Hi everyone,
My computer had some issues last week, so I spent most of my free time trying to fix it, and didn’t have much leftover to develop the game. However, I was still able to overhaul how scouts work, which I will be talking about today.
First off, I had decided to take another look at the scouts cause they could cause a game crashing bug when fleeing from pirates. After taking that initial look, however, I decided to switch how they work altogether. When you send scouts to their scouting location from the map, they have a variety of ways to deal with pirates they encounter along the way. Until now, they would notice the pirate and hide, doing nothing until the pirate either moved past them, or was taken care of by the player. If a pirate got close enough, the scout would run away to avoid getting killed - but this could also result in an endless chase as the pirate couldn't catch up.
After this week’s changes, the scouts act a little differently: Scouts can no longer be seen by wood tier units (axe and blunderbuss pirates), so they will simply walk past the early opponents. They will still spot them and reveal the map, but this reduces the danger to them, and makes them more effective in the early game. Scouts are still seen by more advanced pirates, so if the scout notices one of them, he still goes into hiding - at which point he will start revealing the map around his hiding location.
We are thinking of introducing some research with 0.9 that will allow scouts to also remain hidden from the stone tier pirates - and maybe even the metal tier pirates - but those plans haven’t been finalised yet. Regardless, pirate fortresses should remain a barrier to the scouts, so they will be detected when trying to run through them.
Until next week!