Preview Realms Beyond Combat Alpha Gameplay Video

[Infinitron]

So weird to see this after I fought basically the exact same battle with the exact same assets in Demons Age, but all I could do was auto-attack and cast like two spells...

Hah, can you post a screenshot of that?

 

[Jack Dandy]

I might have said it a couple times now, but kudos for promoting these kinds of things in the news feed.
Good indie games getting a spotlight is very important!

 

[ArchAngel]

Not sure what the penalty for a hex would be, but AP cost is usually 1.5x for that maneuver in a square/grid-based tbs.

There is no additional penalty in D&D for moving through squares occupied by friendlies.

 

[felipepepe]

So weird to see this after I fought basically the exact same battle with the exact same assets in Demons Age, but all I could do was auto-attack and cast like two spells...

Hah, can you post a screenshot of that?

Not gonna keep replaying that garbage until I find the orcs, but here's a group of goblins:

 

[Infinitron]

Realms Beyond goblins:

 

[sser]

Not sure what the penalty for a hex would be, but AP cost is usually 1.5x for that maneuver in a square/grid-based tbs.

There is no additional penalty in D&D for moving through squares occupied by friendlies.

Not for moving through friendlies, but because you're skipping terrain. It's faster to go diagonally.

 

[Valky]

This is what incline looks like.

 

[Valky]

In all honesty though I'll echo the slow combat complaint, also how cumbersome and awkward it feels to have to walk 6 hexes around one hex despite the charracter size being visually small enough to easily walk the line between two hexes. That's the only failing where I'll give ToEE/D:OS's "lack of grid" the win, the movement and positioning was much superior in it as a result in those games.

 

[cherry blossom]

Not sure what the penalty for a hex would be, but AP cost is usually 1.5x for that maneuver in a square/grid-based tbs.

1.5x is very disagreeable to me. Actual calculation is something very close to 1.4x. I think in Xenonauts diagonals also take 14, but I might be wrong.

In this case (hexagons), minimum AP should be the same as moving two tiles, plus whatever conditionals.

 

[sser]

My understanding is that if you run the numbers long enough you get almost exactly 1.4x. But you're not usually moving hundreds of squares a turn to justify the exactness there. 1.5x is what I see presumably because it allows for easy counting -- X-Com, HoMM, and I imagine most other games I play -- and presumably because from a design perspective if you have a very limited set of resources (AP in this case) and the constraints of the map are very tight yet with tactical obfuscations (like an X-Com map), then even with the middling extra mathematical 'cost', it's still worth it to move diagonally because it will be a large advantage regardless. What I've never really understood is why diagonal movement is so fast on 3D games like Doom or Half-Life.

 

[roshan]

Looks like complete shit. So fucking slow. And it's got that stupid "modern turn based" thing where the camera keeps slowly panning around without you moving it that makes games like Shadowrun, Halfway and so many others excruciatingly painful to play.

I remember in Shadowrun, when I reloaded a weapon, the camera would pan and center on the character, then a slow reload animation would play, and then text would pop up saying weapon reloaded. Then you would have to manually pan back the camera to the guy you wanted to shoot, wasting 5 seconds on all that crap. In Fallout you just clicked reload and the reloading happened. No bullshit waste of time rubbish ANIMESHANS!!!, popup text, camera panning.

I'd take IE RTWP over all these waste of time turn based systems any day.

 

[Strange Fellow]

In Fallout you just clicked reload and the reloading happened. No bullshit waste of time rubbish ANIMESHANS!!!, popup text, camera panning.

I seem to remember my character squatting as if to take a shit while rubbing his hands. But it's been a while.

 

[FeelTheRads]

Auto camera panning IS cancer. Hopefully it's optional.

 

[cherry blossom]

My understanding is that if you run the numbers long enough you get almost exactly 1.4x. But you're not usually moving hundreds of squares a turn to justify the exactness there. 1.5x is what I see presumably because it allows for easy counting -- X-Com, HoMM, and I imagine most other games I play -- and presumably because from a design perspective if you have a very limited set of resources (AP in this case) and the constraints of the map are very tight yet with tactical obfuscations (like an X-Com map), then even with the middling extra mathematical 'cost', it's still worth it to move diagonally because it will be a large advantage regardless. What I've never really understood is why diagonal movement is so fast on 3D games like Doom or Half-Life.

Because strafing and moving forward both had individually assigned movement vectors so when you press both, the game engine does the math. I think it was an oversight in early games and then became sort of a staple once it became a known "exploit", like rocket jumping.

 

[JarlFrank]

Looks like complete shit. So fucking slow. And it's got that stupid "modern turn based" thing where the camera keeps slowly panning around without you moving it that makes games like Shadowrun, Halfway and so many others excruciatingly painful to play.

I remember in Shadowrun, when I reloaded a weapon, the camera would pan and center on the character, then a slow reload animation would play, and then text would pop up saying weapon reloaded. Then you would have to manually pan back the camera to the guy you wanted to shoot, wasting 5 seconds on all that crap. In Fallout you just clicked reload and the reloading happened. No bullshit waste of time rubbish ANIMESHANS!!!, popup text, camera panning.

I'd take IE RTWP over all these waste of time turn based systems any day.

Auto camera panning IS cancer. Hopefully it's optional.

The autopanning of the camera during enemy turns can be switched off entirely in the options menu.

As for the animations, we do have a speedup function and in the next video Peter will hopefully not forget to show it off. It sets animation speed to 5x the speed you see in the video.

We're also going to add a speed toggle bar in the interface, similar to the speed toggle in the Total War games where you have normal, x2, and x3 to seamlessly switch between with one mouse click.
Once that is implemented we're going to make another video where we show off the different animation speeds.

Also, due to the overall feedback we're going to increase the default speeds of most animations, and especially the projectile speeds which are very slow right now.

Keep in mind that this is the first alpha version of the combat system and details like these are still subject to change based on community feedback and our own playtesting experience.

 

[Infinitron]

I think what we're seeing here is something akin to what it would be like to play Baldur's Gate with turn-based combat. Animation speedups will help but I'm not sure if they can entirely fix the issue.

At least in this battle, it seems like the orcs were just way too HP spongey. They were paralyzed sitting ducks and each one still took a million years to take down. Does the party have bad equipment here or is it underleveled or what? Maybe it wouldn't feel as bad if the player in the video didn't spend each turn faffing around in his spellbook, I don't know.

 

[JarlFrank]

Do keep in mind that this is nowhere near balanced yet either. It's essentially just a demonstration of our combat system: showing off the combat interface, a couple of spells, the AI's movements, etc.
Issues like HP bloat negatively affecting combat pacing will be dealt with once the actual systems are fully implemented and tested.

Here, we intentionally used a player party with powerful casters so we can show off the multitude of spells we have in the game, but the orcs only had one caster among them and he wasn't particularly great.
This isn't representative of what encounters are going to play like in the finished game. We'll plan out some properly designed encounters in more interesting environments (dungeons with chokepoints and possibly some elevation) later.

Some of the chars in the party had great equipment, some had shit equipment which they weren't even skilled at (the dwarf wore heavy armor without having proficiency, conveying a substantial malus to his to hit chance), etc.
What you saw in this vid was essentially a haphazardly cobbled together test party vs a cobbled together test orc squad for purposes of demonstrating how our combat system works.

Of course, once we show some actual, properly designed encounters, we'll be happy to hear more comments about combat pacing and flow and how it could be improved.

 

[Rune_74]

I think this looks really good.