The game started as a very basic "medieval X-Com" idea, and so our character stats and combat mechanics started there as well. At some early point we even had an equivalent to the hidden psionic skill of X-Com, called magic aptitude, which we eventually scrapped in favor of a more down-to-earth feel for the player characters, but also for more asymmetry by making the enemies that do use magic appear more alien and special. A strong influence of X-Com can still be felt in the stats for example by the way morale works - characters (players and enemies alike, although there are exceptions for undead) can panick and flee depending on how the battle unfolds, both for their faction and for them personally, and there are some special skills which attack morale akin to psionic attacks. Also drawn from the original X-Com is the concept of Action Points (called Time Units there) and how the player can freely spend them instead of being forced into movement and action phases, as seems to become increasingly popular now.
Since the player will be able to control up to 12 guys in battle at once, we decided that we won't need an overly complex system of character stats like it would be appropriate if we had just a single character or a party of 4 or so. The stats we do have, however, are all important.
I'm not particularly fond of MMO mechanics either, and especially not of the skill-rotation-by-cooldown routine. That's why we consciously decided not to have any cooldowns in the game. Instead, moving and using skills accumulates fatigue, with more powerful skills and more difficult terrain (e.g. swamp) being more expensive. When a character is sufficiently exhausted, he'll be unable to use more expensive skills until his fatigue has lowered again (by not using expensive skills for a while). This way, we can balance the use of those more powerful skills while still giving the player a choice of when to employ them beyond some hard limitation of every 2 turns or so. Since wearing heavier armor lowers the maximum fatigue a character can accumulate, the player can also balance his or her characters between being more offense-oriented and lightly armored but able to use more specialized skills in quick succession, and more defense-oriented and highly armored but becoming exhausted quicker. It is important to us to have every piece of equipment be useful in some way and not just be obsolete once the player finds a better version; by offering pros and cons like this, I feel we've gone a long way towards reaching that goal. I don't think we had any specific inspiration for this mechanic, it just seemed to be a good solution to us based on all the games we've played in the past, MMOs or otherwise.
Unlike X-com and Jagged Alliance we have no separate turns for the player and the enemies. Instead, all characters are sorted by their initiative and act in descending order. Initiative is calculated by Action Points and current fatigue so that exhausted characters, and characters wearing heavy armor, generally act later in a round than those who are not. This was inspired by all those PnP systems which operate on initiative systems, only that we extended it with fatigue since it tied neatly into our other systems, gave more incentive to manage fatigue well and makes sense intuitively. Our reason for going with this was that an initiative-based system seemed more fitting, more authentic, to a melee frenzy than neatly separated turns, which we felt was more suited for ranged combat. There are drawbacks to both systems, of course.
We removed from X-Com the mechanics that didn't seem to make much sense in a close combat scenario (like going prone) and added instead what would appear to offer interesting tactical options (like zone of control), again, based on our general gaming experience without any specific inspiration. Two of us, although not me personally, also have some experience with LARPing which they draw on occasionally.
If you haven't done so already, you can find an article explaining our character stats and how they tie into each other on our Developer's Blog (
www.battlebrothersgame.com). We'll also post an article there explaining our combat mechanics in detail soon.
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