The world of The Unliving is merciless and unfair, yet it maintains its fragile equilibrium – you don't need to save it from the mighty villains or ungodly monsters striving to destroy it. On the contrary, it is you who are the main threat to the existing state of affairs here. Thus, a major part of the opponents does not actively seek a conflict with you at first. We set their behaviour so that they prefer minding their own business after they spawn at the location.
Yet, you should not just sit back and relax. Even peaceful peasants gathered together can patrol surroundings to help their neighbours if needed or cut off your path to retreat. In addition, our peasants can deftly throw their pitchforks that can inflict a lot of damage if you don't dodge them. Actually, we try to implement certain abilities for all our units in addition to giving them an interesting basic attack: Rangers can tactically retreat, and a Blacksmith, if you don't stun him in time, will bring down the burning hammer onto your army.
Although we haven't yet approached the "morale" system of the creatures during the development, still many of them learnt to flee in panic when overwhelmed by your hordes of the undead.
Sometimes these "deserters" run onto the other groups of hostile mobs, joining forces against you in the next encounter – it's pretty surprising and fun when it happens. But sometimes, instead of running to their allies, they can bump into their own enemies – yes, we have implemented the faction system that will sometimes allow you to pit your opponents against each other. Now we think about making this panic system to calculate that the mob should run to his allies instead of retreating in random directions.
But do not anticipate that absolutely every enemy will scatter in fear as soon as you arrive. Some large and ferocious opponents are made to fight you to the last drop of their blood. For example, a werewolf being in a continuous fight only becomes stronger with each hit.
All creatures (except summoners' servants) spawn at the location only once, when location is generated. The composition of each group of enemies and the number of creatures in it are randomly selected within our framework. Given this contingency factor, as well as the fact that those groups can use complicated routes to patrol locations, you can't foresee the exact time, the place and the type of opponent you will bump into, even if you have already passed this very place several times before. Killed opponents never respawn, but you can always raise them as the undead. The appearance of the undead unit, as well as its capabilities, entirely depends on the type of its "living" form.
Yes, you can have even an undead werewolf in your army – this is completely okay because you resurrect literally everything you kill
We've made huge progress working on the intelligence, capabilities and the appearance of the opponents that you will face in the game. Now we are preparing for the new challenges waiting for us ahead, while you can anticipate our next devlog where we will most likely cover the environment topic. In the meantime, keep your scythes sharp, Necromancers!
P.S. This is the recent redesign of creatures
