Hi everyone,
Last week was spent on a lot of bug fixing the new combat calculations, and in addition to testing for bugs, I was also able to test how the newly simplified calculations work gameplay wise.
First up: The new soldier behaviour is working a lot better. Not only is performance vastly faster, allowing for bigger battles, but the outcome of the battles has also become a lot more predictable and influenced by tactics, as you can more or less depend on your soldiers doing what you would expect them to.
However, having fixed these issues also meant that we could see some additional pieces missing from how we would “want” the soldiers to behave. The most important one being control: with all of the soldiers acting somewhat independently from their squad, it can easily happen that multiple squads get mixed in with each other during a bigger battle - so when you try to extract one squad to close in on some enemy ranged units, it is difficult to tell which unit you are going to select, and how many of its soldiers are actually at the front line.
Likewise, selecting said squad and telling it to close the distance to some ranged units potentially means that they end up re-engaging new enemies shortly after, as they get closer to them and perceive them as a higher threat - so while you can tell your units to retreat, telling them to get behind enemy lines is a little more difficult.
Overall, this has a lot to do with the fact that the soldier behaviour was originally designed for ranged units, and has since been adjusted to also work for melee units. As a result, a lot of the behaviour is something of a hybrid, which at this point works OK for both, but not great for either. While I don’t consider it to be necessary for 0.8 experimental, I now firmly plan on separating those two behaviours before finalising 0.8 - so we have two distinct behaviour types that both work great for their respective units.
For now, however, we are just missing sounds and the new building models, so I will focus on both of those to get to 0.8 experimental.
Until next week!