Hey folks!
For a while now, I’ve been aware that our ambush scenarios have a problem.
As a reminder, an ambush scenario is one where either the enemy starts unrevealed and you can sneak up on them or one where the enemies ambush you (based on encounter choices) and start first. Today, I’m talking about the former case.
A Warband that has no revealed units essentially has every unit skip trying to think about what to do. In other words, we skip the AI calculation for unrevealed units. Until fairly recently (maybe two patches ago), this was happening instantly and was hard for anyone to discern what was going on other than “I can press the End Turn button constantly and nothing happens”.
The first part of the solution was to make the AI units telegraph what was happening. They were skipping their turn because they weren’t revealed, so I made them raise a combat message (the scrolling text) saying “Unrevealed”. I still knew there was a bigger issue at hand and last week I’ve decided enough is enough, when our designer Mia posted a message in our internal bug tracking channel.
I’m happy to report that this is a thing now. In every ambush scenario, you will have 3 turns before the enemies are automatically revealed and start attacking you after your 4th turn.
We then also had another idea - have the unrevealed enemies randomly move around, increasing the danger of accidentally revealed them if you’re not careful. This is how it looks like in the current version and is going live in the patch today.
The movements are fully random so you won’t be able to memorize the patterns in order to prepare a flawless ambush by abusing restarting the fight.
Thanks for reading, and if you wanna ask questions or pitch suggestions, join our Discord server or post in the Steam forums.
MarkoP