Greetings, Directors!
It's Dev Diary time! Allow us to guide you through The Pegasus Expedition's combat system!
Previous installments:
- Investing in Infrastructure and Research - DevDiary 1
- Diplomacy in the Pegasus Galaxy - DevDiary 2
- The Story and the Setting - DevDiary 3
A woeful reality of our expedition to the Pegasus galaxy is the inevitable need to attain the resources of new star systems to secure humanity’s future against the Colossals. Through the effort of countless fleets and thousands of military personnel, players will be able to wage war for both new star systems and to defend their own.
In the Pegasus Expedition, we wanted to have the game’s battles fit the game’s theme of overarching galactic leadership. Players won’t be micromanaging each ship individually, but giving preliminary orders safely from afar, as any high ranking personnel would.
As long standing fans of the grand strategy genre, we wanted to avoid the tedium and “stack of doom”-meta so many fans are familiar with in many similar games, so we took a fresh approach by taking inspiration from modern, more automatized strategy games, and combined that with various strategic and tactical elements, tuned to the right amount through testing and a large amount of iteration.
Battles don’t begin immediately after moving fleets, but players can complete their maneuvers on the Galaxy Map before initiating combat, as long as it’s initiated before ending the turn.
When doing so, conflict can be either resolved manually, or autoresolved. Players will also have to choose which fleet will engage the enemy first. If the attacker is repelled, combat will continue until all attacking fleets have been repelled.
When combat begins, the fleet admiral will be waiting for commands. A set of strategies, varying based on whether the player is attacking or defending, are presented to choose from. Each strategy can affect a fleet in various ways, including their combat capabilities, the number of units they separate into as well as their angles of attack, which players can also rotate as well. After a strategy has been chosen and combat begins, the fleet will separate into units and try to execute the given strategy as best they can.
After this, the player will be able to order the fleet's flagship to fire various ordnance, as well as give overarching tactical commands such as telling the fleets to run the enemy down or stand their ground. As said, single fleets aren’t micromanaged, and the player is only giving orders from afar.
That's all from us today! Please, feel free to join our Discord server and let's chat more about anything that comes to you minds!