Skirmishes and Soldiers

Today Zombie Columbus posted part four in his series about the upcoming Skirmishes system. Usually Merric reports to you on these sort of dealie-jobs but he’s busy taking care of the Baby Hobbit today so I’ll do my best! Today’s information is concerning the Soldier that comes along with your Skirmishing instance.

First off it’s important to note that your soldier when you first get him/her is not a soldier at all. They are not fighters; they are just regular everyday townspeople/farmers/tradesmen that have decided to help defend what’s theirs.

Most formally trained warriors have been called away by their respective lords and masters to assist in the larger scale battles that are brewing.

I can see that. There’s a war going on and it’s unlikely you’ll find a trained warrior just milling about looking for work. The people that are going to volunteer to help you defeat your little skirmish are likely to be ordinary people. So it will be our job to take this fledgling and help them become warriors! That sounds pretty darn exciting to me.

Unfortunately, they are not as well trained as the Captain’s Herald or Lore-master’s companions. In battle, they will act without your orders, engaging the enemy as they see fit. You can give them occasional orders…

Basically these soldiers are not our “pet” to command. Which I can see as important because then a Captain or Lore-master would have a heck of a task trying to control their mini-army. However, my experience with automatic helpers has not really been favorable. So long as the solider is intelligent enough to know not to break crowd control skills or run off into large groups of other baddies it could be manageable. I’d almost think they’d have to be at least this intelligent or 12 man raids with 12 soldiers will be just complete madness.

Since there are many eager recruits to choose from, you are in a position to decide what you would like your Soldiers to look like.

I get to customize my Soldier! Oh the role-player in me rejoices at this news. Things we will get to choose from include: race, clothing, & hair. We also get to give them specialized training to fill a specific role.

…If you are fragile in direct combat, train your Soldier in the Protector Role.

It makes you wonder how robust this is. For example, could a Soldier be trained to be a minstrel to boost everyone’s moral? How about a field medic that can heal your poisons, wounds or diseases? Only the Protector role example was given in the dev diary but it does let your imagination go wild, doesn’t it?

This specialized training will be done in a special Skirmishes Traits panel and are supposed to work very similar to how our characters traits operate. What Role your Soldier has will have different set of traits to select from.

The number one reason we added Soldiers into Skirmishes was so each player could customize that Soldier to complement their own characters.

By the sounds of it, this Soldier is there to be more of an assistance to you rather than a fellowship. However, I could see people asking what Role their Soldier is before entering into a Skirmish. Perhaps there’s a perfect balance a group can find to really make the Soldiers super efficient. But I’ll leave that to the number crushers. Right now I need to figure out what my Soldier is gonna look like!

Read the Skirmishes Dev Diary Part 4 for yourself!