Black_Willow
Arcane
Weren't Ufo1 and 2 maps also generated?
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Slaves of Magic - tactical turn-based RPG inspired by XCOM and Guild Wars
Harthwain
Magister
- Joined
- Dec 13, 2019
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- 5,413
Yes, the original Ufo maps were generated as well. I think the only XCOM game with premade maps is the first Firaxis remake.
It is inspired by Battle Brothers, though the artist really wanted legs in our case, so we have those :D . The reason for doing it is pretty much the same, to reduce the number of animations the artist has to do. It is even more important in our case as unit facing is an important part of the combat system, so even with using mirroring, we have to do 5 directions.
Ontopoly
Disco Hitler
Adding counters to everything is part of balancing.
I played the demo before there was a tutorial.
Here are my few cents:
- There doesn't seem to be any explanation between the 2 movement options.
- The combat system reminds me of Titans of Steel: Warring suns (I don't recall whether it was a different recovery time after each action, or a delay between order and action). However, there are not that many options that let you play with it yet (ie, I didn't notice huge difference of action time, maybe because we are only given basic warriors).
- Not being able to hit at range 1 is very punishing for spearmen (I am not even sure you can attack through a friend)
- I didn't find a way to move back without turning my back to the opponent (which also hampers spearmen), but maybe I missed it.
- The wait order seems to make the unit skip way too many turns. I could move each other character 5 times or so before the wait was over.
Here are my few cents:
- There doesn't seem to be any explanation between the 2 movement options.
- The combat system reminds me of Titans of Steel: Warring suns (I don't recall whether it was a different recovery time after each action, or a delay between order and action). However, there are not that many options that let you play with it yet (ie, I didn't notice huge difference of action time, maybe because we are only given basic warriors).
- Not being able to hit at range 1 is very punishing for spearmen (I am not even sure you can attack through a friend)
- I didn't find a way to move back without turning my back to the opponent (which also hampers spearmen), but maybe I missed it.
- The wait order seems to make the unit skip way too many turns. I could move each other character 5 times or so before the wait was over.
Trash Player
Augur
- Joined
- Jun 13, 2015
- Messages
- 495
The wait order will repeat itself if not interrupted. Each unit of "wait" action is about 10 time unit.
Interrupt this or movement by clicking the interrupt icon at the rightmost of the skill bar.
Spear can attack through teammates. Attacks lock the target in place until it is executed, so feel free
to lock enemies in place with quick skills if you can land the hit and spare the stamina.
Movement is directional dependent, so it is not possible to step back without turning with normal movement.
There are however skills to remedy that. Archers have dodge for example.
Interrupt this or movement by clicking the interrupt icon at the rightmost of the skill bar.
Spear can attack through teammates. Attacks lock the target in place until it is executed, so feel free
to lock enemies in place with quick skills if you can land the hit and spare the stamina.
Movement is directional dependent, so it is not possible to step back without turning with normal movement.
There are however skills to remedy that. Archers have dodge for example.
Darth Canoli
Arcane
Yay!!!
Aka MMO and NuXCOM ...
Nay!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
It was never UFO best feature but it worked quite well, looking at recent games with proc. gen. maps, algorithms are not equal, example, Battle Brothers barely playable forest maps against UFO maps...
To change the subject, there is also another huge difference between UFO and BB, encounter design and line of sight.
It's not relevant to the current conversation but hopefully, the devs can get some inspiration from UFO instead of NuXCOM monstrosities.
BB has no encounter design, regular battles all have the same two blocks against each others and ambushes split your team randomly because of the terrible forest maps.
On the Other hand, UFO have enemies walking all over the map from out of sight, reacting to noises and trying to stay out of sight while blasting your troops, this and the music and sound effects created one of the best tactical-"RPG" ever made.
Food for thoughts...
Firstly, let me thank you for trying it out! I saw that you are working for a long time on a somewhat similalry themed game (or atleast same starting inspiriation) and I would love to try it out sometimes as well when you feel ready to show it! I admit, the way you solved the hexagon tiles but 90 degree wall problem visually was a very interesting read. We gave up on it after our first prototype when we encountered this problem, and just went with the system we have now as we felt it would take a lot of time to get it right and we wanted to focus our time elswhere. But back to your feedback:
- There is just one tiny difference between the 2 movement option. The default one will avoid known collisions with your own units and seeable moves of the enemy units. The other does not care for collisions so that in special situations, you can overwrite it. This is written into the description of the 2 movement options, but because only 1 word is different between the two, it is easy to miss I admit. Probably some highlighting of the most important parts in the skill descriptions would help with that.
- Yes, there is not too much besides interrupting the enemy and slowing units that the player can do to directly affect time units yet. But it has a lot of subtle effects already which I feel changes the way the gameplay flow. For example, if the mage wants to throw a boulder at one of your units, you have a chance to break line of sight, or at least take cover. Then there is no problem with people not being able to have a reaction to other characters actions. Think of the usual problem that you for example have a "tank" character with a ranged character behind them. In a "traditional" turn based game, if no steps are taken to solve the issue, somebody can just simply move past the guard if they do not perfectly block the way. Normally it is solved by giving characters zone of control, so that it is not that easy to slip past them. This is not a problem in this system as by default, you will be able to have a reaction if somebody trying to go past you. But nor you are a superhuman who can stop everybody who tries to go past you, you can be overwhelmed. Another effect that the weapons can be balanced around DPS. Take the spear and the mace as an example. The spear is a very quick weapon, with somewhat low damage. This is great against people without armor, but it is quickly losing efficiently against armor (armor works as a flat damage reduction). Maces are slower weapons with higher base damage. Their overall DPS is lower against unarmored target, but they lose efficiently a lot slower against armored targets, which makes them better against heavily armored targets. I managed to make the mace a better weapon against armor just using the speed and damage variable of the weapon without the need for armor penetration.
-True, it is punishing, probably later on, I will create a few spear skills which can be used in range one as well (or just add some penalty for using it only 1 tile away). Though for the demo the idea is that he should be behind the player maceman line for the most part, and it can attack though units. It's task is mostly to support the others.
- That is intentional. This is the punishment for disengaging somebody, but there is a lot of ways to reduce the risk. As Trash Player said, characters with the dodge skill (in the demo the archers) can use it to keep their current facing (and you can leave a tile with it even if it is already attacked, so you can actually dodge out of the way of an attack). Other ways in which you can mitigate the risk in the demo for example, the shield knockback skill of the maceman, or the interrupting strike for the spearman.
- The wait command will wait "forever" in 10 time unit increments, till you do not interrupt it from the pause screen (which can be accessed from the rightmost of the skill bar, or pressing space). If an enemy goes to an adjacent tile to a waiting character that will automatically interrupt the wait.
So about the inspiration from an MMO part, there is basically one thing I'm taking from Guild Wars 1, the way characters were built. The very basic idea is that you have 8 skill slot for a character and no restrictions (oversimplification, there are penalties if you use too many different attributes) in placing any skills to those 8 skill slots. That I think made character-building incredibly fun and diverse, and I'm kinda bummed that even Guild Wars 2 left this idea behind.
About XCOM, well, I did not specify if I meant the old or the new versions. The reason I did not because I'm taking inspiration from both. Personally, I think the first Firaxis XCOM was kinda bland, okay for one playthrough, but lacked in the replayability and depth department. What made me stay with it for a long time was the Long War mod, which I think made it a lot deeper experience, and made the strategic layer a lot more interesting than it was for the base game.
But to go back to the topic, you can check out the map generator in the demo, it is somewhat similar to even the original UFO map generator, in that it creates the map from pre-made assets. Admittedly, on the sound effect and music department, we are nowhere near that level that even the original XCOM was, as they are mostly placeholders. Plus because of the fantasy settings, the combat is predominately melee, so the feel of the game has to be different as well. Time to kill is a lot longer counting from spotting an enemy if you have to get into melee range as well first.
On the encounter design, it is more so akin to XCOM than Battle Brothers. You do have a map with line of sight to play with, and on the map, the enemies are moving together in "squads" like in NuXCOM. But they do not have a scamper or anything like that when they notice you.
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Darth Canoli
Arcane
UFO worked well because their line of sight (reduced at night, mostly for X-COM operatives) was in synergy with the ranged combat.
Also, it's often tiresome (like in X-COM Apocalypse) to chase after hidden enemies but they mitigated it by adding sound effects during enemies turns so you can hear whatever they're doing even when they're out of sight.
That's what made UFO a great tactical game and why it's still played nowadays.
SE and music are major components here.
It's difficult to adapt it to a game focused on close combat (I didn't play x-piratez mod) but i know there's at least one trying to emulate just that, Zodiac Legion.
Don't get me wrong, i like BB combat but not the absence of encounter design.
And if you allow me to digress, BB weapon skills is by far its best feature.
Enemies squads walking together doesn't inspire me much though, i like classic encounter design bringing a variety to the combat but maybe you can make it work or improve it on the way.
Let's hope it doesn't include cool-downs...
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Haha, I have little merit in trying it, as it was of obvious R&D interest to me. I like these kinds of systems actually, so I hope you manage to pull it off (I liked the way it was done in Titans of Steel too, but it split the action more than in your game).
It is quite convenient indeed. I think I only used the "don't care about blocking units" option, but I am unsure about the best way to describe them either.
I too toyed with the idea of using a similar system, but I renounced for the same reason you didn't go with hexagons. I wanted to have something like an "initiative bid" with each character bidding a negative modifier to all of his actions in exchange for better initiative (a bit like the dueling system in the pen and paper RPG Legend of the 5 Rings).
Yup, a malus at range 1 seems to be the most straightforward way to do so.
I think it is still a bit weird, as the most obvious way to disengage would be to make one step back, but having separate move and facing options may add too much UI clutter.
I like dodge moving you to another tile (it reminds me of Cards Hunter).
Thanks for the clarification!
Btw, how will the overworld work? Will it be inspired by XCOM?
It was one of the issues I had in the beginning indeed. Trying to port X(-)COM directly didn't really work.
But it doesn't need to be too melee focused, because there are other things that don't work too well then:
Camping doorways gets stupid without ranged or magic options (like the early Total War bridge battles).
That said, I now see it as a strength of the settings: Changing the amount of magic and ranged units available totally changes the combat.
Darth Canoli
Arcane
You're a real tease!
Zodiac Legion, when?
And look what you did! You made me download Slaves of Magic demo now.
- Joined
- Apr 24, 2015
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- 20,645
Would it be possible to change "wait"-command so that unit would stay put for a set amount of time (for example player could command unit to wait 50 or some other amount of TUs) or until unit sees an enemy?
- Joined
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- 20,645
It was delay between order and action.
What complicates things further was that movement and attacking were different actions with some overlap in stuff that could be done in each category.
- Joined
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But shooting was an exception with act being instantaneous, but different weapons had differing recovery times
Initiative bid sounds like an interesting idea for sure, I have not played with such a system before, I will read up on Legend of the 5 Rings sometimes! The basic design idea for Slaves of Magic delayed turn-based system was that I wanted to represent the stereotypical David vs Goliath, agility vs strength combat more mechanically, rather than just one unit has more dodge, the other has more health (and/or armor). I wanted it to be a different playstyle as well, not just 2 combatants in melee range choosing to attack each other. The core idea is that I wanted to see combat movement between already engaged units, especially from agile fighters, and this was the system that I felt that can archive it the best. But this is definitely uncharted territory, with not many examples, so that was one of the reasons this alpha demo exists. I wanted to see if there are other people out there who would find this system interesting.
I agree that it is not exactly "natural" that you need special training to be able to disengage slowly. This was something I decided that it will work this way because of gameplay reasons. As you mentioned as well that implementing movement with user decided facing without a lot of UI clutter would be hard from one hand, and from the other hand, this gives me a good mechanic to punish disengagement without using things like attacks of opportunity.
Now, for the overworld part, I can give you my design goals, but it will be my first task of the new year to really design and implement a prototype so this will be just really high-level stuff. Here, I really disliked the Firaxis XCOM approach. The aspect I did not like about them is that I felt that the invasion was just window dressing, and I was just choosing from 3 random missions. I did not felt that it was a "simulation of an invasion", as in, the aliens have an actual plan to which I had to act on and disrupt. In this regard, I think the original XCOM was better. Luckily, these things were vastly improved in the long war mod for Firaxis Xcom. So, the first design goal is to have the invaders with a clear goal (to the player), and they will act to fulfill those. And the player will not "passively" gets random missions, but the missions will be based on the invader's actions, which the player should be able to interrupt/slow down.
Another thing that is mentioned a lot for the Firaxis XCOM games is the reverse difficulty curve. My idea to solve this issue is that the player will have access to "higher level" missions from the get-go, and will have access to the low-level stuff as well later on in the game. Of course, the higher level missions will be more impactful, either for the resource side of things, or they will be a lot more impactful on slowing down the invaders. So the player will be able to decide how much risk they are willing to take, but he will be incentivized to take as much risk as he can handle. This means that I will of course needs to be very transparent about the difficulty level of the different missions so the player can make informed decisions.
We will have research for armor/weapons/skills, and some sort of resource to manufacture, and use these.
Now, I do have some ideas in my mind about how to reach these goals, but I would not go into it till I did not flesh them out a bit more. But I will surely write about it when I have a presentable concept!
Agreed, camping doorway is a very real problem :D . Right now we tried to design buildings in such a way that it has multiple entrances and windows from which it is possible to shoot inside to give options against turtling. Another thing is to give goals to the player which are not possible to do with turtling. For example in the demo, you can turtle which is safer, but if you take too much time, you will have a hard time escaping because of enemy reinforcement.
I agree with what you said about the setting. What I really meant is just really a "warning" to the players to not expect an exact replica of the feeling of the combat of XCOM.
Uh oh well... :D . Out of curiosity, what do you think are the problems with using cooldowns as one of the balance mechanics?
Now, this was something that I was very on the fence (I mean about implementing a wait command where the player can set the exact time to wait). There was 2 reason why in the end I chose not to implement it.
- Firstly, it kinda breaks the uniform way skills are used. No other skill needs numerical input to use, and at the very least feels very un-elegant from UI perspective I think.
- Secondly, and this is the more important one, is that I do not want to encourage the player to micromanage wait time. Instead, I'm trying to see the usual cases when the player wanted to use wait precisely and try to solve that situation so that the player does not need to. For example, if you have an enemy that is going to step into melee range, and you want to attack it, but your attack would be faster than the enemy arrival time you don't have to use wait just attack the tile anyway. I'm automatically slowing down that attack to the exact moment the enemy arrives at the tile so that you will hit him (this is already how it works in the demo).
The other idea, to have separate wait command which will interrupt if seen an enemy is an easily implementable idea if this is something which would be commonly used by players.
Darth Canoli
Arcane
Interesting, first example that comes to mind is the scout class implemented with Temple+ for Temple of Elemental Evil. It wasn't fully implemented when i tested it though and my rogue / scout was a bit underwhelming.
It's a sensible topic around these parts.
Why would you use CD instead of a stamina pool, for example?
It's more flexible, you can use the skill you want when you need it and not wait X turns and if you don't use your stamina wisely, you're fucked.
Battle Brothers, while not being perfect in any regard did a good job with fatigue management, for example.
Interesting too, what about a more aggressive approach?
If i know this enemy base is going to launch an attack on X, which might be a minor objective, why wouldn't i size the opportunity to attack their operation base which is one squad short of soldiers?
Even better if/when they launch multiple operations at once (if they do).
I see, well generally Guild Wars used both stamina (as in energy) and cooldown, and right now I'm doing the same. Simply put, even if there is a stamina system, there are skills that I feel would be too strong if you could spam them. Of course, you could say that then I should increase its stamina cost, or weaken the skill itself. But I think the use of cooldown gives the designer another axis that can be used for balancing, leading to more diverse skills ideally. With cooldowns, you can create skills that are for example highly impactful but balanced around the idea that because of cooldowns, you will not be able to use them multiple times in one encounter (plus, they make interrupting skills more powerful if you can interrupt a high cooldown skill). My current plan is that if you want to reduce, or in some cases completely ignore the cooldown of the skills, you will have to have Intelligence-based characters that can do so. There will be skills in the intelligence skillset, which will reduce or outright reset the cooldown of other skills you use, which will be one of the key defining aspects of intelligence-based characters.
They will definitely be going to launch multiple operations at once, and ideally, I want some ways to define how much force there is for the different regions, which will affect the difficulty level of missions in the region. Maybe just as simply as they did in Long Wars 2 that every region has an abstract force level which represents the number of enemy forces in the region. So if the enemy leaves a region understaffed because those forces were needed elsewhere, that will give the player an opportunity there. So in high-level thinking yes, I want the player to be able to do such a thing. I want to abstain from talking in concrete examples though because again, I have a few ideas about how I want this to go, but I really have to sit down, do some prototype, and see how I feel about them before I decide the way I want to archive these goals. I will be definitely going to do dev logs about the topic when I have something more concrete about this!
Darth Canoli
Arcane
Sooooo, i played the demo and i wasn't expecting this at all...
What i got from this short experience:
You keep talking about Firaxis XCOM but it looks way more like X-COM Apocalypse to me.
And not in a good way.
Looks like you picked the real-time combat mode from Apocalypse and added a "Turn-Based" layer on top of it so your game is both RT and TB and no need to pause because the artificial turns will do it for you.
It's extremely painful early on when there's no enemy on sight.
Also, because of that restrictive TB layer, i can't give orders to whoever i want when i want and have to through every party member turn, maybe i missed some shortcuts here, i hope so.
Also, no settings while playing ? ESC gets you to the main menu and then you can't get in, you have to start over (or did i miss another command here?)
I'm not a RTwP fan to say the least but i'd rather have a "Real" RTwP system than yours like it's implemented for now.
What i got from this short experience:
You keep talking about Firaxis XCOM but it looks way more like X-COM Apocalypse to me.
And not in a good way.
Looks like you picked the real-time combat mode from Apocalypse and added a "Turn-Based" layer on top of it so your game is both RT and TB and no need to pause because the artificial turns will do it for you.
It's extremely painful early on when there's no enemy on sight.
Also, because of that restrictive TB layer, i can't give orders to whoever i want when i want and have to through every party member turn, maybe i missed some shortcuts here, i hope so.
Also, no settings while playing ? ESC gets you to the main menu and then you can't get in, you have to start over (or did i miss another command here?)
I'm not a RTwP fan to say the least but i'd rather have a "Real" RTwP system than yours like it's implemented for now.
Yes, the basic description that it is kinda between real-time and turn-based is true. I never said that the turn-based system is like firaxis XCOM, I specifically highlighted it as a big difference which I wanted to test
. Thank you for trying it out!What have you found painful about it early on? While the movement is technically atomic (so you only move 1 tile) but you can queue up any route you want, you do not have to give movement commands one tile at a time. And if you meet any enemies it will pause automatically so you can easily cancel those movement commands as well if needed, so feel free to just give general broad movement orders for your troops, you do not need to micromanage the movement if that was the problem. Usually, I found it is actually rather painless to get into combat fast. Of course, after we get into combat it slows down and plays like a turn-based game (or maybe a bit slower as the actions are more atomic, you can't move and attack at the same time).
You can't give orders to whoever you want whenever you want because their already ongoing action is not interruptable (if it would, it could cause a constant problem of the player starts an action, see what the enemy does as a reaction, the player interrupts its action as a reaction to it to change its action, the enemy sees this, interrupts his action and so on and so on). But you can interrupt any queued up (but not already started) command at any time (and in case of the wait command, you have to interrupt it) from the pause menu (which you can access by the rightmost icon on the skillbar, or pressing space).
And yes, there are no in-game settings, it was cut so that I could finish it before the Steam winter sale... To be honest, not like there are many options to set, I guess you wanted to turn on tile-overlay? I could just give a shortcut to toggle that in-game. It is just an alpha release so yeah, it is functional, but absolutely not polished, this will be patched in.
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Darth Canoli
Arcane
No, it's about the volume, i don't think the modifications were taken into account or you just can't tone down the music volume.
What i found painful is having to confirm each turn even when you're not changing any order.
For example, Apocalypse RT mode has a play button and a fast forward button (as far as i remember).
Also, it should be RT only before your spot any enemy or an enemy spots you, like isometric cRPG do (ToEE, Dark Sun and all the other ones) so you go fast forward toward the good bits and don't have to suffer turns and turns of a RT TB combat against nobody.
What i found painful is having to confirm each turn even when you're not changing any order.
For example, Apocalypse RT mode has a play button and a fast forward button (as far as i remember).
Also, it should be RT only before your spot any enemy or an enemy spots you, like isometric cRPG do (ToEE, Dark Sun and all the other ones) so you go fast forward toward the good bits and don't have to suffer turns and turns of a RT TB combat against nobody.
Again, could you elaborate a bit more, because I do not really understand? You do not need to suffer turns and turns of TB combat against nobody, you just tell your guys where to go, and that's that, you don't need to give any more orders till they are done. You can literary tell them go to the captive, and the game will go in pseudo-real-time till they see an enemy. I actually think this is one of the strengths of the system compared to traditional turn-based so that when nothing interesting happens it speeds up nicely. As such, it does work as a fast forward to the good bits. You don't need to confirm anything if you already have a command queued up. They will only bother you if they do not have a command to execute. And mostly this happens in melee combat where you can't really queue up commands, and the commands themselves are rather fast.
Darth Canoli
Arcane
I could do that but first, i want a decent formation, i'm not going to send the party with the archers as scouts because they spawned ahead of the troop.
At the very least a spawning area where you can change the starting formation would allow me not to have to spend 10 minutes to get to the formation i want.
Also, it seems like the wait button makes them wait for quite some time.
I don't have a clue about the differences between the two movement options, maybe i've read too fast, descriptions looked the same to me.
Maybe (probably) it's just not for me.
Oh yes, keeping a formation is definitely something I'm thinking about how to make it easier, that was a topic that was already discussed a bit here. Though at least in the demo, you should use the archers to flank the enemies, they are not really good if you are trying to shoot into melee while your units in the way anyway.
The wait button waits in 10 time unit increments. You can interrupt it from the pause menu. If you do not it will wait forever, or till an enemy goes adjacent to your waiting unit.
I think because it is definitely a somewhat unique system, which is not really explored by many games, and as such, there isn't really a lot of good examples of it to learn from. So on one hand, these feedbacks are absolutely valuable to me to see where are the pain points which are needed to be solved for smoother gameplay. Keeping formation easily is definitely a problem to which I will have to find a solution to. On the other hand, I think this uniqueness can make the game interesting. I feel like there is potential in this system, and it opens up a lot of interesting design space especially in making melee combat more interesting. But of course, if someone is looking for something more traditional, admittedly this is not it. This is more like a let's try something new. And again, going back to the point that this is an alpha release, so it is far from polished. My goal is exactly to gather information about what players feel needs more work in the delayed turn-based system.
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