Update log
Full Drop Duchy update
The complete published notes, normalized for clean reading and source attribution.
Repeated intro
Hello and welcome back to a new series of Drop Duchy’s Devlogs (I love a good alliteration), dedicated to the upcoming content of our first major content expansion.
Extracted changes
- Gameplay
- Maps
- Events
First, I’d like to thank you all for playing the game. If you’re one of the 100,000+ players who’ve purchased Drop Duchy, you can proudly say that you’re 0.00001% responsible for the project’s continuation. In fact, thanks to the game’s incredible success, we’ve decided to continue expanding it. So far, we’ve released two bug-fixing patches, and in a few weeks, you’ll also get to discover a big content update featuring new mechanics, new cards, quality-of-life updates, and more!
This first post will tell you more about the new DLC faction we’re introducing with this update available from August 18th : The Tribe.
Power of the Druids
The Tribe is the fourth faction in the game, and as you know, we strive to give each faction a strong gameplay and thematic identity. After the peasants, city dwellers, and crusaders, our next idea was to focus more on the forest, nature, and exploration, which is how we decided to go for the mystical druids.
The central mechanic of the Tribe is called the Cairn’s area.In your starting deck, you’ve got the technology Ancient Alignment, which adds four Cairn’s pieces to the round deck. Your goal is to create the largest rectangular area that fits inside those four standing stones to trigger the effect of the Tribe’s starting building, the Stone Circle. Indeed, if you manage to place the Stone Circle inside the Cairn’s area, it collects a massive amount of resources.
The Cairns also recruit troops when aligned with one another, which can be helpful to support your early game military needs, but you may also decide to drop the idea of a rectangular area in favor of a stone alignment to gain even more troops. In this context, existing technology cards, such as Tactical Advantage or Strength in Numbers, become particularly interesting.
Exploration Combos
But wait, don’t underestimate the power of a large rectangular Cairn’s area too quickly! Trying to position a Cairn in each corner of the grid is certainly a challenge, and you’ll have to reconsider your usual approach to optimal positioning, but it provides a fantastic opportunity to set up massive exploration-related combos.
As a reminder, in the game, when you complete a line, you get to explore its square and gain resources; now you can explore them a second time! The Tribe has access to exclusive cards that leverage its boosted exploration capacity, such as the Druid Hut for extra food & defense, or the technology Lush Woods, which adds food to forest exploration gains.
At this point, I should mention that it can be worth revisiting cards from the base game that fit into this archetype. Buildings such as Exploited Lands or Royal Garden can yield resources twice in a round now (or even more if you used the Manor ’s capacity to explore squares in range three times!). While the Tribe’s natural environment is the forest, they can definitely work with the river if you bring in a good Shipyard, which recruits for each time a river square adjacent to the grid border is explored.
Now, if you want to go all-in on the exploration, your best option is going to be another druid-exclusive card: the War Council, which recruits for each square explored in the round.
Source