Devlog #17 The calm before the storm
Hello everyone! This devlog's biggest focus will be on the teleporter room, which is an incredible piece of equipment, and the biggest prize of the resistance movement!
Preparation for the mission
In the beginning, the player will have 6 teleport pads so that will be the party limit. With additional resources and research, this can be increased to 8. The basic gameplay loop is to set up a team for combat, do the mission, then teleport back.
Units that don't make back are lost forever, and even those who did make it back will need a resting period. The length of it depends on the extent of their injuries, but even uninjured troops will be tired. Tired troops can be sent to another mission in a pinch, but then they become depressed and will need a longer rest. So the player will need to manage their troops well if they don't want to end up like this:
We did a bit of an upgrade on what exact enemies you will face during a mission as well. As a reminder, the invaders have their own armies on the campaign map and will conduct different kinds of missions. Now, they are spread thin, especially in the beginning, so there is a big difference between army sizes, which basically decides the difficulty of sabotaging the given army. The enemy has a science level as well, which will decide the units of the different army's fields. Like so:
Every army is set up from 4 units in this list. Like so:
The level 1 army consists of the leftmost 4 units, the lever 2 then shift 1 to the right, etc. The enemy squadrons in the given combat map are set up using these 4 units. And when the enemy improves their research, new units will appear at the rightmost spot of the list and shift every other unit down by one. So units that were part of only the hardest armies will eventually be part of the easiest armies. This process does mean that the player will have time to prepare to counter the new units before they appear in large numbers on missions.
New equipment
We have the animations for one-handed mace, one-handed axe, and shields.
Shields will work a bit different than simply reducing the chance to hit. They do not interfere with hit chance, rather every character has a separate shield block chance. This is mostly influenced by their skill in using shields. If a character with a shield is hit (and not from behind), then we roll another and check the character block chance. If he manages to block then the shield will take the damage, otherwise the character. Axes have a bonus against shields, so they will be the best weapon to destroy them, but other high damage dealing weapons can work in a pinch as well.
Ui improvements
On the UI front, we have created icons + bars to show the unit's stats, instead of using just text.
So that's it for today's devlog! One small piece of information, the prelude alpha demo will be removed from the Steam store on May 31st to avoid confusion with our planned new demo. It will be available from the full game's Steam page when it will be ready.