Home Trending Latest threads New posts Developer diaries

Age of Wonders: Planetfall - Dev Diary #6: Combat Units 1

Jump to latest Follow Reply
  • We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.
Age of Wonders: Planetfall 3776 Bug reports 1659 Suggestions 539 User Mods 95 AoW: Planetfall: News and Updates Archive 41 Multiplayer 55
Show only dev responses
I meant to ask this earlier, @Tombles, but can you tell if Flanking itself applies a modifier to the damage formula(on either the damage or defense end), on top of such effects as Exposed Flanks feature of making armor rating is two less when attacked from a flank?

Also, can Exposed Flanks bring the effective armor rating into negative values, if already reduced through other means, and thus increase damage in that way, as one might expect, or only down to zero?
 
By default, flanking gives a 20% damage bonus (I think...) which stacks on top of exposed flanks. It's not possible for a unit get negative armor or shields, since that doesn't really make any sense. Blocking negative armor/shields lets us limit the usefulness of things like armor melting weaponry so that they only work well against high powered units.
 
Well, from the newest dev diary:
"The Flanker ability means that the unit does an extra 25% damage on all flanking attacks (on top of the 20% bonus that units normally receive)."
So, I suppose it is 20%, answered almost immediately after I asked, too. How convenient!
 
I think I'd be inclined to say: There should always be a chance of friendly fire (in situations where allies are blocking the shot, anyway). I think, though, it is reasonable for the chance of friendly fire to be less than the chance of hitting a non-friendly obstacle, to represent that the shooters are trying not to hit their friends, while when shooting past an enemy unit or a neutral obstacle, they're going to care less and hitting the obstacle may be regarded as almost as good.

At the risk of increasing complexity, one possible option is to give ranged units a "try not to hit friendly obstacle" toggle. Turning it on reduces the chance of hitting the friendly unit, but also reduces the chance of hitting the actual target. That would allow the player to adjust how much risk they take, albeit at the cost of putting another button on the interface.
 
Tombles said:
As with all Kir’ko females, the Hidden have powerful psionic abilities, which they use to both attack and elude their foes.
Click to expand...
So only female Kir'ko have psionic powers? Does this means that Kir'ko leaders and heroes have different abilities depending on their gender? Or maybe they are female only race same as Amazons?
 
The kir'ko females are all psychic because they all descend from the queens, and there are no male, psychic kir'ko units. As for the heroes, we're still looking into that, no-one can tell me right now if Kir'ko heroes are male or female!
 
with the way the elemental interactions are working, are there steps in play to avoid the situation in AoW3 where you can get into matchups where the majority of your options feel impotent, due to your race/class being focused around 1 element that your opponent's race/class are largely immune to? like the way that a theocrat's primary source of damage is spirit damage, but a dreadnought's machines are all totally immune to spirit damage by default? seeing kir'ko be focused on psionic energy, which machines are naturally resistant to, has me a little worried about a repeat of that kind of balance debacle.
 
Yes! Each race has access to two weapon techs, which means their units always have access to two damage channels. Also, many weapon techs (Psionic, Biochemical, Explosive and Kinetic) have mods that flip the damage channels of an attack. So a marine could use an electrified ammunition mod so their gun does arc damage instead of kinetic damage.

Kir'ko use Biochemical and Psionic weapons, so roughly half their units do biochemical damage instead of psionic damage.

In case anyone is wondering, the other weapon techs are Laser and Arc, and no-race uses those 2 in a combination.
 
Tombles said:
In case anyone is wondering, the other weapon techs are Laser and Arc, and no-race uses those 2 in a combination.
Click to expand...
Out of curiosity, is there a balance reason for that, or is there an unspoken "yet" in that it's simply that no race planned in the original race happens to have that combination, but it could happen in the future?
 
Just chance, it could happen. The lack of flexibility the race would face might be problematic, but we could compensate in other ways. Also, players always get to choose their secret tech which gives them access to more damage channels too.
 
Tombles said:
Yes! Each race has access to two weapon techs, which means their units always have access to two damage channels. Also, many weapon techs (Psionic, Biochemical, Explosive and Kinetic) have mods that flip the damage channels of an attack. So a marine could use an electrified ammunition mod so their gun does arc damage instead of kinetic damage.

Kir'ko use Biochemical and Psionic weapons, so roughly half their units do biochemical damage instead of psionic damage.

In case anyone is wondering, the other weapon techs are Laser and Arc, and no-race uses those 2 in a combination.
Click to expand...

It seems strange that Kinetic is a weapon tech instead of a default everyone has.
 
Also, we've seen Vanguard units with both laser weapons and rocket pods/grenades. Are the latter not explosive weapons for some reason?
 
Explosives is a weapon tech that only Dvar has, which means they have a dedicated line of unit mods and tactical operations (like orbital strikes) based on explosives which they can use. It also means half their units use explosive weaponry. Vanguard have a few explosive weapons (the marine, and a couple of units that shoot missiles) but they aren't specialized in it like the Dvar are, all their explosive using units are also using kinetic weapons.

It's a long story, but in short, we built half the vanguard line up before we figured out how the weapon techs would work, and initially explosives wasn't a weapon tech. Then we needed a 6th weapon tech for the Dvar, and we added explosives, but by then Vanguard was already locked to Kinetic/Laser.
 
Based on some reasoning, I've got this list:
Vanguard = Kinetic/Laser, as you said
Dvar = Kinetic/Explosive, also as you said
Kir'Ko = Psionic/Biochemical, ^
Amazon = Laser/Biochemical, putting in Biochemical due to their genetics knowledge
Assembly = Arc/Kinetic, Kinetic as you said, and I'm presuming some race needs to be Arc, and a race of machines could work, even if they might also have a weakness to it
Syndicate = Psionic/Arc, two psionic races, so that's why they have that, and it gives a second place for Arc in the lineup

One Explosive, since you mentioned only Dvar had it as a primary, and three Kinetic based on the provided list, making sure the rest of them were represented twice. Seems like a reasonable guess of the setups.

So, how linked are the terms "damage channel" and "weapon tech," since as we've seen a damage type of 'Thermal,' but no direct weapon tech? Several weapons which would obviously fall under the category of Laser have been listed as dealing Thermal damage, but the Phoenix Walker most certainly isn't utilizing lasers to deal its Thermal type damage.

Likewise, is there still a chance for what I suppose might be called "Cryo" damage to show up? Most of the weapon techs have fairly direct analogs:
Kinetic = Physical
Psionic = Spirit, sort of
Biochemical = Blight(acid/poison), but can technically induce effects similar to fire and shock
Laser = Fire
Arc = Shock
Explosive = ...Fire/Physical?
 
Cryo damage was kicked out early due to it not really fitting with the Sci-fi setting. It might still come back I guess..

The damage channels are: Kinetic (used by Kinetic/Explosive techs), Psionic, Thermal (lasers), Biochemical (same tech) and Arc (same tech)

Secret Techs have special weapons/attacks that use those channels, but they are there own techs, they don't use the weapon techs.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom
Back