Previously, I discussed our decision to remove building mechanics and minion management from the game. At first glance, it might seem like we’ve stripped away features and made the game less dynamic. However, this change has had a surprisingly positive impact on gameplay. Players are no longer distracted by auxiliary tasks. Instead, their primary focus is clear: defeating the enemy forester. This clarity enhances the overall enjoyment of the game, as players can fully understand their actions and predict their opponent's moves. Moreover, it significantly improves skill development. Since the results of your decisions are immediately apparent, it’s easier to identify mistakes and learn to avoid them in future matches.
One minor distraction from battles remained: the hero progression system. Previously, players had to manually sacrifice one unit of each resource every five minutes to unlock the ability to upgrade one of three skills. While this approach added value to resources, it also forced players to constantly track spell upgrades. After unlocking a skill, they had to mentally set a five-minute timer to upgrade the next one and repeat the process.
To streamline this, we made hero progression automatic. Like in many other games, our foresters now gain experience during play, leveling up when they reach certain thresholds. Each new level unlocks an additional skill upgrade. Players earn 1 experience point for every resource gathered, and cards taken from the table also grant experience – equal to their resource cost.
The forester's level now also determines the level of their minions. For instance, if the forester is level 1, their minions are level 1; if the forester reaches level 5, the minions summoned from the portal will also be level 5. This adjustment maintains the importance of resource collection for progression but eliminates the need for players to juggle additional tasks mentally.
New Teleports
At the start of the game, players often spend considerable time running to the forest. This is especially challenging for the second team, as they must traverse the entire map to disrupt their opponent’s resource gathering. To address this, we added teleporters to each base, leading directly into the forest. The teleportation exit point for each base is located near the opponent's base exit. This means that a second-team forester can immediately teleport to the first team’s base and ambush their forester.
Notably, champions cannot use these teleporters, preventing the entire team from ambushing the enemy forester at the start of the match. However, the first-team forester can avoid confrontation by using their teleporter. If they do, the second-team forester can simply run from their base without using the teleporter, still creating the possibility of an early-game encounter. As you can see, this creates a variety of strategic options right from the beginning!
Fog of War
However, to prevent the second player from gaining a guaranteed advantage, the first player needs some degree of privacy. I’ve previously explained why game transparency is beneficial – it allows players to learn from each other. This led us to remove the fog of war entirely, which has been a good decision so far. However, we now see a need to reintroduce it. That said, the core forester mechanic – resource gathering – should remain visible to preserve the advantages of open gameplay. Therefore, the forest area where resources are located will stay visible to both teams at all times.
Teleport Restrictions
Another issue we noticed involved the forest teleporters, which provided little room for positional play. If one player realized they were losing a fight, the teleporter offered no reliable escape route – the opponent could simply follow them through the same portal. To address this, we added a short cooldown between uses for each teleporter. Once a player uses a teleporter, it becomes inactive for the next 4 seconds, preventing anyone else from following immediately. Additionally, heroes now have a personal cooldown of 6 seconds after using a teleporter, meaning they can’t instantly jump back and forth. This change prevents players from exploiting teleporters to escape and immediately return to the same spot.
Timeouts for Gnomes and Traps
We’ve also updated mechanics for gnomes and traps – anything players can place on the ground. These now have timeouts, disappearing automatically after a certain duration. Let me explain why we made this change. The idea behind gnomes is to give players a choice: either destroy the gnome, taking significant damage, or avoid it by navigating around the forest to reach the resources they need. However, as the game progresses, gnomes tend to accumulate, making it increasingly difficult to avoid them. Eventually, players have no choice but to confront them, often needing to destroy multiple gnomes in quick succession.
This created a situation where the strategic choice was effectively removed – players had to destroy gnomes, and the sooner, the better. By introducing a lifespan for gnomes, the original intent of providing meaningful choices comes back into play. Players can now decide whether to deal with a gnome immediately, incurring some losses, or wait it out, temporarily complicating their path through the forest. This change restores balance and ensures that gnome placement works as intended, enhancing the strategic depth of gameplay.
With traps, the situation is slightly different. Without a timeout, any trap will almost inevitably trigger sooner or later, as forester spend a lot of time running through the forest. Adding a timeout forces players to think more carefully about trap placement, making their choices more strategic.
Let me also highlight a seemingly minor change that doesn’t directly impact gameplay but adds a lot of positive emotion to the experience: we’ve added visual feedback for when traps are triggered. Now, whenever a forester accidentally steps into a trap and loses a resource, or tries to gather a booby-trapped resource and gets blown up, the opposing forester receives a notification in the form of flying cards on their screen. This small detail strengthens the connection between a player’s actions and their results, encouraging them to use traps more often and making their impact feel more rewarding.
So, let’s see how all these changes play out in action!
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