FRIDAY DISCUSSIONS #06 - Rainbow Rain And Battle Events

FRIDAY DISCUSSIONS

Hello everyone, another week has flown by. This week I pushed the 0.7.7.8 release out and have worked on another decent chunk of content outside of the combat update which I might release soon.

As for combat update this week has seen a number of developments. I've further planned and reviewed the planned features and structure and have come up with some candidates for my new battle system. I was hoping to get a semi functional combat system out by today but there's been a number of other things that needed to be worked on first and they haven't been finished.

A big chunk of this week has been spent fleshing out the idea of how combat will function and the various different battle events and random events as well as their respective systems. As well as developing a new and much improved system for loading in attacking and defending armies more efficiently than was done before.

This week has also expanded on the weather system to include random battle events that will occur based on the weather, with mundane weather having little to no chance of having any battle events, and more serious weather recurring with special weather based events throughout the battles.

WEATHER EVENTS

So alongside the new battle system I have planned for random events that can trigger every so often, these random events can vary from a large list of things including. 'A number of local peasants passing the battlefield decide to join in your favour' +14 peasants, or ' strange smokey symbol appears in the sky, your men see it as a sign of victory and fight harder'

There is however a new number assigned to each weather type called the WeatherEventRatio, this can be 0, 1, 2, or 3. Sunny weather has a WER of 0, Wind has a WER of 1, Snow has a WER of 2, and Acid rain has a WER of 3. This determines how likely a random event is to be weather based. So if it's snowing you're fairly likely to see snow related events happening but if it's Sunny you won't see any at all.

Acid rain however will result in frequent acid rain related events. Each weather has double whatever it's Ratio number is of events. So acid rain with a WER of 3 has 6 events, Rain with a WER of 1 has 2 events and so on.

Some of these random weather events are as follows:

Snow Events

* A group marching forward slip on thick ice (unless ice race)
* Several men on both sides begin to shiver under the cold falling snow and cannot fight (flee)
* Your men stand their ground in the snow, but soon this becomes troublesome and they charge forward to battle and warm themselves up
* The snow appears to cover a small hole in the ground (-1 troop)

Meteor Shower Events

* A large meteor crashes down on the battlefield (heavy damage against both, randomly distributed)
* A series of small meteors crash down on the battlefield (heavy damage against both, randomly distributed)
* A large meteor hits your enemies line (heavy damage against enemy)
* A large meteor hits your line (heavy damage against you)
* A large meteor hits down right beside the battlefield almost killing a group, men on both sides pause for a moment in shock before continuing to fight
* A series of meteors crash down all around the battlefield miaculously causing very few casualties (small damage)

Acid Rain Events

* The acid rain falls heavy for a moment causing serious damage to everyone
* The acid rain falls heavy near your men, causing serious damage
* The acid rain falls heavy near your enemy, causing serious damage
* The acid rain wear away at the armour and skin of all on the battlefield with serious consequence
* Some men flee the battlefield hiding from the acid rain
* Some men use their shields to protect themselves from the acid rain, making themselves more vulenrable in battle

Rainbow Rain

* The fighting stops as the rainbow rain begins glistening (only if non evil fighters)
* You men, seeing the beauty of the rainbow rain feel emboldened to fight on for what is good (only if enemy is evil)

There are a total of 58 weather events currently written down, but there could be more in the future. The idea of this is to make these various weather conditions have a real effect in game and for you to see a certain weather and worry about how the fight could go. You could fight during a meteor storm but it wouldn't be hard to see your army wiped out by a stray meteor.

THE PLAN GOING FORWARD

The plan now is to finish fleshing out and testing these systems before getting a functional battle system sorted. Once this is done I can begin fleshing out all of the battle events and testing various battle types. There is a monstrous load of things to do for this update and I realise that more and more as I work on it. But I think with the right amount of effort and work I can deliver a much better combat system and really improve the overall experience.

SCREENSHOTS

Not much this week, but here's a picture of the rainbow rain weather event