solwyte

The Future of the Promised Land. Well, kind of.

Added 2023-09-11 14:56:52 +0000 UTC

Hey there all! Today I thought I'd post an update on the state and potential future entries into the Promised Land factions, in the form of trees. This is listed just a little further in, and describes a bunch of new units I plan to make in the future.

Force Composition in The Promised Land

So, in case some of you following the development of The Promised Land, a gaming system for using Solwyte Studios miniatures, missed it or are totally new to it, there have been some revisions of the way in which forces are built:
Each Leader can recruit a number of units to their force. When building your force, first you recruit a Leader, then recruit a number of units up to their maximum recruitment allocation. Once a Leader has recruited their maximum number of units, you can then recruit another Leader.
In practise, this means that army building is done by purchasing Leaders, then purchasing units for that Leader, then purchasing another Leader, then units for them. There are no further interactions on the battlefield between Leaders and whom they recruit, but generally the units a Leader can recruit tend to be themed similarly so they would naturally stick together anyway.
In addition, Independent and Leviathan units can be taken separately, without requiring a Leader, and some units can recruit other units in addition, such as Transports.
The limitations are simply that no Leaders or Independent units can be recruited more than three times, and each Leviathan and Unique unit may only be recruited once, which allows players a lot of freedom of customisability without leading to spam of particular units.

Lastly, when (eventually) I get around to pointing stuff up, each unit's points will include all of its wargear, so army building is very straightforward. I'm very aware that this has been the subject of criticism for certain other games, however that brings me to the next part of force construction - unit upgrades.
Starting with this month's Hieronite Specialists, I've started on a road to create sets of unit upgrades, each of which replaces a model in a unit. These range from leaders, to communicators, to banner-bearers, to heavy weapons specialists, all of which are intended to add customisability to your units while maintaining an easy method of army construction. Lastly, enhancements are additional rules which can be added to units to, unsurprisingly, enhance their abilities to do certain things; unlike upgrades, which modify and replace models, enhancements affect every model in a unit.

Faction Plans

Following this bit, there is a list of each of the currently progressed factions, including potential plans for future releases - except for the Castellans of Ouresa, as they're still very much an unexplored idea for now. Most of the things in this list do already exist, particularly for the Skjalos Guard and Covenants of Astyri, but many are new. I have ideas for these and I'm super excited to share them with you guys in the future. Now, with this in mind, and that the provisional plan until the end of this year went totally off the rails, I'll have to reshape the schedule, which will appear in the next couple of days.

In addition, retrospectively I'm not super happy about the current state of the Kingdoms of Mikaelhelde designs. Though the core is quite nice, I feel like they need more raggedy clothes and more 'cult' iconography and equipment to really communicate that 'zealous battle cannibal' vibe that I'm trying to go for.

Anyway, on with the lists: