Age of Wonders: Planetfall - Dev Diary #5: Tactical Combat

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What faction does the phoenix walker belong too? As Ambassador of the Dvar; i claim it for the Dvar faction. Plasma cutters and flamethrowers are useful shaping tools.

Also it seems kind of silly that ranged units can do point blank shots on melee.. They get an accuracy penalty for this or bonus? Maybe the Melee guy should get his counter-attack BEFORE the ranged guy gets his point blank shot? Thats probably some skill already in game though.


Prometheus unit.

And point blank (or point blanc as it should be really, seeing as it is a french term for the centre of the target, or what is also known as the bullseye now, which used to be white, iirc) or extremely short range weapons are totally viable.

Sub machine guns, pistols, shotguns, hell anything that isn't an actual rifle.

Gameplay wise I can udenrstand your objection though. I imagine melee units have tonnes of advantages when engaging in melee, and a point blanc shot will have several maluses, or require disengaging, like in AoW3.



We shall see!
 
How can chance to graze be %10 when chance to miss is %10? Isn't it supposed to be %2.5?

No. Chance to graze is maxed out at 25% and replaces miss chance. So 99% to hit chance down to 75% will either hit or graze, anything below will be X% hit, 25% graze, (1-(X-25))% miss. Looks good, I like more melee based combat but there's enough stuff to keep me happy in here I think. Kind of missing that there is no damage or accuracy reduction as HP go down though.

btw, I still do not understand the reason for a vanguard hero to name herself after sliced raw fish.

Might be linked to the fate of her opponents? :D Or perhaps she really likes sashimi. Or perhaps she invented sashimi in AOW universe and just like in our universe people lack creativity and thought they would name it after her?
 
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on the left, on the unit card, there is a +++ sign, with the words "friendly territory." Does this imply regeneration in friendly territory (and, tangentially, in connected friendly sectors), and therefore reduced or no regeneration in enemy territory (or unconnected sectors?)

If so, that's attrition and supply modelled, which would be a HUGE mechanical change.


DARE I to dream?
 
One thing I would like to suggest, as it recently occurred to me while playing AoW3, is that since tactical combat is going to be more cover based, we will need a better way to see what the environment is actually doing. It can be really unclear what tiles do what, and you only get clues if you have a unit near them to find out.

I would suggest something like: Hold down shift and game tints each hex to highlight if something is destructible, blocks movement, blocks fire, provides cover, hampers movement, does damage, etc.
A tooltip when mousing over each tile would be great too.
 
Does morale still work the same way as in AOW3, or has it been tweaked? Having grazes and fumbles seems a bit less than elegant.
 
One thing I would like to suggest, as it recently occurred to me while playing AoW3, is that since tactical combat is going to be more cover based, we will need a better way to see what the environment is actually doing. It can be really unclear what tiles do what, and you only get clues if you have a unit near them to find out.

I would suggest something like: Hold down shift and game tints each hex to highlight if something is destructible, blocks movement, blocks fire, provides cover, hampers movement, does damage, etc.
A tooltip when mousing over each tile would be great too.

This. So much this.
 
One thing I would like to suggest, as it recently occurred to me while playing AoW3, is that since tactical combat is going to be more cover based, we will need a better way to see what the environment is actually doing. It can be really unclear what tiles do what, and you only get clues if you have a unit near them to find out.

I would suggest something like: Hold down shift and game tints each hex to highlight if something is destructible, blocks movement, blocks fire, provides cover, hampers movement, does damage, etc.
A tooltip when mousing over each tile would be great too.


I can't upvote so I'll just echo Gloweye's sentiments above and say I agree.
 
Weaknesses also have diminishing returns, the formula I posted doesn't work for negative values of R.

You need:

D = I + (I x (1 - 0.9^-R))
Hrrrmn. So that seems that the maximum damage increase approaches the original damage (resulting in double damage) as R approaches negative infinity.
 
Oh thank you so much. I wish every game would just give out it's formulars instead of just putting us out there with some random numbers that don't mean jack s...

You're welcome : D>

I don't see the point of keeping those secret. Inquiring minds demand to know and all.
Might as well save people the trouble of reverse engineering them.
 
The defense, resistance and elemental protection/weakness systems of AoW3 seem perfect to me. So I have mild doubts that different can really be better in that area.
 
The defense, resistance and elemental protection/weakness systems of AoW3 seem perfect to me. So I have mild doubts that different can really be better in that area.

There are several problems with AoW3's system:

1) Defense/Resistance are flat damage reduction, which works well when most damage values are in a tight range, but not when you have a wide range. A unit with 16 defense is good if everyone does 8-12 damage, but not against units that do 20+ damage. Against such high damage you need 20+ defense, but then normal attacks of 11 damage do nothing.

2) There's ambiguity in the order in which the flat bonus and the percentage bonus are applied. If you do it in one order, then you favor units with high defense, in the other order you favor units with high damage attacks. We changed it back and forth several times during the first beta, and were never really happy in all situations.

3) It's relatively easy to stack defenses to become highly resistance/immune to some/all types of damage. In AoW3 this is only really an issue for heroes, and requires rare loot to drop, in Planetfall the modding system means that it could be an issue for a lot of units. We're hoping this system will be easier for us to balance.

Anyways, the equation is not set in stone, we recently changed the modding system so we'll need to see how the system works with it!
 
on the left, on the unit card, there is a +++ sign, with the words "friendly territory." Does this imply regeneration in friendly territory (and, tangentially, in connected friendly sectors), and therefore reduced or no regeneration in enemy territory (or unconnected sectors?)

If so, that's attrition and supply modelled, which would be a HUGE mechanical change.
DARE I to dream?

I'm not sure I'd say that we've modelled Supply and Attrition, but units do heal faster in your own domain!

Hrrrmn. So that seems that the maximum damage increase approaches the original damage (resulting in double damage) as R approaches negative infinity.

Yes!
 
So.. with the hit-dodge system being what it is (though "To Hit" is misleading since people probably assume you have to score some kind of hit to do damage and "To Hit" only considers a direct hit, leaving "Graze" in a weird limbo) and the damage calculation being what it is... is a "critical hit" just
D = I + (I x (1 - 0.9^-R)) x 1.5?

I am assuming here that critical hits are a possibility (though I imagine some weirdness happening if someone scores a critical on a graze... hitting an exposed blood vessel?)

Also, this formula does not consider any randomness. Does this mean that scoring a "Hit" with known Damage and Resistance/Defense will always score the same exact amount of damage?
 
Critical hits are a possibility yes! I'll probably mention them in the next dev diary.

We removed randomness from the damage output to simplify the interfaces. We'd have an interface that said:

3 x 75% 8-12*
(i.e. 3 shots, with a 75% chance to do between 8 and 12 damage)

And having 4 numbers in a row made it hard to quickly process how much damage you'd actually do. Removing 1 of the numbers makes it easier to parse, it also means we can have interfaces that tell players things like "If all 3 hots hit, the target will die", which is hard to do properly with randomized damage.