Greetings, Kings and Queens!

While working on the upcoming 3rd playable faction, we’ve had a lot of fun ideas pop up — both from internal discussions and your feedback. Not wanting to cause a content draught while we develop Boreal Nomads, we’ve decided to deliver a big update featuring a lot of those ideas in form of new cards, abilities and artifacts! Welcome to Steel Meets Steel update!



With more and more cards available to each faction (with even more coming up in future updates), we didn’t want the players to miss out on their new unlocks because of random nature of the deckbuilding in ORX. Especially, since some cards have a high rarity. To amend this, our first approach will be the events — we’ve added couple new ones dedicated exclusively to Instant Kill and Neuro cards, so you have a hight chance of obtaining those during the campaign. Another way to combat this problem is a new one, and we’re very excited about it!

Introducing Universal Cards! These cards can’t be used as is, and instead transform into a random card from their parent category (weapons, units, dictates, runes) each time they come into your hand. They can only transform into the cards you’ve already unlocked and the end result will always be the same upgrade tier as the Universal card producing it — we feel like these cards will help a lot on your orx-slaying crusade, since they have common rarity and thus you can get them pretty easily, but can transform into any unlocked card from their respective category. |



Here’s a fun little story. Back in the day the Crossroads card had a nice totem drawn on the card. However, it was a bit hard to implement at the time, so the Crossroads did not include it when placed. For years our Lead Artist jokingly brought this up every time we’d mention the card. And now, after all this time, we’re finally adding the glorious totem to the Crossroads!

We did not stop there, however, and decided to make this card more desirable to the players. Being a dead-end on all sides and at the same time having slightly higher cost than normal roads, Crossroads in the past were very situational and most of the time would end up ditched at the next “discard a card” event. Now, to justify it’s higher base cost, and make it fit nicely into road building, the Crossroads grant the defence boost to all objects in it’s aura. Yes, both units and castles! Surround them with roads and place units to gain a hefty defence increase, or stack them outside the castle walls — either way you’re getting a great value out of Crossroads now.



We’ve also decided that it would be very fun to give stealth to the players! With Cairn of Stealth you can use the enemy tactic against them and hide all buildings and units in it’s aura. Yes, even your Town Center! Be careful, however, as the Cairn does not apply stealth to itself and doesn’t possess a lot of health. Units will also break stealth while attacking, so use it wisely.



Another option to throttle the orx’s advance is Reinforced Housing. Play it on on a group of Small Houses to build a fence around them, turning an otherwise defenseless village into an impregnable wall! By the way, this card was inspired by you, our dear players — after seeing how some of you were walling off the Town Center with Small Houses, we thought there should be a better way to use this strategy!



We’ve also added some unique interactions between unit camps and buildings. For example, you can now turn units into Bazaar or Barracks! This allows you to put these buildings more strategically, to extend the Military Zone from it’s borders or simply put a Bazaar further away from the Center to get more silver per caravan trip — all without waiting for roads.



Another building, which allows units to interact with it is Fight Club. You know the rules, though, so we're not allowed to say much about it. Just try moving your units to it and you will be rewarded with Initiative points (redraw chargers)!



Speaking of units and seizing the initiative — we’ve prepared a slew of new Dictates, allowing for new playstyles and enhancing existing ones. Have no weapons for new recruits? Play Curse to give them a huge damage boost! Have a unit camp with great stats, while the other warriors are underpowered? Use Motivation dictate to share the camp’s stats! Want the warriors to become stealthy assassins? Enhance them with the power of Shadow Amulet! Be wanted though, some of these Dictates have a downside, and wielders of the Curse’s power pay the ultimate price come dawn.

And when everything else fails, use Intakill Dictate or Rune to bestow your castles and warriors with a chance to instantly kill any non-boss orx. These pair exceptionally well with DoT weapons like Arbalest (DR), Poison Tower (RG) or the newly added Puddle Tower (RG).



The update doesn’t end here — we’ve added a lot more new cards and artifacts in Steel Meets Steel. Covering those would make this post twice as long, and we also don’t want to spoil everything! Read the patch notes to learn about all the new additions to ORX and head to the game to find out how they play!

PATCH NOTES

New Systems

• Universal Cards — transform into a random card from their parent category (weapons, units, dictates, runes) each time they are added to the hand. Universal Cards can transform only into the cards the player has already unlocked.
  

Gameplay

• Crossroads rework — now they have a totem granting defence boost aura around the crossroads
  
• Instakill rune (RG) — set chance to instantly kill an orx when dealing damage
  
• Instakill dictate (DR) — set chance to instantly kill an orx when dealing damage
  
• Stealth Cairn (DR) — makes units and buildings in it’s aura invisible. Doesn’t apply the effect to itself. Actions (such as attacking orx) break the invisibility
  
• Element switch (Neutral) — switch the sephiroth on the target to a different random one
  
• Above the Law card (RG) — exhaust 1 selected road card from hand. Grant delayed gold for each road already placed.
  
• Roads of Gold (RG) — exhaust all road cards from hand, or If more than 40/30/20 roads have been placed, exhaust road cards from the deck. Grant increased gold capacity for each exhausted card.
  
• Fortify card (DR) — build a fence around the selected Small House and the adjacent ones in “+” formation.
  
• Random Tower card for (RG) — change X random towers in the castle to any random ones of the same type
  
• Puddle Tower card (RG) — transform towers into puddle spewing ones. Puddles persist on the ground for some time and deal damage to all orx standing inside them.
  
• Avenger Guild (RG) — Stores 10/15/25% of damage dealt by the castle. When the castle is attacked, releases stored damage in a wave with 2 range. Activates no more than once every 3 seconds.
  
• Demolitionist Guild (RG) — Disables all towers in the castle. For every destroyed castle wall releases a wave with 2 range dealing 10% of the castle's toatl health.
  
• Roof (Neutral) — build a palisade granting +X delayed gold for each unit camp in it’s vicinity.
  
• Hallucination (Neutral) — Select a warrior camp and reate it’s illusory copy. Illusions can’t attack.
  
• Insurance (Neutral) — Grants 5 delayed gold for each destroyed building. Effect ends at Dawn.
  
• Rune of Neuro Force (RG) — increase health, damage and defence by 3/5/10 for each unique camp/castle with this rune.
  
• Cairn of Stealth (DR) — hides all buildings and units in its aura. Does not apply the effect to itself.
  
• Training Camp (DR) — grants bonus 3/6/10% stats when merging camps in the same military zone as Training Camp.
  
• Fight Club (DR) — Move unit camp to this building to destroy them and gain +2/4/6 initiative.
  
• Reinforced Housing — builds a fence around the selected house and any adjacent ones in “+” formation. Orx can not destroy or pass through this fence.
  
• Camp to Barracks (DR) — transform a unit camp into Barracks.
  
• Camp to Bazaar (DR) — transform a unit camp into Bazaar.
  
• Curse (DR) — Dictate. Grants +181/404/666 damage to a unit until Dawn. Units under the Curse will be forever lost if they die in battle or when the Dawn comes.
  
• Motivation (DR) — Dictate. Units no longer can attack. Units share 20/40/60% of their stats with every other unit camp in the same military zone.
  
• Commander Neuro (DR) — Commander. Increase health, damage and defence by 5/10/20 for each carrier camp. Camps remain a carrier even if you change the commander.
  
• Recruiter (DR) — Commander. Each time another camp appears, increase damage, health and attack speed of the camp with this commander by 5/10/15%.
  
• King’s Legacy (Artifact) — receive (20 x Act Number - Amount of tiles with buildings) delayed gold on mission start and at dawn.
  
• Amplifier (Artifact) — receive Amplifier card on each redraw. Amplifier card raises the upgrade level of the next card played to its maximum.
  
• Dune Reavers Town Center now spawns warriors upon building Small House or triggering the process otherwise.
  

Random Events

• Universal cards random event
  
• Mastery of Intant kill random event
  
• Neuro powers random event
  
• Architect brothers random event
  
• Updated descriptions for some older random events
  

Optimization

• Further improvements to texture atlases and VRAM usage
  
• General under-the-hood optimizations and improvements
  
• Stability improvements
  

Fixes

• Fixed card rewards carrying over from a previous run
  
• Fixed loading into a previous campaign defeat screen upon starting a new campaign
  
• Fixed exclamation mark missing from unread entries in Encyclopedia
  
• Second iteration fix for inability to place Small House if too many units are present
  
• Fixed The Sphinx being activated only by certain Spell cards
  
• Fixed getting a copy of the artefact you already own on artefact selection screen
  
• Fixed Cards jittering in hand when bringing the cursor to the bottom edge of the screen
  

Let us know what you think of the new additions — as we’re always listening to player feedback. And who know, maybe your suggestion will become a basis for a new card in ORX!




Thank you for your support of the game, by providing invaluable feedback and simply playing the game! In upcoming devlogs we’ll cover more about the lore of Boreal Nomads and finally show their gameplay. If you don’t want to miss out on those — follow us on Social Media and keep an eye out for the new Steam posts. Until next time, orx slayers!