Combat Update

Base functionality

I’m happy to announce that the combat system is now functional.

• Units can deal damage
• Units can take damage
• In other words: a die may die… [I’ll let myself out]

No health bars or visual effects yet just destroying the unit after it dies. Left the blue path indicators and white placeholder effect for attacks (to at least see the attack rate).

Dice are inherently overaggressive

Currently the “dice brain” is barely functional and limited to taking just a few actions. Therefore by design the primary action is to attack. On the second video I tried to show how units react when an enemy enters their “detection range”.

Design decisions

One of the main reasons for using dice as units in a RTS game was the randomness of combat encounters. Currently the damage value is being taken from the “top” die face. That means that even if the die is still rolling and hasn’t settled (there is no number displayed above the model) it’s still going to deal damage equal to the “top” face. This is not very intuitive and I’m not sure what would be the best design. Currenlty I’m considering:

• Sticking with real time combat but dice can only deal damage when they settle
• Semi-turn based combat with a “combat time window” when all dice are settled and damage can be delt and taken simultaneously
• Turn based combat (not sure if possible without changing all other features to turn-based)

From the development side these decisions are secondary, but at the moment I like the “semi-turn-based” system most.

What’s next

I’m working on a number of features including:

• Worker unit type
• Resources system
• Worker brain (higher IQ than combat units due to additional tasks)
• Gather-deposit worker cycle
• Unit production (probably after I finish working on the resources system)