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

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Yeah I read that, but that was in response to implementing a fully moddable system. I was suggesting a possible compromise that might be doable with much less work.
I'm just guessing though, as I obviously haven't seen the code.
 
I was thinking about this. It would be less work, but I would still need to do a bunch of stuff so that the Identity of the damage channels could be modded. I think the biggest issues is that mods themselves would not be moddable. Modders would need to come to agreements over who would use which slot, it could get quite messy.
 
That's true, it'd break cross-compatibility between mods. Oh well.

Do you have a list of notes that you make and keep for future games (ideas, things to consider etc.), where you might jot down this request about damage type moddability?
 
Well, than that'd be up to the mods ? And their authors, of course. I think the community can get along with that.

In Skyrim modding, a plugin can inject records into a previously loaded plugin. Mods use this to generate common dependencies. You specify the ID of the mod record, and of course the mod record itself.

This is used for compatibility - for example, one crafting overhaul injects a number of keywords it uses in it's recipes. And if another mod adds an armor, it can inject the same keywords. Then, when only the armor is loaded, it works just like normal and the extra keywords dont do anything, but if both are loaded, they're magically compatible.

This requires mod authors to communicate well about who uses which resource, down to the specific ID of the record. If they can do that, I believe we can do it as well.
 
I was thinking about this. It would be less work, but I would still need to do a bunch of stuff so that the Identity of the damage channels could be modded. I think the biggest issues is that mods themselves would not be moddable. Modders would need to come to agreements over who would use which slot, it could get quite messy.

This would be great! The community can deal with the messiness. The reason I like this is imagine I wanted to break Phys damage in AoW3 into Pierce, Slash, and Blunt. Or by breaking Spirit into Holy and Mind. By having more options, it gives a lot of power to the modder. I don't know what PF will inspire in the community, but I'm sure it will generate a wealth of ideas for damage channels.

Plus, I think the community can coordinate fairly easily. Some mods may not be compatible, but the modders will work together on compatibility mods. They already do.
 
We can solve the cross compatibility issues if we can agree as a community to not make our own damage types, but have a committee (eww) that would create mods which convert one of the blank channels into a fully flavoured one that can then be added as a dependency to our own mods.

TBH, I like the damage channel layout of PF at the moment and don't really see much concept space for additional channels that don't overlap with existing ones. But possibly I haven't considered it enough.

Eg. Thermal can apply for Heat and Cold damage, as the only time something tends not to be resistant to both is when Elemental creatures appear, which may not exist in this setting. The side effects for flavouring the Heat (eg burning) and Cold (eg slowing) can be done via the Inflict X abilities.

AoW3 being a high magic setting meant that there were a lot of potential flavours for damage that just came out as awkward to fit within the damage channels it has. Mostly due to the Spirit channel sort of representing holy, mind and soul damage. I didn't mind the lack of Death damage, as Cold/Blight worked well at representing the different sources of resistance to it. And Shock was a decent filler for Magic damage.
 
We can solve the cross compatibility issues if we can agree as a community to not make our own damage types, but have a committee (eww) that would create mods which convert one of the blank channels into a fully flavoured one that can then be added as a dependency to our own mods.

TBH, I like the damage channel layout of PF at the moment and don't really see much concept space for additional channels that don't overlap with existing ones. But possibly I haven't considered it enough.

Bureaucracies make everything better :)

Other "missing" sci-fi damage types that I can come up with off of the top of my head besides "Thermal/Cryo" would be some sort of generic Plasma/Energy channel (but not laser-y), Sonic (arguably a form of Kinetic), and Radiation.
 
AoW3 being a high magic setting meant that there were a lot of potential flavours for damage that just came out as awkward to fit within the damage channels it has. Mostly due to the Spirit channel sort of representing holy, mind and soul damage. I didn't mind the lack of Death damage, as Cold/Blight worked well at representing the different sources of resistance to it. And Shock was a decent filler for Magic damage.

Death damage? What's even that? Some type of damage that kills? :eek:
 
Death damage? What's even that? Some type of damage that kills? :eek:

It was in all older versions of Age of Wonders. Spirit was called Holy back then, and was opposite Death. Blight used to be Poison. There was also a Magic Damage, which wasn't elementally associated and existed mainly to bypass immunities and such. You didn't really have multiple damage channels - but if you had 3 damage attacks, it would use the lowest defense among those damage types. Also, some had an associated status effect, like the current inflict abilities. Cursed was especially useful in 2/SM because it gave Death Weakness, and was inflicted with Death Strike.
 
Other "missing" sci-fi damage types that I can come up with off of the top of my head besides "Thermal/Cryo" would be some sort of generic Plasma/Energy channel (but not laser-y), Sonic (arguably a form of Kinetic), and Radiation.
Plasma/Energy is just a form of Arc, maybe with some thermal added.
Sonic basically is just Kinetic.
Radiation is not really that useful for combat, unless its heating up the target? So you could just use Thermal and Biochem.
 
There were actually plans for radiation damage at some point, but we struggled with it because the tropes associated with radiation weren't working that well. Radiation damage is slow, even a fatal dose of radiation still takes hours to kill you, or it becomes so intense that it might as well just thermal damage instead. I'm sure some physicist will correct me on the details, but in terms of what is easy to communicate to normal people (and us) it just didn't really seem to work.
 
Oooo mutually assured destruction as a damage type? ie you lose, but you radiated the enemy party enough that if they don't get to a Medbay (or whatever is the Hospital in PF) quickly enough. Curious strategy - we lose to win.
 
There were actually plans for radiation damage at some point, but we struggled with it because the tropes associated with radiation weren't working that well. Radiation damage is slow, even a fatal dose of radiation still takes hours to kill you, or it becomes so intense that it might as well just thermal damage instead. I'm sure some physicist will correct me on the details, but in terms of what is easy to communicate to normal people (and us) it just didn't really seem to work.
That's pretty much correct. In the short term, radiation damage is typically either by dumping energy into the victim that would be essentially heat, or causing ionisation within the target (which would be thematically similar to ark damage - alpha and beta particles are even charged in and of themselves, with beta particles being free electrons). Neutron bombs would possibly be the hardest to model using existing damage channels, since neutrons are themselves uncharged and neutron radiation is sufficiently penetrating that most forms of thermal or electrical insulation won't do squat. That might have to be a special 'shields are the only defense' kind of attack. A gamma-ray laser would probably simply be a laser that ignores armour (and you'd need laser intensities for gammas to be immediately damaging).
 
It would make more sense if it was a domain-type effect in that case. Similar to Poison Domain, as an attrition mechanic. Of course, at that point, it probably makes just as much sense as a Biochemical-type bioweapon released as a gas or spores, with your own units being inoculated against it as a mechanical functionality. Perhaps something that becomes available from the Xenoplague lab landmark.
 
There were actually plans for radiation damage at some point, but we struggled with it because the tropes associated with radiation weren't working that well. Radiation damage is slow, even a fatal dose of radiation still takes hours to kill you, or it becomes so intense that it might as well just thermal damage instead. I'm sure some physicist will correct me on the details, but in terms of what is easy to communicate to normal people (and us) it just didn't really seem to work.

It's pretty accurate, actually. Most reasons for protection about radiation IRL is against mutations - mostly because of causing cancer and birth defects to offspring. The Fallout version has a harry potter sized artistic license. And making it instantly damaging would really be the same as roasting someone with a (bunch of) laser(s).

That said, it could be part of strategic ops - irratiate a sector to reduce food production, perhaps harm happiness, reduce production, incur cost of cleaning it up, things like that.
 
It's pretty accurate, actually. Most reasons for protection about radiation IRL is against mutations - mostly because of causing cancer and birth defects to offspring. The Fallout version has a harry potter sized artistic license. And making it instantly damaging would really be the same as roasting someone with a (bunch of) laser(s).

That said, it could be part of strategic ops - irratiate a sector to reduce food production, perhaps harm happiness, reduce production, incur cost of cleaning it up, things like that.

Radiation damages rapidly reproducing cells such as intestine cell linings, causing acute infection, uncontrolled dehydration and death. or we can wiki radiation poisoning.


Gastrointestinal. This syndrome often follows absorbed doses of 6–30 grays (600–3,000 rad).[2] The signs and symptoms of this form of radiation injury include nausea, vomiting, loss of appetite, and abdominal pain.[10] Vomiting in this time-frame is a marker for whole body exposures that are in the fatal range above 4 grays (400 rad). Without exotic treatment such as bone marrow transplant, death with this dose is common.[2] The death is generally more due to infection than gastrointestinal dysfunction.

Rad would be a damage channel everyone avoid using, like blight, due to the amount of things immune to it. Between doing nothing to everybody's tanks, to entire species that might be immune to it, to it's slow DOT effect, it might become a dedicated anti-hero channel that nobody uses :)