Greetings commanders,
First of all, we updated the demo build, but the changes are mostly under the hood. However they should have a big impact on the flow and balance of the maps :
Changes
- Alarm locked doors have been added to all maps
- AI groups also have an alarm lock level now
- AI groups will now reinforce each other and seek the player party once the alarm threshold is passed and they become active. They will also open doors that have an alarm lock level lower than the current alarm level.
Fixes
- Some minor AI turn crashes have been fixed (it happened when pressing TAB during AI turn, after all the AI parties had been played, but not all animations had been processed).
This update is the perfect occasion to introduce our vision for the AI, and the general pacing of the levels in Zodiac Legion. One thing we wanted to avoid was to have the player party jump from one micro-encounter to the next. We wanted the whole dungeon to feel like a coherent battlefield, but it was not possible before, as the AI was not authorized to open doors.
But we also wanted to avoid all AI groups leaving their initial positions to charge the heroes' staging area, so the compromise we have found was to add alarm lock levels to some groups and doors.
Once the alarm level is higher than the alarm lock, the groups will become active, and be allowed to leave their area in order to engage the player party. They are not omniscient, but they will reinforce a group engaged in battle, or move to one of the previous known locations of the party to seek them. They can also reinforce objectives instead of looking for your party.
This means that the alarm level is not only about adding reinforcement to the map, but it also represents the AI groups present getting a higher readiness level, and taking more initiative as it becomes clear that it is a major attack.
The next upgdate will teach the AI how and when to deal with blocking objects. This will allow us to add the ice wall spell you can see in the trailer without trivializing the levels.
The AI will also be able to use active props too. It won't open chests to deny them, but they will use things like the thunderstrike capacitors against your party (the AI can already do that, but it is still very erratic, and the probability of an AI character doing so is pretty low at the moment).
We are also working on setting level wide priorities for the AI (defending a given objective, regrouping somewhere, going after a given character), and the low level tactical considerations, like teaching it to use and deny formation, and protecting its backline because AI archers can be a bit suicidal now, especially if they don't have enough melee friends to protect them).
We will also introduce more active terrain items, like teleporter pairs, but we'll cover active terrain elements in a following update :
Zodiac Legion will also be part of the Tiny Teams festival this week (but the game should not be covered on the stream).
Thank you for your support, and may the stars shine on you.