- Messages
- 5,182
Patch 4.0.5 has several big new mechanics to give you more ways to strengthen your army, on top of this also being a quest update for the Raider line - so tons to play with!
I'm already getting tons of questions about the new leveling mechanics and the plots, so going to try and cover everything here.
Q. Do the plot benefits apply to all my soldiers?
No. They apply to the soldiers who live in the Outpost the plots are in. So if your soldiers are split between multiple Outposts when you make your attack, each will gain the benefits of their home outpost.
When making attacks, Conqueror always tries to pull from the current outpost you triggered the assault from, so you can help dictate who goes on an attack by sending your soldiers to the outpost you intent on attacking from.
Ultimately, your best bet is to plan on building one of each of the new plot types in all of your Outposts.
Q. Do the new plot benefits stack?
No. Conqueror will provide the benefit for the highest level plot of that type to every soldier from that Outpost. So if you have a level 1 field hospital, and a level 3 field hospital, any soldiers who live in that settlement will gain the L3 30% chance to avoid death benefit.
Q. Can I still manually equip my soldiers if I have an Armory?
Yes. The Armory will likely override your equipment choices each time your troops rank up, but you can turn off the armory equipment settings in the Conqueror section of the holotape if you'd prefer to manually equip your soldiers or feel like the benefit is too cheaty.
In the future, we'll give you the ability to manually tag soldiers to not be auto-equipped, as well as introduce an optional cost system so that this isn't overpowered for scarcity runs.
Q. What do the ranks do?
Ranks increase the power of your soldiers, granting +50 health and +25% damage bonus with each new rank, for a total of +200 health and double damage at rank 5. In addition, once they reach rank 5, they can no longer be killed, and will instead be treated like companions and just go down in combat and await a stimpak. This is no easy task, so you'll be glad for the immortality.
Making it to rank 5 takes a ton of experience and due to their mortality, many will die on their way to this veteran soldier level. The new plot types, combined with the Wall Busters introduced in the raider questline, are designed to help give you some control over their fate so you don't feel that you're completely at the mercy of terrible AI and the settlement design - though you always will be to some extent, and that's part of the chaos of war.
Though your ultimate control will always be your own ability to quickly take out enemies in combat. With all of the new buffs, you should have a much greater chance to engage in some tactical killing of enemies to help protect your soldiers.
Q. How do I know what rank my soldiers are?
All soldiers will have a green ball burst out of them on level up, as well as play a level sound (these effects can be disabled if you find them unimmersive). Raiders from Jammers gang are configured to get new names as well as they rank up.
In the future, we'll give you a means of viewing the individual progress towards the next rank of any of your soldiers so you can figure out which ones to try and protect.
Q. Can Faction Pack soldiers rank up as well?
Yes. Until the faction pack creators update them to support the new content, the only benefit your soldiers will receive, are the HP and damage buffs. Those creators need to add in support for the actual rank names and armory.
Conqueror will not retroactively grant those things to existing soldiers, so you will likely want to wait until those packs update before proceeding with more assaults.
Q. How does XP work for my soldiers?
A. Any of your troops that go on an attack, that are within a reasonable range of a kill (radius of 3000 units, which is about 6 plots stacked side-by-side in all directions - so pretty far), will share experience for that kill.
Experience is calculated as follows:
(Enemy Level * 10) * (Enemy Level/(Soldier Level + (Soldier Rank * 10)) * (1 + (City Level/0.25) + (Turret Count * 0.01))
So what does that mean in english?
The first part Enemy Level * 10 should be pretty self-explanatory, each enemy gives 10 XP per level. So a level 9 enemy will give 90 xp.
The next part calculates the scale, as if the enemy is higher level than your soldiers, they will earn more xp. So EnemyLevel divided by Soldier Level plus (Soldier Rank *10). Effectively what we've done, is count each rank within the Conqueror system as the equivalent of being 10 levels higher. We then just divide the enemy level by the calculated soldier level to determine a difficulty ratio. The difficulty ratio is capped at a lower limit of 0.25 and an upper limit of 2.5. Which means you can expect somewhere between 1/4 and 2.5x the XP depending on how different the levels are.
The last part is a multiplier based on the difficulty the settlement itself is providing. So a pre-built City Plan gives +25% xp per level, plus an additional 1% xp for each turret.
Experience requirements for each rank are based around each soldier killing 10 enemy soldiers of equivalent level. So if your soldier is level 9, it would take 900 experience to get to rank 1. Once they reach rank 1, they would be calculated as being level 19, so to get to rank 2 will require another 1900 experience, etc.
The overall idea is to introduce a new goal of trying to build up a bad-ass army full of high-ranking soldiers, with a risk-reward system, where taking less guys with you can result in them leveling up faster, though at the risk of losing the raid since once they all die you have to start over with fresh troops.
Q. What if I conquer everything and my guys still aren't ranked up as much as I'd like?
You also gain XP during defensive raids, so when you get the quest that your main base is under attack, those defenders will gain experience.
We'll be introducing other ways to gain experience in the future, such as training plots, more frequent attacks on your outposts (which also give XP), and eventually the control gameplay I discussed in my launch live stream, where you can lose your smaller Outposts to enemy activity and need to reclaim them - thus having a never-ending loop available to keep building up your army.
I'm already getting tons of questions about the new leveling mechanics and the plots, so going to try and cover everything here.
Q. Do the plot benefits apply to all my soldiers?
No. They apply to the soldiers who live in the Outpost the plots are in. So if your soldiers are split between multiple Outposts when you make your attack, each will gain the benefits of their home outpost.
When making attacks, Conqueror always tries to pull from the current outpost you triggered the assault from, so you can help dictate who goes on an attack by sending your soldiers to the outpost you intent on attacking from.
Ultimately, your best bet is to plan on building one of each of the new plot types in all of your Outposts.
Q. Do the new plot benefits stack?
No. Conqueror will provide the benefit for the highest level plot of that type to every soldier from that Outpost. So if you have a level 1 field hospital, and a level 3 field hospital, any soldiers who live in that settlement will gain the L3 30% chance to avoid death benefit.
Q. Can I still manually equip my soldiers if I have an Armory?
Yes. The Armory will likely override your equipment choices each time your troops rank up, but you can turn off the armory equipment settings in the Conqueror section of the holotape if you'd prefer to manually equip your soldiers or feel like the benefit is too cheaty.
In the future, we'll give you the ability to manually tag soldiers to not be auto-equipped, as well as introduce an optional cost system so that this isn't overpowered for scarcity runs.
Q. What do the ranks do?
Ranks increase the power of your soldiers, granting +50 health and +25% damage bonus with each new rank, for a total of +200 health and double damage at rank 5. In addition, once they reach rank 5, they can no longer be killed, and will instead be treated like companions and just go down in combat and await a stimpak. This is no easy task, so you'll be glad for the immortality.
Making it to rank 5 takes a ton of experience and due to their mortality, many will die on their way to this veteran soldier level. The new plot types, combined with the Wall Busters introduced in the raider questline, are designed to help give you some control over their fate so you don't feel that you're completely at the mercy of terrible AI and the settlement design - though you always will be to some extent, and that's part of the chaos of war.
Though your ultimate control will always be your own ability to quickly take out enemies in combat. With all of the new buffs, you should have a much greater chance to engage in some tactical killing of enemies to help protect your soldiers.
Q. How do I know what rank my soldiers are?
All soldiers will have a green ball burst out of them on level up, as well as play a level sound (these effects can be disabled if you find them unimmersive). Raiders from Jammers gang are configured to get new names as well as they rank up.
In the future, we'll give you a means of viewing the individual progress towards the next rank of any of your soldiers so you can figure out which ones to try and protect.
Q. Can Faction Pack soldiers rank up as well?
Yes. Until the faction pack creators update them to support the new content, the only benefit your soldiers will receive, are the HP and damage buffs. Those creators need to add in support for the actual rank names and armory.
Conqueror will not retroactively grant those things to existing soldiers, so you will likely want to wait until those packs update before proceeding with more assaults.
Q. How does XP work for my soldiers?
A. Any of your troops that go on an attack, that are within a reasonable range of a kill (radius of 3000 units, which is about 6 plots stacked side-by-side in all directions - so pretty far), will share experience for that kill.
Experience is calculated as follows:
(Enemy Level * 10) * (Enemy Level/(Soldier Level + (Soldier Rank * 10)) * (1 + (City Level/0.25) + (Turret Count * 0.01))
So what does that mean in english?
The first part Enemy Level * 10 should be pretty self-explanatory, each enemy gives 10 XP per level. So a level 9 enemy will give 90 xp.
The next part calculates the scale, as if the enemy is higher level than your soldiers, they will earn more xp. So EnemyLevel divided by Soldier Level plus (Soldier Rank *10). Effectively what we've done, is count each rank within the Conqueror system as the equivalent of being 10 levels higher. We then just divide the enemy level by the calculated soldier level to determine a difficulty ratio. The difficulty ratio is capped at a lower limit of 0.25 and an upper limit of 2.5. Which means you can expect somewhere between 1/4 and 2.5x the XP depending on how different the levels are.
The last part is a multiplier based on the difficulty the settlement itself is providing. So a pre-built City Plan gives +25% xp per level, plus an additional 1% xp for each turret.
Experience requirements for each rank are based around each soldier killing 10 enemy soldiers of equivalent level. So if your soldier is level 9, it would take 900 experience to get to rank 1. Once they reach rank 1, they would be calculated as being level 19, so to get to rank 2 will require another 1900 experience, etc.
The overall idea is to introduce a new goal of trying to build up a bad-ass army full of high-ranking soldiers, with a risk-reward system, where taking less guys with you can result in them leveling up faster, though at the risk of losing the raid since once they all die you have to start over with fresh troops.
Q. What if I conquer everything and my guys still aren't ranked up as much as I'd like?
You also gain XP during defensive raids, so when you get the quest that your main base is under attack, those defenders will gain experience.
We'll be introducing other ways to gain experience in the future, such as training plots, more frequent attacks on your outposts (which also give XP), and eventually the control gameplay I discussed in my launch live stream, where you can lose your smaller Outposts to enemy activity and need to reclaim them - thus having a never-ending loop available to keep building up your army.