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We proudly present another important location - Mission Control ruins.

The century-old wreckage of the Ship Authority government complex that once controlled every aspect of life on the Ship.

The mutineers’ attack was months in the making, a decisive, disabling strike at the electronic heart of their world. It should have been over in less than an hour, but such things rarely go as planned. The Ship Authority was made of harder stuff than anticipated and the first assault was driven back.

In the following months of attack and counterattack, the mutineers’ failure to quickly secure the complex cost them much in lost lives and spent firepower. When forced to surrender ground, both sides adopted a policy of destroying anything not of immediate use, so as to deny it to the enemy.

Decades later, deteriorating conditions at home began to drive explorers and treasure seekers farther and farther afield, until a lucky group wandered into the fringes of that fabled battlefield. When the first news trickled back of decks littered with the technological marvels of Old Earth, the scavengers swarmed like maggots devouring a carcass.

Here the focus is on exploring the complex rather than fighting or dealing with factions. Only the first 5 levels (including the topside and mostly atmospheric General Assembly) are available in this chapter. To go deeper you'll need information and special items requiring a trip to the Habitat.

You'd meet two potential future companions here: Romeo (a riot control robot) and Knurl (a mutant you were asked to kill), plus several prominent 'divers'.

You'll be able to repair the robot (you'll need some armor plates, a gyroscope stabilizer, and a new head) in this update, but finding weapons (if you notice the robot's model doesn't have any at the moment) will be a bigger problem to solve. Energy cannons' ammo isn't easy to come by, so you might have to order some old-fashioned machine guns or supplement them with a grenade launcher.

We look forward to your feedback. Now on to the Shuttle Bay.​

Today we will discuss the game systems that pertain to character progression: levelling up and spending your skill points, and finding items and equipment for your characters. These are the systems at the core of any self-respecting roleplaying game - the features that give you that sense of personal growth and ensure a steady increase of strategic and tactical complexity as you grow familiar with the game.

It all starts with good old-fashioned XP, or Experience Points. In Rome, your characters earn XP mainly for completing quests. Since you can only bring up to 6 characters on a quest including your own, we distinguish between two types of XP reward: those which everyone in your praetorian party gets regardless of whether they are around or not, and those where only those who were with you at the time gets the full amount, while those left behind get half. This creates a little bit of a difference between how much XP characters end up with based on how much you use them, while ensuring that the ones you leave behind are still mostly able to keep up.

As you gain enough XP to level up, the only character statistic that increases with every level is your Health. This makes surviving easier and gives you more room for failure. All other stat progression is purely based on your items - this is to avoid the stats increasing too much over the course of the game, so a group of level 1 characters can still be a threat to a level 20 character, as they would be in real life. The aim here is to make the combat feel grounded and deadly from beginning to end.

One other thing that improves as you level up, however, is your unarmed combat ability. Each character class has their own set of unarmed skills that they can use when they’re not wielding a weapon, and each of the companion characters has a unique unarmed skill of their own on top of this. As a character levels up, at certain thresholds they will unlock new unarmed skills and their unarmed fighting stats will improve as well. This is to ensure that unarmed combat doesn’t fall behind. If you’re wondering why you’d ever fight unarmed when you could fight with a weapon, well - sometimes circumstances might not give you a choice, but your unarmed skills can be quite useful, so leaving your 2nd weapon slot empty might not be a bad idea in some cases.

The main thing you get from levelling up is skill points. Each character gets 1 per level, and buying a skill or upgrading one you already have always costs 1 point. Every class has 3 subclasses with 8 skills each, arranged into 4 rows. To reach the bottom row, you must spend 7 skill points in that subclass. In designing these skill trees, our aim was to make the top row contain the skills that define the subclass. These skills should be useful throughout the game, and they should serve a very specific purpose in combat. The bottom row, by contrast, are the “ultimates” - the most powerful skills that you can really look forward to unlocking, which feel like a reward for specialising in that subclass.

The two middle rows are designed to synergise with tools found in the other skill sets, to make it viable to split your points between 2 or maybe even all 3 subclasses. By the time you hit the maximum character level near the end of the game, you may be able to reach the bottom row of 2 of the 3 skill sets. A highly specialised character feels quite different from a generalist, but both build strategies can be very powerful.

The final thing we should mention about skills, is that many of them can be upgraded by investing further skill points into them. Skill upgrades typically make a skill more powerful without fundamentally changing what it does, while certain passive skills allow you to modify the effects of a previously unlocked active skill. For example, the Dodge skill allows you to avoid the next attack aimed at the character - if you unlock the passive skill Slippery afterwards, this adds a probability that the Dodging status effect is not lost when it activates.

As we hinted at above, levelling up is only a small part of how your character will progress throughout the game. Equipment and other items are where your true offensive capability will come from.

Items in Expeditions: Rome advance along two axes: tier and quality. Weapons come in 3 tiers that are simply numbered. The tier of an item accounts for the greatest power spike; when the game starts dropping a new tier of items, you will really feel yourself increase in power - at least until the enemies’ power catches up to you. In addition to this, there are 5 qualities of item: Worn, Regular, Good, Pristine, and Unique. While tier determines power, qualities increase the complexity and versatility of items by giving them more statistics and (in the case of weapons) a greater number of weapon skills. The baseline item quality is Regular, with higher qualities rolling with more affixes. Worn items are like Regular, but with lower stats.

What we’re perhaps most proud of is the way items differ from culture to culture. As Expeditions: Rome spans three separate military campaigns in different parts of Europe and North Africa, each location introduces you to a new people with a vastly different culture from what you’ve encountered before, and their equipment reflects that. Armour you take from defeated Berber warriors in Nasamones will not only look very different from Roman armour, but also offer different types of affixes to match the theme of that culture.

In addition to stats and affixes, weapons also have skills that determine how they are used in combat. Weapon skills are how you attack - as we have highlighted in previous DevDiaries, there is no “basic attack” in Expeditions: Rome, it all depends on what weapons you’ve equipped. Let’s lift the curtain slightly to give you a glimpse of what’s behind there.

Which skills a weapon rolls with are determined by two hidden stats: weapon skill amount and weapon skill rank. The former determines how many skills will be on the weapon, while the latter governs which rank of skill the weapon can have. This means that higher-tier items will drop with more interesting (and often more complex) skills and makes it so you may still be discovering new weapon skills after 40-50 hours of gameplay.

Every rank of weapon skill further has a weapon skill amount, which is used to guarantee that each weapon gets a certain amount of lower-rank weapon skills, since those are often the most straight-forward and broadly applicable skills. When a weapon is dropped as loot, it checks its tier to create the pool of skills that it is allowed to have. Tier 1 weapons can only have rank 1 weapon skills, and so on.

A final wrinkle in this system is the addition of “combo skills”, which require a certain secondary weapon to be equipped in the character’s off-hand. This can be a shield or a dagger. Combo skills can only be found on one-handed main hand weapons, namely swords and spears. Since only the heavy infantry class can wield shields and only light infantry can wield daggers in their off-hand, the matching combo skills are designed to be particularly useful to those character classes.
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Abrikandilu
Abrikandilus are born from the souls of mortals who used to destroy works of art and things of beauty out of pure envy.

Abrikandilus look like malformed hunchbacks with forked rat tails. Their bite is truly horrible and can leave mutilating wounds that don’t heal for a long time. In demon wars, abrikandilus typically act as foot soldiers who favor neither weapons nor armor — rather, their urge to destroy any and all displays of beauty works to demoralize the enemy.

The only thing that abrikandilus loathe more than beauty is looking at themselves in the mirror.

Vermlek
Vermleks are born from the souls of those who once found pleasure in desecrating corpses — grave robbers, necromancers, and necrophiles.

Vermleks actually resemble large, four-tailed worms, but they are most commonly seen inhabiting bloated human bodies, which they wear like clothes and use as means of transportation. Even though vermleks are expendable troops in demon armies, their ability to control dead bodies often allows them to infiltrate the enemy's rear. This disguise, however, does not hold up to scrutiny — vermleks are not particularly good at using the vocal cords of the dead and have trouble with articulated speech. One can even see the vermlek itself through the open mouth of the corpse.

Left to their own devices, vermleks usually avoid warfare and prefer infiltrating mortal communities under the guise of laborers and gravediggers, indulging in the same vices that spawned them.

Schir
Schirs, or spite demons, are born from the souls of mortals who committed heinous crimes (or framed others for them) for the sake of petty vengeance.

Schirs look like shaggy, goat-legged — and likewise goat-headed — humanoids. Among the denizens of the Abyss, schirs are known to have the foulest of tempers. They may not be too sharp, but they are strong, hardy, and hungry for battle. Schirs make up the backbone of the demonic hordes, and their fetid bardiches can infect their victims with terrible diseases.

Fledgling adventurers would do well to remember that it is impossible to trick a schir with an invisibility spell — and that it is best not to give it enough space for a charging attack...

Incubi and succubi
Incubi are born from the souls of sadists, sex criminals, and rapists.

Muscular and attractive humanoids with silky-smooth skin, curving horns, and wings — often decorated with piercing and tattoos — incubi prefer to act as advisors, executioners, and masters of torture to more powerful demons. However, that is not to say they shy away from battle, and the finesse with which they wield both weapons and magic makes them truly formidable opponents.

Incubi can easily assume the form of any humanoid of any gender, and thus make excellent spies and saboteurs.

Succubi are born from souls depraved by lust.

Their appearance is that of a gorgeous woman, whose demonic nature is reflected in their leathery wings, tail, and tiny horns.

Like incubi, they are not exactly fond of combat, as they prefer seducing mortals with their unholy gifts and sinful pleasures in order to bring them to their fall and inevitable demise. Although succubi and incubi share a fascination with sex and perversion, it is hard to mistake one for the other because of the differences in their methods of bringing societies to ruin — incubi act brutishly and aggressively, whereas succubi favor a softer, subtler approach.
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