Hey all, an update on the game:
Been working on rewriting the code and fine tuning some of the mechanics for the game's starmap, away team, and space combat systems.
The starmap work was basically to try and ensure I can support the number of star systems I want for the game, and UI stuff to support visiting a planet's moon(s).
Related to that was some rework on the away team mechanics. I'm planning to add a bunch of scenarios you may randomly encounter when you away team explores to break up the monotony of players harvesting every planet they come across. They're CYOA style, where you'll be presented with situations with multiple choice, and your success is decided with a roll against your team's stats.
Also, I'm planning to remove the injury timer that was in the demo: You'll basically just have to roll once to see how unscathed your team is during a bad situation, with an extra save chance when you bring along a medic.
The final and big update is space combat: I took the opportunity during the code rewrite to play around and redesign the combat to be turn based(!)
If you played the demo you'd have seen that space combat was originally real time, but slowed down a bit to allow some deliberate, but pressured decision making, as part of my goal to recreate battleship style scenes in sci-fi.
I've had some posters like
epeli ask me why not just make it TB then, which was a fair point. It also felt slightly strange that space combat is RT while the away team stuff which also has combat was TB. So I played around with trying to reproduce my above goal, and to preserve the spirit of the advantage system which I quite like, into a TB format.
So this is how spacecombat currently works in Startropy:
- Participants regenerate energy at the end of every turn. Most ships will not be able regenerate enough energy to attack on every turn, but I am considering to allow players to be able to build their ship to do that at the expense of other stats.
- Previously, the advantage mechanic was a resource that quickly reset itself to equilibrium in RT. It gave you advantages to hit and increased your crit chance, and you got it for doing “good things” (hitting the enemy, dodging an attack, etc.) and lost it for doing the opposite.
- In TB, it will now slowly move towards equilibrium at the end of the turn. In the old RT version advantage gave you a flat bonus to hit and to crit, with the benefit of having a larger advantage was just the increased time you spent in the state. In TB you will gain escalating to-hit/crit bonuses or penalties depending on the size of the advantage, until you hit a cap.
- A new ability called Manoeuvre has been added to shake up the TB combat. This is a low cost option to gain 1 point of advantage.
Right now, space combat feels similar to a tug-of-war, where both sides are splitting their choices between blasting each other, or gaining more advantage so they can more efficiently blast each other. The fights are interesting, and I think I have retained the tense deliberation I wanted players to have. More work needs to be done to balance it, but overall I'm very pleased with how it has turned out.
I'm gonna be away from my computer for a few weeks, so expect my next update maybe late Dec/Jan.