Codex Interview Expeditions: Conquistador Interview

[EG]

It was like that on Fire Emblem on GBA, you were a "strategist", and in fact you never appeared on screen at all. It didn't make the game any worse.

But . . . that applied throughtout the game, not just in combat.

 

[Tigranes]

I just think the game would be more enjoyable if the player character was integrated fully into the gameworld as well in that sense. You have all the stats that a follower has and can participate in combat alongside your followers, it's just that you also have additional stats (e.g. leadership) and participate in plot/faction/CYOA oriented stuff as well. It would help make the followers themselves seem more concrete and less disposable as well, because their progress and personalities are directly comparable, both visually and mechanically, with the player as well. The stories that you build up emergently involve not just "oh that was a tough fight", or "my awesome shooter nearly died", but also how your new native follower saved the PC's butt, etc. (And, of course, we all want the PC to be the badass.) The injury/death mechanics could be worked around to make this possible, it's not a hard limiter... but as I say, it's not a deal breaker if the game's already beyond the point of changing that.

Would much rather see terrain effects come into the combat, to be blunt, 17 skills, 3 item types, no terrain effects, seems like the combat will be more of a minigame than something genuinely interesting on its own right. I know this kind of game splits your resources into a bunch of different modes of gameplay, but go too far and you end up like the Pirates! remake, 6 minigames and no game.

 

[EG]

Much better to be the invisible hand of God, meddling and guiding your minions, than your own personal cypher. I'd rather see it as an absolute instead of a compromise.

 

[Misconnected]

I'm glad the alter ego won't be bothering with battlefield heroics. And I'm at least as glad LA won't be compromising the lethality of the battles to make it possible for Mr. PC to safely play hero.

As for the skills, how many do you need in ~20 guy skirmish battles? X-Com had, what, 3 attacks, move and crouch?

The terrain thing sounds worrisome. I'd very much like terrain based movement & LoS/F. But other than that, it sounds pretty good. Well, there's the craptastic GUI too, but I've decided I believe that's a placeholder.

 

[Tigranes]

Don't get me wrong, it mostly looks and sounds good and fund-worthy. I've just found that to be what separates something like King's Bounty from, say, the Pirates! remake, or even some earlier examples like KOEI's Uncharted Waters. You want the combat itself to be replayable.

 

[LibertyRansom]

Once again, really hoping they make the 100k fund raising mark. As a way to help support I posted the kickstarter link in the comments to other projects that I supported, i.e., Wasteland and Shadowrun. It just seems like a shame that these guys, who seem to have it the most together out of any the projects, i.e., a unique setting for once, a viable teams, playable demo etc, are having the most trouble getting their project funded. Wish I could think of other ways to promote the project.

 

[Morkar Left]

I will back the project. The player char only being passive is not my preferred gamingstyle in such small combat group games but the rest sounds good and interesting enough. Still hope they probably consider a change with the pc, would make me spent more at least.

 

[Running Fox]

Question: You have 2 coders. How in gods name will you manage to scrap together even a remotely functioning AI?
Answer: lol who cares our target audience (codex) only larps conquistardores and likes winning with tiger bloods roffles

 

[EG]

Question: You have 2 coders. How in gods name will you manage to scrap together even a remotely functioning AI?
Answer: lol who cares our target audience (codex) only larps conquistardores and likes winning with tiger bloods roffles

It'll probably work out better than Project Zomboid's single coder.

 

[Burning Bridges]

Going to GC must have cost more than they got on kickstarter so far. Strange.

 

[Jonas]

Question: You have 2 coders. How in gods name will you manage to scrap together even a remotely functioning AI?

Our AI is already pretty far beyond just functioning. If you care to direct your attention at our Let's Play combat demo videos, you'll see that it behaves pretty intelligently: it prioritises its targets, it uses cover, it uses the combat abilities of its characters, and it's capable of tactics such as flanking and avoiding attacks of opportunity (most of the time, it wouldn't be fun if you never got to make an AoO), etc. It's obviously going to be under continuous improvement, but it's already quite fun and challenging to play against. All of that AI was made by one of our programmers in about a week. It's not even all that technically impressive, it's just a complicated state machine, but it's a very clever state machine.

Going to GC must have cost more than they got on kickstarter so far. Strange.

The cost of going to Gamescom was nothing compared to what we've got on Kickstarter so far. It was somewhat expensive for an indie studio, granted, and we've yet to see if it pays off in terms of Kickstarter funds, but there is also the question of building awareness for the game so we can sell it when it's actually completed, not to mention showing people that we're serious about what we're doing

 

[Smashing Axe]

I think I'll probably pledge to this in the next week or so, this is pretty much exactly the type of game I've been longing to play for the past several years. History based RPGs are alas tragically rare. However I will add my voice to Tigranes' in that it'd be nice if the player character appeared during combat. Even if they're a weak pathetic non-combatant, it'd be fun trying to keep them out of harm's way, much more so than say, Mount and Blade, given you have direct control of your followers and so can participate in combat.

 

[Tolknaz]

Question: You have 2 coders. How in gods name will you manage to scrap together even a remotely functioning AI?

Our AI is already pretty far beyond just functioning. If you care to direct your attention at our Let's Play combat demo videos, you'll see that it behaves pretty intelligently: it prioritises its targets, it uses cover, it uses the combat abilities of its characters, and it's capable of tactics such as flanking and avoiding attacks of opportunity (most of the time, it wouldn't be fun if you never got to make an AoO), etc. It's obviously going to be under continuous improvement, but it's already quite fun and challenging to play against. All of that AI was made by one of our programmers in about a week. It's not even all that technically impressive, it's just a complicated state machine, but it's a very clever state machine.

Running Cocks is a known shitposter, don't bother reasoning with him.

 

[Jonas]

Eh, gave me a reason to brag about our amazing programmers :D

By the way, something just occurred to me: when we said that terrain won't affect movement in combat, how did you guys interpret that? Because what I assumed you mean is whether the terrain type (ie. sand, grass, cobblestone) increases or reduces the moves-per-turn of your units, which seems like an awfully specific sort of thing for so many people to care so much about. I can't even really think of any games similar to ours that have that feature.

You didn't just mean, like... will there be obstacles and do ranged attacks depend on line-of-sight and so on, right? Because we obviously have all that. We have partial cover now, for example - so if you're standing behind a waist-high rock, any enemies trying to target you will have a lower chance to hit you.

 

[Charles-cgr]

Still it would make sense in a jungle environment that dense foliage or steep slopes slow you down. I'm pretty sure JA2 reduced your characters' number of steps if grass was high for instance.

 

[Burning Bridges]

Jonas, if you have questions about what is considered good turn based combat by rpgcodex standards, just look at how it was done in Jagged Alliance 2.

Concerning individual features, if your combat provides the same or more than JA2, people will go crazy. If you do less, they will moan. That's how it will be on the Codex, I guarantee you.

It doesn't mean you should disregard your own ideas, but people will be really critical and harsh if they turn out to be miles behind JA2. Because there is no excuse imo to ignore the benchmark in turn based combat and replace it with vastly inferior stuff. We have seen this many times, and some people really have lost patience whatsoever.

If you see this as your first game, some sort of stepping stone before you go at a really ground breaking turn based game in your next project, then make that clear and those people will almost certainly forgive you if the game is a compromise, and support you all the same. But don't try to make it sound more than it is, that will not end well here I am afraid.

 

[Avonaeon]

But don't try to make it sound it more than it is, that will not end well here I am afraid.

We're not making it out to be more than it is, just trying to understand what the Codex meant

 

[Tolknaz]

Movement speed being altered by certain terrain may not be that common in RPG-s, but it's pretty standard stuff in TBS. It usually happens when moving around on world map, but i'm pretty sure i've seen it done plenty of times in combat maps (If the games have specialized combat maps). In many games terrain can alter many other statistics as well, such as higher ground giving you advantage in melee or foliage or other obstacles around your ranged character or enemy reducing your ranged effectiveness (which you have implemented).

 

[Jonas]

Ah okay well it's good to know we didn't misunderstand you.

Yeah I've played Jagged Alliance 2 and I liked it a lot, but not all its features will suit the game we're making here. For example we've talked about introducing character stances (crouching and prone in addition to standing) but it feels too modern for our setting and it doesn't sit right with the type of gameplay we already have.

In terms of movement over terrain, characters move between 4 and 10 spaces every turn (plus 100% if they don't attack), and there are already items and abilities that can speed up or slow down characters - to introduce terrain modifiers to that as well... I dunno. We have talked about adding concealment penalties to ranged attacks when the enemy is standing in dense foliage or behind a cluster of trees though, that's probably going to happen.

The world map is a different matter, of course. We're in the process of redesigning the way movement is handled on the world map right now, and I think we'll go ahead and add terrain modifiers while we're at it

 

[Overboard]

we've talked about introducing character stances (crouching and prone in addition to standing) but it feels too modern for our setting

You think that before the 20th century people didn't know how to make themselves a smaller target in order to avoid being hit? I understand the gameplay considerations, but it's a bit worrying for someone working on a game with a historical theme to exhibit this level of lack of understanding of what is a basic action in combat, whether historical or modern.

 

[OSK]

Bitching is this site's native tongue. If the Codex is complaining about something minor like movement over terrain, you should probably take that as a compliment.

 

[Jonas]

You think that before the 20th century people didn't know how to make themselves a smaller target in order to avoid being hit? I understand the gameplay considerations, but it's a bit worrying for someone working on a game with a historical theme to exhibit this level of lack of understanding of what is a basic action in combat, whether historical or modern.

Actually if you studied history you'd know that the human knee didn't even evolve joints until somewhere just prior to World War 1. Knee joints were specifically evolved to address the threat of machine guns firing across the trenches.

(On a slightly more serious note, European warfare around this time pretty much consisted of rows of people lining up and taking turns to shoot at each other. It wasn't terribly intelligent. If we thought the introduction of stances would be a drastic improvement on our current combat, we'd do it anyway, but none of us really feels that the game is missing that feature )

 

[Charles-cgr]

(On a slightly more serious note, European warfare around this time pretty much consisted of rows of people lining up and taking turns to shoot at each other. It wasn't terribly intelligent. If we thought the introduction of stances would be a drastic improvement on our current combat, we'd do it anyway, but none of us really feels that the game is missing that feature )

And red coats for camouflage.

These rows weren't that dumb, considering the time it took to reload muskets, combat taking place on open battlefields, giving little option for cover, and numbers of combattants being in the hundreds or thousands. This is quite different, with a small band fighting off guerillas.

No one is bitching btw. This is a civilized discussion.

 

[tuluse]

Wouldn't wearing a suit of metal armor make it difficult to crouch and especially go prone?

 

[Tolknaz]

Wouldn't wearing a suit of metal armor make it difficult to crouch and especially go prone?

Not really.