Vagrus - The Riven Realms News

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Initially, we built Companion Combat without too much focus on the combat AI, knowing full well that it would be a massive task to code and having most of the combat features locked before we do so would make it overall a more efficient undertaking.

Thus, vanilla Companion Combat AI was 'equipped' with nothing more but brute force, running thousands of random choices without any direction that were then evaluated in the back end by a not-too-sophisticated point system spiced up with a dash of random generation aiming to make the AI choose sub-optimal scenarios too from time to time. Otherwise it would have been much too strong.

That unfortunately had its share of drawbacks. It was either extremely slow (too many iterations) or dumb (not enough iterations). After some tuning, we went for the middle ground with a rather slow and occasionally irrational setting. Truth be told, it felt awkward every time we saw someone stream the game like that and initially planned to return to it earlier but our players felt more concerned about other areas of the game, so we moved it behind other open-world features on our priority list.

Now that the first open-world region is in the hands of our backers and patron testers, we finally got around to improve AI, too.

First Objective: Increase Speed

We introduced a number of new attributes for all characters to drive their behavior, such as:

• Row preference: Melee or range preference, or being versatile in both. That allowed to eliminate all simulations from non-preferred positions on the battlefield.
  
• Tactical level (TL): Only characters with higher tactical awareness look for high certainty of their available options, while the ones with lower TL could drop the iteration numbers in the simulation drastically.
  
• Expected damage: It is calculated based on the characters' average damage. Characters finding a 'good-enough' option stop the simulation and look no further. The higher the TL of a character is, the higher that imaginary bar of expected damage is set.
  

Second Objective: Optimal Positioning

When an AI - in any game - makes a dumb move, most of us feel lucky, even happy for a moment but then we immediately start to resent it. We want to beat the game with our superior strategy and not because of the AI's inferior tactics. Thus, we added new priorities for the AI:

• Row preference: It was already mentioned above but beside helping with efficiency it also increased the effectiveness of the AI as enemies naturally priorities moving into their preferred rows allowing them to use their most impactful Skills.
  

• Use cover: It is much harder to hit characters in cover with ranged attacks, so it only would make sense for the enemy units to use that advantage (even if only on higher TL).
  

• Use swap: Why spend two actions on shuffling around each other when you can swap? The players can do it, and so can the enemies now.
  

Third Objective: Colorful Skill Usage

Balancing a tactical game is very difficult and can barely ever be perfect - we knew that from the beginning. We are also aware that for a single-player game, variety and challenge is more important than being perfectly balanced, so when we design enemies, we do not mind them having a mix of stronger and weaker skills. On the other hand, we would like the AI to use all of them, even if not with the same frequency, so now the AI takes into account:

• Effect prop points: Our old AI gathered 'points' during its simulation for instant and overtime damage as well as heal, also for getting targets stunned, killed, or downed. In the new version, we plugged in buffs, debuffs, and impediments too, so those skills would be assessed on their true merit.
  
• Cleansing matters: We also take into consideration cleansing (meaning removing) effects, since those can be equally helpful or painful, depending on the situation.
  
• Choice pooling: To ensure that weaker skills are used occasionally, we pool all viable options, sort them based on their scoring, then pick from the top number of actions on the list, where the number is determined based on the character's TL. The higher their TL, the narrower the pool, resulting in better choices.
  

We have worked for weeks on these changes but are quite happy with the final outcome. The next build will include all these changes and we hope to see you guys try them very soon.

Gábor, Lost Pilgrim
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[h3]A Huge 'Thank You!'[/h3]
We are grateful to everyone who has tried the game and shared their experience of the Open-World prototype. A very special thanks to Deviant, mithc, SomeCommonName, and TheBrightKing for all their testing efforts. With hundreds of hours of gameplay under their belts, their detailed feedback on the use of different systems, balances, and mechanics were immensely useful for us, helping to prioritize what we need to improve first.

[h3]So What's in the Current Patch?[/h3]
Most importantly, the Companion Combat AI improvements, about which we will release a separate post in the near future here. Also, various tweaks to the trading background systems to make the early game a bit more forgiving until we add Tasks. Beside those, we made a metric ton of typing and script corrections, squashed bugs, and added some smaller quality of life features.


[h3]What's coming next? We listened to You[/h3]
We have decided to split our Companion Combat improvement Milestone (milestone 19) into two. In this build, we are releasing the enhancements made to the combat AI speed and logic, while the part that was supposed to cover adding new skills to enemy units will return as a separate milestone later on. Instead, we are refocusing our efforts to some early game improvements, most notably: Trading Tasks.

Tasks are jobs commissioned by factions for a fixed fee. Players can take on these Tasks knowing the exact money they will receive without having to dig deep into the trading meta from the start. They are the best and most reliable way to earn reputation with factions, too.



So the benefit of placing Tasks to an earlier spot on our development roadmap is to allow players to ease into the open-world part without having to have an extensive meta-knowledge of what can be bought or sold for a good profit in the different parts of the Empire. While completing these tasks for a fix commission, players also earn reputation with factions, gaining access to higher tier Tasks, better market prices, and one-time rewards. You can find some more details on Tasks in the description of our Milestone 20 here.

Okay, time to jump to the patch notes so you guys can experience this new build yourselves. Enjoy!

[h2][h3]PATCH NOTES v0.5.04[/h3][/h2]
[h3]New Features 👀[/h3]

• Milestone 19 — Companion Combat AI improvements 💀
  
  • The AI takes its turn much faster ⌛
    
  • Opponents move between rows based on their preference (melee, ranged) ⚔️🏹
    
  • Enemy units take advantage of cover 🛡️
    
  • Enemies are now able to swap positions 🔄

[h3]New / Updated Content or Game Mechanics 🎁[/h3]

• Trade was made slightly more profitable in the early game with small comitati while significantly harder in the mid/end game
  
• Tweaks to Workforce and Guard requirements to make high-end comitatus size a little more costly (requires more crew to run one)
  
• A number of Perks have been merged to make them more impactful
  
• A shed-load of typos and event scripts corrected (anything you reported is supposedly fixed now 🤞)
  
• Carrying Passengers for longer distances is now slightly more profitable
  
• Scouting has a slightly better chance now (but still not justifies keeping scouts, that will come with Hunting and Tasks only)
  
• Added a few new visual and sound effects for enemy characters
  

[h3]User Interface Improvements 📝[/h3]

• Throw-out window can now be manually triggered from the Cargo pane (to get rid of contraband, unwanted goods, etc.) 🗑️
  
• Goods tooltips improvements (now shows both Buy and Sell prices) ⚖️
  
• Panning on the Chart with keyboard arrows added 🗺️
  

[h3]Fixes 🛠️[/h3]

• A number of bugs causing all kinds of grief fixed (left some in so you can keep reporting them)
  
• Fixed the bug that prevented crew combat to come up during camping. Expect to be ambushed during the night more often. Finally! 💀
  

[h3]Coming Up Next 📈[/h3]

• Trade Tasks 📦
  
• Factions pane and Faction rewards 🛡️
  
• Hunting and Foraging 🏹
  
• ...
  
• More Sound Effects 🔊
  
• Companion Level Up and Progression ⏫
  

Our friends from Dark Crystal Games team released the second content patch for Encased: A Sci-Fi Post-Apocalyptic RPG.



Encased is an old-school isometric RPG, heavily inspired by the original Fallout, Baldurs Gate and Divinity. Story takes place under the mysterious Dome, left by unknown civilization. Player has to fight for life in the harsh post-apocalyptic wastelands, explore anomalies, solve mysteries of the Dome and decide the fate of humanity.



New content patch adds many new locations, characters and mechanics to the game. Players will be able to meet ferocious cyberhyenas and heavily armed raiders, recruit the new companion and witness the dynamic day and night cycle under the Dome.

• Reworked locations. The Concord starting station was changed the most. New NPCs and interactive items were added.
  
• New enemies. New monsters are waiting for you in the wastelands! Cyberhyenas, crazy raiders and overgrown mutants.
  
• New locations and story. Main storyline got new quests. Get ready to complete them in unfamiliar locations.
  
• Day and night cycle. Now all areas under the Dome can be flooded with sunlight or enveloped in the darkness of a cold night.
  
• New random encounters. We've added a lot of random encounters, be more careful when traveling through the wastelands!
  
• New weapon and armor. The arsenal of the main character and his team was increased! Find new ways to kill your targets, while wearing new armor to protect yourself from danger.
  

[h2]It's the perfect time to see how the isolated world has changed in Encased, even if you weren't familiar with the game before![/h2]

The Riven Realms has been around for over two decades now for us who created it for our tabletop campaigns, and the setting has quite a lot of currencies, even if one only considers the continent of Xeryn. When we set out to develop Vagrus, we picked three coin types not to overcrowd the UI: the Lyrg, a copper coin; the Bross, a silver coin; and Draka, a rare and very valuable golden coin. These are all coins that are used fairly often in large-scale commerce on the continent, and they are also fairly easy to identify as the copper-silver-gold trio of currency is fairly common in historical and fantasy settings.

Problems arose soon from the fact that a lot of common, everyday things are bought and sold for a smaller currency called Changers. For example, food for a day typically goes for around 2-3 Changers, or the daily wages of a worker are also typically around that sum. However, we had no Changers, so we implemented Supplies to represent 10 points of Consumption each. Individual crew wages were raised to 1 Lyrg - the absolute minimum - but this started an internal inflation that led to the rise of a lot of goods and services to make ratios match the world and to allow vagri to earn enough to pay upkeep. Unfortunately, this led to a situation where Drakas became very common, even in the beginning of the game, which in the metal-starved world of the Riven Realms goes against the lore and atmosphere, eroding immersion.

Recently, us Lost Pilgrims decided that Changers have to make a return, and they have to do so before the Open World campaign launches (otherwise the change would mess with saved games later).

At first, you might think this is a simple decimal shift, but it sent ripples out that shook most areas of the game in one way or another.

On the technical side:

Code had Lyrg/Bross/Draka hard-burned in several places, which had to be altered.
Our databases, however, store prices as numbers only, so it was fairly straightforward to have prices shift (for example, if something used to cost 1 Draka, 2 Bross, and 5 Lyrg, now automatically costs 1 Bross, 2 Lyrg, and 5 Changers).
On the design side, things were looking much more complicated:

• The silver trading goods used to cost one or more Drakas per unit, but now only cost one or more Bross, so we had to make them more expensive (it did not make sense in world or any other way to have a bar of silver cost a few silver coins). This of course inflated the prices of all metals further, including Scrap Metal, which you know very well from Pilgrims of the Wasteland. This caused further changes in that prologue section because now you have no funds to buy the metal for the main quest.
  

• Naturally, making metallic trading goods more expensive resulted in all gear, equipment, and items becoming more expensive, too. We'll have to tweak these prices as we go on.
  

• Now that we have Changers to work with, we could de-scale the Supplies-Consumption situation explained above and eliminate the decimal multiplication. One Supply is now indeed one meal, which equals one Consumption. However, this causes Supply goods stacks to now be much less effective, so we are raising the number of Supply goods in one stack significantly to make up for the multiplication loss.

• Then there is the question of Drakas, that are now effectively eliminated from the game. It is not a problem from a lore perspective, because gold is indeed very rare and mostly only extremely rich people see them with any kind of regularity. Now that said, your vagrus may indeed become such a person in the game, so we will probably add Drakas in some form or another later on.
  

Overall, we are happy that we went with the change (of Changers, heh...) despite the added work, especially because it would have been much more problematic later on. Additionally, our tabletop RPG souls are now at rest that the setting and the game are not at odds. :)

[h3]A big shout-out to Alder's Blood[/h3] Before we conclude this post here's a game we can wholeheartedly recommend you to chech out here on Steam! Alder's Blood is a tactical-strategy with stealth-based combat, RPG elements, crafting, resources gathering and management, exploration and rich storyline. Set in a grim world, where mankind killed their God and is facing extinction.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Whishlist it now because it will be released on this Friday on 10/04/2020 so you can grab immediately this gem.

The Lost Pilgrims Team
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🎉 Our crowdfunding campaign is LIVE ▶️Get instant access to the Alpha build at Fig

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Wanna get the game as early as possible with even more content? Please share our pages and posts with your friends through your favorite social media channel(s). Appreciate it!

Fig | Website | Youtube | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram | Patreon | Discord

[h2]Huge Announcement [/h2]
The Open-World Prototype of Vagrus has been released to all our Fig Backers. It is a major step towards getting the game ready to eventually bring it to here on to Steam for all of you to enjoy.



What It Brings

A ton of stuff, really. This is the game we've been working on, compared to which 'Pilgrims of the Wasteland' was only a small appetizer. That said, this large segment is only the beginning, and areas (with their content) will be added later on at intervals. We have discussed this an other details of the Open World Campaign here.

In short, a gigantic area with

• dozens of settlements and points of interest to explore,
  
• six Companions,
  
• over 20 new enemy types,
  
• five new soundtracks,
  
• character creation,
  

and a ton of story content for you to discover are coming in the build.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

We are very excited to see and hear your reactions, how long it takes you to find all the content, and of course to find out how difficult it is to stay alive for players in the cruel wastelands of the Riven Realms.

See you soon on the dark continent!

The Lost Pilgrims

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🎉 Our crowdfunding campaign is LIVE ▶️Get instant access to the Alpha build at Fig

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Wanna get the game as early as possible with even more content? Please share our pages and posts with your friends through your favorite social media channel(s). Appreciate it!

Fig | Website | Youtube | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram | Patreon | Discord