Brace yourselves, Wastelanders: this week’s update will overhaul most of the core gameplay mechanics! Aren’t you excited? You should be! Get ready for a brand new Insidia experience!
Gameplay Evolved
The Why
In the past couple of months, we’ve been keeping a keen eye on the state of the game, checking data from hundreds of matches, collecting your feedbacks and enjoying some intense theorycrafting sessions on our Discord server. The game was generally considered a lot of fun (thanks, guys!), but some of its core rules were a bit too convoluted to be really enjoyable, especially for new players. With this in mind, we’ve redesigned many of our core features, with the aim to ged rid of unnecessary complexities without losing tactical depth.
The How
Phases: It just takes two.
The most important change? The Resolution Mode and its subphases. We felt that having five of them was a bit overwhelming and, above all, it was quite confusing to see the result of your inputs after many actions already took place. For this reasons we’ve decided to cut the number of phases and to let the Active champions perform their movements and action BEFORE any other heroes.
The new Resolution Mode goes as such:
- Active Phase: Active heroes move and perform their actions.
- Passive Passive: All other champions use their passive abilities.
Priorities: less is more.
Since to understand how Initiative works is quite essential to play Insidia, we also decided to remove the ability types that could blatantly violate the priority rule.
- Quick Abilities: With the removal of Quick Phase, Quick Abilities have been changed into standard abilities. With active heroes firing their skills before passive ones, we felt it was not necessary to have an additional class of abilities that could go before movement. Of course, former Quick Abilities will no longer require the casting champion to not move.
- Interrupt Effects: All interrupt effects (that is to say, Trauma’s passive) have been removed and replaced with Reaction effects. Two (slightly) different kinds of triggered effects were really not necessary.
Side Generators: interactivity goes a long way
While Side Generators provided and interesting tactical choice, their impact on the game was a bit too slow and their overall design felt a little dull. So, we’ve reworked them a bit.
Side Generators are no longer a take & hold objective. Instead, every 5 turns they will spawn an energy globe. When a Champion moves over one of these globes, its team instantly gains 20 energy. Energy Globes can spawn randomly in a fixed set of tiles around the Side Generators, but their location will be highlighted one turn before they actually spawn, so that players will have time to react and plan their strategy accordingly.
Energy: more is more.
We’ve raised the maximum energy that can be stored to 50. In this way, you will not be compelled to use the most expensive ultimate as soon as you hit 30 energy out of fear to waste points.
The Future
All these reworks are just the first step in our effort to make the game less convoluted and more fun. The next objective will be to redesign and expand the in-game UI to better underline what actions a player has chosen and who is doing what during the Resolution Mode.
Of course, we will keep listening to your feedbacks so, if you have any suggestions, please write them on the Steam forums or on our Discord channel! Don’t be shy: Insidia can grow only through your contributions!
UI
- To make the distinction between Tactical Mode and Resolution Mode more noticeable, the map’s grid will always be visible during Tactical Mode.
- A new “ghost” effect have been added to better preview where you champion will be after movement.
- Also, the “ghost” will preview the chosen action
- I ain't afraid of no ghosts!