Expeditions: Viking - New Patch Improves Difficulty

Expeditions: Vikings has been updated to v1.05. Check out the patch notes here.

Hello, and thanks for checking in with us again. Today we've released update 1.0.5 for Expeditions: Viking. In addition to some bug fixes, this version contains several major changes to game balance that I will outline separately before we get to the change log.

New caps on skill ranks
The most significant change we've made is to introduce caps on all skill ranks based on the total amount of skill points you've spent. Ranks 1 and 2 are freely accessible, but in order to upgrade a skill to rank 3 you must have spent a total of 100 SP. To reach rank 4, you must have spent 175, and to max out a skill at rank 5 you must have spent a total of 250 SP. Recall that you begin the game with 50 SP and that there is a total of just over 300 SP in the campaign. The result is that you'll have no skills above rank 3 when you go to Britain, and you won't be able to level up to rank 5 until quite late in the game.

This update trades away some freedom of choice to enforce a better levelling curve. Previously, we let you max out your weapon skills quite early in the game, with the predictable result that you would outpace the enemies before you even reached Britain, and the enemies wouldn't begin to catch up until near the end of the game. Now, you're forced to distribute your points among the different categories, perhaps buying some Utility and Passive skills for a more well-rounded character. This does have the drawback that characters will be a bit less specialised, but the improvement to the game's difficult curve is profound.

Surprise round on enemy initiative
A new feature is the so-called Surprise Round, which occurs when you trigger an encounter where the enemy acts first. Previously the enemy would get a full turn before you had any chance to position your hirdmen. Since there is no formation system in the game, this felt unfair. From version 1.0.5 and onwards, the player always acts first, but in encounters where the enemy would previously begin, the player will not have any attack action, nor a bonus action in the first turn. In other words you can only move or change your weapons in your first turn because your party was caught by surprise. This has also allowed us to change the initiative back to Enemy-first on all the encounters that were previously set to Player-first to avoid unfairness. The result is a slight but significant increase in difficulty in many encounters throughout the game.

Bear in mind that this update is not the final word on difficulty. These are major changes that will fix our difficulty issues, but they are not intended to increase the upper ends of difficulty on the Hard and Insane settings. The next update will contain more tweaks intended to make the Hard and Insane settings live up to their name, as well as the promised Iron Man mode.

And now for the full change list. As with the 1.0.4 update, I have divided it into two sections: one for changes and additions, and one for fixes. Since this update has a far greater variety of changes than previous patches, I've decided to further subdivide each section into categories based on the type of change or fix.

[...]