Hello!
I thought it'd be a great idea to share with you the new game mechanics I've been working on for the campaign for the last 3 weeks or so, as they are nearly ready for release!
The campaign was good for setting up staged battles but the resource harvesting, fleet management and strategic level control was not so great.
The new campaign mode changes don't just affect campaign play, they affect everything about FtD and add two new strategic elements.
The current tactical mode (press N, use "patrol AI cards") offers tactical control over the units.
A new mode has been added that allows assignment of vehicles into fleets, fleets can move and forces can be moved within the fleet into different formations (or your own custom formations).
The world map has been completely redone and now your fleets need to physically move from place to place (making a fleet of fast small boats much more viable than one single battleship). You'll need to spread your forces around your captured resource zones and intercept attackers. As a player character you can warp to any fleet on the map.
The map has also changed such that it is one continuous game world without any need for scene changes / load times.
Obviously if the game world contains every AI fleet and every fleet you've ever made you'll be wondering what the "performance" is like! This brings me on to the next massive change: "in play" and "out of play" vehicles.
Prior to this development work battles could be so large that they'd cause extreme slow down (and even crash to desktop due to memory problems). With the new "out of play" mechanics all forces you are not interested in can be removed from play. These forces can still repair, harvest, smelt, grow crystal, move, etc, but don't use up and computational power and are not visible as vehicles. This makes fleet management extremely easy as you're dealing with "markers" not "vehicles".
Battles happen by moving fleets near each other on the map. Once within a certain range they enter "blockaded status" which means they cannot move or do anything. Once the player warps to the blockaded fleet and turns a force (or more) in play then the battle starts.
To keep battles manageable the campaign is kicked off with a "maximum number of blocks in play at any one time" parameter. This can be anywhere from 10K to 100K, depending on whether you want a more tactical game, or a more chaotic game, and also it allows those people with lower end machines to get a smooth experience.
The number of blocks you can spawn depends on the relative battling fleet sizes of you and your enemies (and your allies!). So if you bring 40 ships and they bring 5 ships then the game might have you spawning 8 against their 1 (five times over). So the balance of the forces is always fair (you had 8 times the number of ships that they did) but the game never loads in too many vehicles to play smoothly.
To make the game more user friendly you can now warp the player character directly from vehicle to vehicle, and even sit the player in an "out of play" vehicle and admire the view as it moves with the fleet.
As an example of the benefit this brings I quote the following functionality:
- Mass producing units painlessly by spawning in vehicles, turning them "out of play" and adding them to fleets with repair tentacles in them. You can go elsewhere and (assuming you have enough resource) when you come back they'll be at full health.
- Building resource miners in every resource zone, turning them out of play, and getting the full resource gathering, oil drilling, crystal farming, etc capability that you would if you were right there with them
- Creating fighter squadrons that can zip across the map and join you in battle, or watching an enemy battleship slowly lumber towards you across the map
- Managing dozens of vehicles in an out of play fleet, changing their formation and moving the fleet around without having to worry about them crashing into things!
Fleets move at a speed determined by the forces within them, and have maximum altitudes. Top speed and maximum altitude need to be "proven" so when you build a new plane, take it for a spin to show the game what it can do. Save it as a blueprint and spawn another one and it'll automatically have the same top speed and maximum altitude.
Retrofitting will be added to FtD to allow a vehicle to be turned into another vehicle. If you build fleet of 30 bombers but then realise that you want each of them to have an extra missile launcher you can change one and "retrofit" all the others to the same standard using a simple GUI interface.
These campaign changes also prepare FtD for trading mechanics and also a more complex resource mechanic where you need to actually transport resource around in order to spend it. Trading will definitely be added, and the resource mechanic will be an option that hardcore players can use.
Most importantly these campaign changes also make a co-op campaign mode very feasible for the future, so expect the co-op campaign somewhere near Christmas.
You can expect these new campaign mode features in the stable branch on Saturday the 8th of November. Old campaigns will be compatible with this mode but for the best experience I recommend starting the campaign again fresh!
Visit the official forum at www.fromthedepthsgame.com/forum for more details and I hope you're all enjoying the game !
Nick