WaveLightGames]

Hi,

Thanks for your questions,

1 - Morale is consistent across the two gameplay modes. A change I will make in the future (once I've tested it properly) is to make the morale impact of losing an ally nearby depend on your faction's remaining numbers. Basically, if your faction only has 3 guys left and one dies, it should impact you more than if you have 20 guys left and lose 1. Hopefully will have this out in a patch but need to test it.

2 - Yes, movement is fixed in simple mode and can only be extended by certain ability buffs. In complex mode, you can move further but at the expense of other activities like attacking or casting spells / abilities.

3 - Yes, I've put a fair bit of effort into the story this time around. There are key characters (heroes and villains) that span the story and there are also 4 major factions that the player can decide to support or turn against during the battle. Utlimately, the goal is the same regardless but the choices you make decide what kinds of battles you fight and with what type of support from those factions.

[Fargol]

Thanks for the quick and helpful reply.

[FaintPulse]

1. Is it possible to disable the pulsing/flashing orange lights under the "Item" and "Skills" areas during a battle? They're a bit hard on my eyes.

2. Does the "Retreat" option have any long-term penalties? I can't figure out how to exit the game mid-battle without selecting Retreat (or force quitting the application).

[WaveLightGames]

Hi,

1 - Not at the moment but I plan to put an option to disable them in the first patch. I did intend to have that out before launch but just didn't get time for it.

2 - No impact at all. Retreat is just a fancy way of saying "go back to menu".

[WaveLightGames]

Originally posted by FaintPulse:

1. Is it possible to disable the pulsing/flashing orange lights under the "Item" and "Skills" areas during a battle? They're a bit hard on my eyes.

An option to hide the pulses was added in the last patch, by the way.

[kjaekley]

Can you explain the command trait system better? How do you gain (and/or recover) command points?

[WaveLightGames]

Sure thing.

Command points represent your team's ability to fight better and more cohesively together. They are temporary buffs that last for the battle in which they are activated and only apply to your core team and not to allies that are fighting on your side.

You gain points by killing a lot of enemies in a single turn. I think the threshold is 8 in a turn (yours and the enemy's) and the chance of getting a reward is higher the more you kill. So if you 12, its' much more likely to award a point than just 8, for example. You can only gain one point per battle.

[DedZedNub]

I found this post and thread helpful in getting a sense of the game. I'm presuming that the Demon's Rise games are similar in game mechanics for the tactical part, but have less focus on story?

I'd also say that I looked at the longer video of 7 minutes here and it was helpful in understanding the combat and possibilities. Is the combat also similar in the Demon's Rise games in terms of mechanics?

[WaveLightGames]

Originally posted by DedZedNub:

I found this post and thread helpful in getting a sense of the game. I'm presuming that the Demon's Rise games are similar in game mechanics for the tactical part, but have less focus on story?

I'd also say that I looked at the longer video of 7 minutes here and it was helpful in understanding the combat and possibilities. Is the combat also similar in the Demon's Rise games in terms of mechanics?

Yes, the mechanics are similar but not exact. The morale system has no effect on hit chance in the demons rise games and there are no stun, poison, blind, bleed mechanics. Instead, the critical hits apply a random penalty.

Demons Rise uses the simple gameplay mode only and Strike Team Hydra uses the complex mode only. The main reason this game has an option to use either if them is that I still cant decide which is better. I prefer simple but many others dont so I decided to leave it up to the player.

[DedZedNub]

Thanks much. I'll probably try out DR:LoC to sample the series from my wishlist before the end of the Winter Sale, as I like what you are trying to do, and how SC is trying to move another step forward.

[Lampros]

Is there a more detailed Wiki or reference site that gives details on heroes and enemy types?

[WaveLightGames]

Not currenlty, I'm afraid.