Hey everyone!
After promising it for the past 2 weeks, I will finally discuss the planned ammo mechanic today.
Let’s start with our goal: Considering that we were trying to create a “strategy” game, we wanted to make sure that a player got an advantage not by bringing more units or firing first, but we wanted to encourage players to utilise as many strategic advantages as they could (flanking, high ground, assessment of what your opponent is doing) in order to give them an edge in battle. One of the more important considerations in this regard in a “real” war is logistics. Being able to keep your troops supplied and fed during an expedition or conquest is vitally important at a very top down level, so creating and securing your supply lines is not to be taken lightly. This is also something that can be decided on outside of the chaos of combat itself, which moves it to being a strategic choice rather than a reaction. As a result, it was important to us to have an aspect of “supply” in the game.
Initially, we wanted to cover this with Coin being brought to Barracks. We moved away from this before even publishing the game, as we made Coin virtual rather than a physical good. What we replaced it with was food, which needed to be provided to the market to supply Towers and Barracks. However, with Barracks, there is no need to further supply your soldiers as you walk them halfway across the island, as long as the Barracks in the base receive a steady supply of food. The way we have countered this is to make soldiers less effective the further they get from their Barracks, in the hopes that this would lead players to create forward operating bases and build their Barracks there. Unfortunately, this system is very unintuitive, and difficult to visualise for players. It is unclear how effective a soldier is at any point, whether they will perform worse if moved across this hill, or whether moving a Barracks is actually worth it.
So, we decided to replace the efficiency mechanic with an ammo mechanic. Every soldier will now have a certain amount of ammo in their inventory, which they will use with each shot. Once they run out of ammo, they will default to melee attacks, which will be less powerful (and more dangerous) than shooting from a range. In order to resupply with ammo, they will need to get close to a Barracks or a supply building, at which point their inventory gets refilled from the building’s inventory. This will mean that ammo either needs to be supplied to a forward base in order to minimise the time the soldiers take to get to ammo, or the army will need to be moved back across the entire island in order to regain its efficiency.
This also opens up new dynamics regarding producing ammo to start with, but we can also supplement this with research into better ammo, the need for access to better materials (nitre, sulfur, etc) for better ammo, and supplying your armies halfway across the island with the chance to have the shipment intercepted will hopefully make for some more strategic and considered gameplay (especially when you have a map and scouts to tell you about this). Beyond this, the commander will of course also require ammo as discussed before, which should stop the FPS legends among you from dominating too early (until you’ve set up the supply lines to support it!).
We will talk more about what we have gotten done over the past 2 weeks in the next post, but the current image is a little sneak peak of the latest version of the stone mason.
Until next week!