Hey everyone!
With last week’s update wrapping up a lot of the smaller improvements that we wanted to make ahead of the bigger update, this week was largely focused on attacks against buildings.
First of all, thank you to everyone who gave us feedback on last week’s update, it seems that the new look of the ocean was particularly attractive to many! With that in mind, I have already worked on a shader for our foliage, which will include wind movement - and John has also started looking into a way to decrease the harsh shadow changes in the tree canopies.
Regarding the attacks against buildings, those of you who have played the game against other players (not too many competitive players around though!) know that soldiers currently attack buildings by only standing in front of the door. If they haven’t been killed by an opponent after 30 seconds, the building gets destroyed.
This approach was largely a result of us thinking about how to simplify the way a building would get destroyed by marauders in the real world (most likely by setting fire to it with a torch), which we wanted to emulate by them having to survive in close proximity to the building for a little while. The desire for a “realistic” approach was somewhat driven by the first person perspective of the game, and trying to avoid anything that would break immersion too badly (and who doesn’t get immersed in 30 seconds of animation-less waiting?).
With the RTS update on the horizon and a desire to improve the behaviour of pirates, we have now decided to go more in the direction of a traditional RTS: In the past week, I added hitpoints to buildings, which can be removed by attacks by multiple enemy units, and villagers will repair damaged buildings (see image above). As a result, it will be possible to have more than one soldier (or pirate) attacking a building, and more attackers will destroy the building quicker.
In the coming week(s), we will be working on implementing this as a default behaviour for pirates as they come across your settlements.
Until next week!