Kickstarter

Happy New Year and Merry Christmas and all that. Having made it safely through 2012 and arrived out the other side of the new year without any fireworks-related accidents in the office, I do believe it's time for another update. This is going to be a good one, as we have a lot of cool new things to talk about.

Perhaps our biggest piece of news is that we've arranged for Expeditions: Conquistador to be localised into Spanish. Now all you Spaniards who've been bugging us on Greenlight with variations of "no esta en Español??" can calm down, give us an upvote, and look forward to our release on February 28.

Our second huge piece of news is best shown with a screenshot:

That's one of the in-doors battles we've put together for the Mexico campaign. Mechanically, there's not much separating the interior battle scenes from the normal exterior battles, but the sort of layouts you'll get inside a building will obviously change the flow of combat significantly.

If you squint, you'll also notice several new features in the screenshot. First off, we got three more Native classes into the game: Champions (two different versions depending on their faction), Amazons, and Civilians. The main purpose of the civilians is to make you feel really bad when you decide to slaughter a whole town of defenceless natives. However, certain battles will have victory conditions where civilians may actually pose a significant threat, such as Prevent Escape where the battle is lost if any enemy spends a full turn in a certain area.

The Champions and Amazons are a sort of super-unit with new sets of combat abilities that will add variation and a sense of progression to the game. Of course, in Mexico, you will be able to recruit one of every type of native follower for your own expedition, including a civilian, so you'll get to play around with all the Aztec-specific combat abilities this time.

Oh, remember our second stretch goal with more visual variation in the character models? That was at the $90,000 mark, which of course we didn't achieve. Just like with our $80,000 stretch goal, we ended up adding all that variation anyway though, so you can look at a character model to see what faction a unit belongs to and roughly how much armour the unit is wearing. The weapon models also change to indicate how powerful the weapons are. Speaking of weapons, the screenshot above also shows our new weapons including the halberd, spear, and blowgun.

I have so much more stuff I could talk about. I'll list some things real quick. We have a character info screen so you can examine your units in greater detail during a battle (and remind yourself which character has which passive abilities), we have better AI which is capable of fully utilising its special abilities, we finally have proper gameplay, video, and sound options, we have a Codex with short articles about the historical background of the game so you won't have to wonder what's true and what we just made up, and we have optional information pop-ups that float over the heads of units in battle so you can see what's going on without looking at the combat log.

We also have this old ruined fortress that you can capture in the Mexico campaign:

That's how you find it. If you spend some time and money rebuilding it, it'll look much more presentable, and all the buildings you can construct in the courtyard will give you various benefits when you visit them – better trade, free resources, movement boosts, and so on. Maybe a few friends will drop by, and of course the fortress also has its use in the storyline quests, but let's not get into spoiler territory.

I think that's all we'll tell you about this time. Next update will probably arrive in middle of February, not long before the release of the game. Hope you like what you see so far, and again – please hop on over to our Greenlight page and give us an upvote if you haven't already. Have a nice January!