Heartland Frontier Content Update - v0.1.4

Heartland Frontier is a challenging tile-based 4x strategy game where you fight feudal lords and tribal chieftains in the hope of unifying your homeland and resisting foreign invasion. The heartland is the last true untamed frontier on the continent, a sparse realm trapped between 4 great powers.  

I try to do content updates every Friday, I do not include balance / bug fixes in these devlogs. You can check the game manual here for more detail. The main content added to the game over the past week is the following:

Every couple of months or so a Mercenary Camp will migrate around the frontier. The camp will allow you to hire mercenary cohorts at the cost of gold. The location it migrates to is random, so sometimes it can arrive just when you need it - or it could move to the other side of the game world.

The Mercenary Camp is one of three neutral camps I will be implementing. In the next week I will be developing the Tavern which will be similar to the Mercenary Camp in that it will travel around the frontier, allowing you to recruit characters into your faction. Once the Tavern has been implemented the Black Market will also be added to allow you to trade various resources.

In addition to this I will start adding more events to the game for flavor and randomness, at first these will involve the Foreign Powers that can enter the heartland from each direction. Your faction will be able to interact with these foreign powers and your relations with them will affect how they view you.

Examples of how the status of Foreign Powers will affect events would be:

• A Prosperous Great Power is likely to send armies and colonists.
• Civil War in a Great Power is likely to send refugees rather than soldiers.
• A Great Power in complete anarchy will not be able to wage foreign adventures.

The past months have been mainly spent on designing the economy and core mechanics, I didn't want to have boring resources - and I wanted to simplify character interaction with the world, my objectives have been largely achieved. Now that we have entered 2020 proper, the goal is to add depth of choice and randomness through Factions, Events and Combat. These are my 3 priorities for the near-future and I will be spending most of my time on these. 

If you would like to learn more about this game, I try to make a video every few devlogs. In this video I talk about resource management and economy, it will give you a feel for how the game plays.