Hi everyone,
I finally finished the tower upgrade I spoke about a few weeks ago, so I want to show you the results today.
As discussed in post 175, the soldiers in the towers are now no longer attacked by pirates, who instead attack the towers directly. This means that tower soldiers usually won’t die to attacks (they may still die to starvation and will then respawn the same way it happened so far), and that they will defend more consistently. The downside of this is balancing: So far, attacking pirates first needed to shoot the soldiers out of their towers before they would attack and destroy the towers - this took them longer, and there was a good chance that towers would survive an attack even if none of the soldiers in them made it. With the new changes, the soldiers are destroyed together with their towers, and I will need to figure out how to best address this.
In addition, I want to change the pirate towers (in the pirate fortresses) to act very similarly to the player towers. Instead of soldiers shooting at the pirates directly, they will likewise have to destroy their towers to defeat them. This is not as straightforward as one might think, however. At this point, pirate building are not yet “functional”, which includes them not being able to take damage or be treated as building by other parts of the game. I will need to change the existing code to allow for that to happen, without making the pirates a full fledged faction that would require underlying logistics, etc.
Overall, I am quite happy with these changes, and I will upload a new version of the game to the experimental branch once I’ve tweaked the balancing slightly.
Until next week!