Tl;dr Small updates to add in better pathfinding for enemies as well as a turn order for enemy actions
Note from Aarimous
This patch is aimed at improving the enemy actions so they can be "smarter" plus act in a more cohesive manner. In practice this mean pathfinding using A* as well as a slight turn ordering so the closest enemies act first. There is also a nice bug fix here that was causing non-pawn enemies to spawn only around the origin tile. All these change should make the game slightly harder as the enemies are now not complete idiots when it comes to navigation.
Cheers,
-Aarimous
Detailed Notes
- Enemy Pathfinding
- Non-Pawn enemies now use an implementation of the A* pathfinding algorithm to move towards the player
- Pawn still act like pawn so they don't need pathfinding as their movement is by design pawn-like and very "railroaded"
- The result of this is that enemies are now able to move around wall and hunt down the player.
- I find this particularly interesting with the knights as they will now move in a patter that results in them being able to attack the player. Prior to this patch they knights might result in a situation where they will get near the player but never be able to attack.
- This is not a perfect system and there are likely many "sub-optimal" moves the enemies will make. But I'd argue the player shouldn't really notice the edges cases.
- This will be improved upon further.. soonTM
- Enemy Turn Order
- During the enemy phase of the turn enemies now act in "closest to the player" fashion.
- Enemies actions are slightly spaced out to
- The result of these changes now allows all enemies to move. Before there were many situations where enemies were blocked by pieces that would move after them.
- This is a small change but I think it makes the game feel a little better as there is a cool wave effect that happens during enemy movement.
- Please report any lag this sorting might have created. Thus far I haven't felt anything. But I am just one money with a computer.
- Bug, Balance, and Misc
- Fixed a bug where the non-pawn enemies were spawning near the origin. This combined with the old enemy movement caused a lot of enemy time if the player moved far away from the starting tiles.
- Many bugs were fixed most of which are small and not noteworthy
- Adjusted ability upgrade numbers, I want the early game to feel harder so most of the easily targeting abilities got their starting damage lowered. This should give more power to early relics that grant bonus damage. It will also make early damage investment feel a lot better as it will enable abilities to one shot.
- Added new relics