Good day, Ellarians!
In this week’s dev diary we wanted to go back to a topic we already visited a few weeks back: RTS combat. You might remember that we showed you a sneak peak of it, but considering we have worked on it over the past weeks, adding new features, we’d like to show you how it has evolved until now.
When you approach a battle in the world view, a button will pop-up offering you to join into combat. If you accept, you will enter the battlefield where you can choose between fighting in first-person camera or doing so in the real-time strategy mode. As you know, first-person combat will allow you to issue commands to your army to attack, defend, or follow you.
But let’s dig deeper into the RTS combat so you can gain an advantage in the battlefield. The first thing to note is that not all of your troops will enter the battlefield. Depending on the strength of your army and the enemy’s you will only get some of your troops and you might be able to use the rest of them as reinforcements later on (note that if your army is too small you will get all of your troops at once, but no reinforcements). So, if you attack a stronger army than yours, you will always find yourself in a weaker position than the enemy. In this case, it might be more responsible to go defensive to try to lose as few troops as possible while inflicting damage to your opponent. Note that the battle will end when one of the sides has lost more than 80% of their army.
To help you fight in RTS mode we have also implemented new features. Positioning is a key aspect in the battlefield so we will give you tools to select and move your troops in an efficient way. One of them is the ability to group your soldiers and bind keys so you can select them in a faster manner. For example, select a group of archers and click Ctrl + number and then click that number and you will be in control of that group. This might be useful to have different groups for your archers or your melee fighters.
Speaking of archers, positioning them will be important as they don’t fire on friendly troops. One way to deal great damage with them is by positioning them on a side of the battlefield, so they will have a clear line of view. If you set some melee fighters in a defensive formation in front of them you can set a trap for your enemy, that will fight a shield wall while receiving arrows from their sides.
Commands will also be important in RTS fights. We talked a little bit about this before, bet let us elaborate a bit more about how to do it in a battle. There will be three commands available to players: move, stop, and attack. The move command will move to a location, usually without attacking anything on the way. The stop command will tell the soldiers to stop moving and fight anything near them (though pressing the stop command twice will enter a "defend" mode, in which your soldiers will stop and stand their ground). And finally, the attack command will tell your soldiers to go to a location and fight anything on the way.
You will be able to issue multiple commands so you won’t have to be paying attention to every movement of your army. For example, if you need to outflank your enemy you can issue the following orders: go left, then go north, then attack move. Outflanking is an important maneuver in Legends of Ellaria. When a soldier is hit from behind, he receives double damage, so you should make sure that your soldiers are not attacked from multiple sides. There are easy ways to avoid this, such as selecting a dozen soldiers and tell them to go to a location. They will arrange themselves as a formation pointing to that location.
And that’s it for today. The size of your army, its position on the battlefield, and the commands you issue will be important features of RTS combats. We hope you have learned a little more about it in this week’s dev diary.
See you next week, Ellarians!