Cool, sounds really interesting. The game is definitely geared towards missiles and ranged combat. The melee is there mostly as an alien weapon and only really meant to be used by the humans for killing specific enemies. I think a melee-focussed human team would get outclassed by the aliens pretty quickly and would probably really struggle. Now a short range team consisting of Spectre, Nova Marine, Incinerator with backup should be fine. It's just pure melee that I think wouldn't work well because the alien counter attacks would just be too much.
Ravager Stage on Extreme Ravager Stage on Extreme Turn 1: Random unit placement makes things more difficult here. Ideal situation would be both Commanders and Cyborg in the SW, to take over the bot and then get the hell outta Dodge. Good thing my Cyborg has 137AP by now, he started out in the NE corner, not SW near the Hyena Bot where I need it. Doc gave the Cyborg the Optical Augment and Combat Stims buffs, then he raced off to take over the Bot. Took the time to throw a Tachion Grenade at the 3-group south of NE starting corner when the Cyborg went down the corridor. Bot fired off Suppressive Fire, but missed 4 out of 5 targets, then moved North to block the doorway. Cyborg got fueled and moved behind the Bot. Nova boosted herself, Missile fired off a few shots. Both collected 1 item. Doc boosted her Mech, even with a Shield. Turn 2: Ravager in Stun range ... and he's out of the picture. Now I just need to keep him stunned (no biggie), weather the fire thrown my way, and methodically clean out the smaller beasties first. Bot is stunned, crap. NOTE: range indicators need to be better visible, third time I miscalculated. Nova, Cyborg, Missile, Commander piled up behind the South Bot, Missile dropped the Tactical Field. Other group got held up, but Bot is in range for main fight fire support. Doc and Commander had to stun a nearby 300+HP Armored Grunt, and need to take him down over the next 2 turns. Turn 3 etc: Still playing, but seems to work so far. I need to move the Doc over to the other side asap. It's not much per hit, but the damage starts adding up; and only the Nova has (self-)healing. Nova drops Shield, Missile goes immobile and shoots down enough enemies to panic another. Doc needed to get fueled big time, but single-handedly took down the Armored Grunt, then turned tail and ran off towards the main fight to support the other group with healing. Commander went after her, leaving the poor Bot all alone on his flank.
Crapcrapcrap! I misunderstood the rules for Stun, the Ravager moved out of the killing zone. But think I can still win, only it will take longer. Hah! Other Commander went back and stunned the Ravager again
Ravager on Extreme - WON! So, it worked Won on turn 10, without ever really being in any danger. Even with making the huge mistake of missiling the living hell out of the Ravager when my Commanders were standing next to it, and once the same with the Nova. All 3 panicked on 3 different turns. But well, they could still shoot, and contributed ~250 damage to the total. Simply keeping the Ravager stunned in a killzone made things almost too easy Might try switching regular missions to Extreme difficulty, see how I fare.
For those who missed our conversation on Discord: 2x 5 Stuns from 2 Commanders, plus 3(?) from the Cyborg. That's what, 20 rounds guaranteed? On top of that, I have my damage folks crit-buffed up the wazoo. And the high number of Commander-AP-fueled attacks (15+ per round with 3 attackers - Missile, Nova, Cyborg - when they have nothing else to do (like setting up their buffs, damage output in first 2-3 rounds is generally lower till I got everything in full swing) I can dish out pretty much guarantees at least one crit-stun per turn. Plus all the other nasty crit-effects like Crippled or Blinded. Oh, the Vanguard has a Stun ability too? Need to keep that in mind if I ever need more
I'm thinking I'll remove the stun effect from the critical hit effect lists. Might replace it with a "disable ability" or morale reduction. I want stuns to be relatively rare effects. The general idea was to have a handful of weaker abilities that could stun to delay powerful enemies, not have critical hits make enemies stay in a perpetual stun state. I think so ... he has an ability called the Vortex rocket that does damage to an area and maybe causes a stun or something. Not sure.
Then you got that one wrong, sorry if I wasn't clear enough. The crit-stuns are just icing on the cake for my playstyle, mostly because they aren't reliable enough to be sure I can stun an enemy this turn. The majority of stuns comes from my two Commanders, with the Cyborg as backup. Everything else on top of that is just a nice bonus. I thought about it quite a lot yesterday and today, and my opinion is: If you remove stun from crits, you remove that option for players who do not drag 3 stun-capable soldiers around. You're coming at it from the wrong angle. IF you want to make a stun-focused playstyle less viable, I think you'll need to limit the stuns soldier can dish out via abilities. But then, the followup question is: Why would you want to do that? Balance? It's singleplayer, so screw balance it's all about having fun. Also, don't forget that folks like me represent the upper limit of what you can get out of your engine, rules-wise. I'd really like to see how an average player goes about things. My guess is that we'll see quite a different playstyle there. Just because some really good players find optimal ways to use a given system, does not automatically mean something needs to be changed. I have a bit of a hard time putting my exact thoughts into words here. Maybe like this: Let's say you remove stuns completely, no more crit-stuns, no more stun abilities. You'll make playing for me more interesting for a bit, as I have to come up with new - maybe superior, maybe inferior - tactics. But for your average player, I dare say you'll make things a lot more difficult. And even for rather hardcore games like yours, I think you should always aim to keep it fun for the average player. Let the optimisers, numbercrunchers, and tactical outliers have their fun their way. But don't change game mechanics just because someone found an interesting application. Planar Conquest did that, nerf stuff because a few at best mediocre players kept complaining that so-and-so was overpowered. Different situation, but I use it as an example that a game can easily be worse off by tweaking things downwards.
No, I definitely want to keep stuns as a game mechanic. I just want it to be a rarer element that a player has to actively leverage through an ability and not something they can get as a side-effect of having high critical chance attacks. I'm thinking of leaving it as properties of certain abilities but remove from the effects of criticals. I just don't think critical hits should be that devastating to large creatures.
That makes sense, especially against the big beasties. Don't know if you have a parameter indicating a creature's size. If yes, I think it would be relatively easy to set crit effects by size. E.g. a small opponent you can stun and cripple, but not bleed or blind. While a large one is simply too bit to get stunned or crippled (good luck kicking those huge legs out under him ); while on the other hand even its eyes/sensors are a big enough target to allow for blinding.
Yeah, that would be easy to do. Have different critical effects depending on the target. I'll give that some thought. Here's some minor tweak I'm doing on the UI. I'd like some feedback before committing. I thought I would change the attacks bar to a number of icons instead. If you have one attack left, it would show one bullet, two would show two, three would show three and any more than that would just show as "+" sign. udpated UI design by Rajpreet Dhillon, on Flickr I think it's a bit more intuitive and easier to read than an attack slider / bar. What do you guys think?
I like both. With the bullet icons, be prepared for "but what about melee attacks?" questions Personally, I find numbers easier to read, but that's just me. Plus, a simple number is less clutter on the UI, opposed to 1-4 symbols. Oh, and I miss the nice green already (background color of the bar).
I'm liking it because while it conveys technically less information, it does it much more vividly. So you look at the character, and you can see immediately that they have two attacks without having to look closely or read a number on the AP. It's also more visually understandable to me.
I like the bar better, it's stylistically more balanced. Although the proposed icons might intially be a bit easier to understand, I don't think it adds enough to warrant the deviation of the style / cleanliness of the UI. I would appreciate a more intuative presentation of total unit AP, the AP used for moving, shooting and use of abilities. It's now in seperate screens and seems, to an average player like me, complicated. Nonetheless, I'm enjoying the game and look forward to the next update.
Thanks for the feedback, yeah, I might go back and forth. Not sure. Can you explain what you mean about your second point? How exactly would you like it changed?
I think I know what he means, and I agree with him. Calculating AP tactics is not easy. The combination of movement and abilities is not easy. For instance, you might choose to move a bit closer to an enemy in order to use a certain ability, only to find that when you get there, you don't have enough AP's left. Would this be possible? You select a character, all the available abilities appear in a line across the bottom of the screen (similar to DR2, I think), then when you tap a potential place to move to, the abilities which will not be available become greyed out? Combine this with the bullet icons you suggested above (I like that idea), and it becomes a lot easier for we simpletons. CJ
Yes, that's a great idea. I think I'll put the information on a panel that appears from the right side rather than the bottom. I'll work on that today.
Also, I think I'll revert back to the original bar for attacks at the top to keep visual symetry. I may put bullet icons representing attacks from the selected tile in the new panel as well.
Here's my first attempt. Seems to be working well in my game dev engine. Just checking on an actual device now. movement ability impact by Rajpreet Dhillon, on Flickr So now whenever you click on a tile that is in move range, a window pops up from the right that shows which abilities can be used after making that move. It also takes into account if the unit has sufficient AP for an ability but if the ability is not accessible for any other reason (e.g. unit is stunned, ability is used up, ability on cooldown, etc.). If this works well on a device it'll be in the 1.3 patch that will be submitted shortly after Apple approve the 1.2 patch. Apple seem to be taking really long time on the 1.2 patch. I wish they would move a bit faster on that one.
Seems to work great on a test device. Fantastic improvement. Thanks again for the idea. It's now much easier to plan a move.
