Wargroove: details about Archers, passive abilities, and reinforcements

Last week, Chucklefish posted the latst devblog post for Wargroove, and this one is all about Archers, passive abilities, and reinforcements. Now, this may seem like a weird bunch of things to put together, but there’s actually a good reason for that.

In order to provide a fun and interesting gameplay experience, that isn’t too overwhelming, the developers have been spending a considerable amount of effort in balancing the game. After all, having game mechanics in place doesn’t automatically make a game fun.

For their playtesting, they needed an early game ranged unit, which job is to provide tactical coverage to your front line melee units. They decided to introduce archers, because trebuchets are quite expensive (which would be a problem so early in the game). Archers can shoot at range 3, and can move and attack on the same turn (while trebuchets can only done one of the two).

However, this removed the tactical decision of moving vs attacking, in favour of offense. That’s when passive abilities kick in.

Every single unit in the game has an ability, and it’s either active or passive:

• active abilities: they manifest as verbs on the action menu. Here’s some examples: the wagon has the ability to load/unload units, commanders have unique powers, and more;
• passive abilities: they generally increase the amount of damage done by a unique in combat, but only when certain conditions are met.

Back to our archers: they get +35% damage when they attack without moving. In other words: yes, you can attack and move during the same turn with archers, but if you want some extra fire power, you will have to wait a turn after moving.

Here’s some other examples of passive skills:

• Knights: x2 damage after a full charge (5 tiles moved)
• dogs: bonus if target is being flanked by another dog
• spearmen: they get a bonus if they’re adjacent to another spearman
• mages: they get a bonus if it’s raining (as they can call down lightning)

Finally, there’s reinforcements. Previously, commanders were responsible for healing the army, but this has been changed. Now, units can be healed by choosing “reinforce”, after moving units next to a friendly city. Naturally, the healing isnt free: doing so drains health from the city, and also costs you some gold (proportional to the cost of the unit).

For some animated GIF, make sure to check out the blog post at the source link below!

Finally, here’s a picture of Wargroove running on a Nintendo Switch:

Wargroove (Switch – eShop) still does not have a release date.

Source: Chucklefish / Tiy