development thread

[jack1974]

No ammo is infinite, but not magazine size This way also the reload time is of SOME importance in a weapon (I don't think will have the reload take a long time, but will have some impact in battle).

[Jaeger]

So, what happens if a dual wielder runs out of ammo for one gun, but still has some for the other? Personally, I would opt for manual reloading, since I may want to spend a character's turn doing something else like throwing a grenade, use a medkit, etc.

If enemy damage resistance is going to have big impact like it did in PS1, then switching may be important. To prevent players from abusing equipment change, a turn can be spent (probably slower than just reloading) in order to equip another weapon. Another possible solution is to have limited slots for weapons a character can switch during battles.

[jack1974]

It starts reloading one gun but for example if has picked an action to "fire 3 shots" can still shoot with the other one (at least that's how it should work, need to test).
Really manual reloading would give you more control but I think would make the battles really too long. I might check if it's possible to have an option to turn it on/off though.
As for switching, yes that's true. I was thinking to display the enemy resistances in the pre-battle screen, so you can still pick the right weapons there... but the problem is that to see the enemy resistances you need to have a skill in this game I mean it will be easy to get that skill but maybe not at the beginning. I am not yet sure how resistances will work, in any case I'll use Cursed Lands deterioring defenses system, so even if you're using a "wrong" weapon you can still kill any enemy if you shoot it enough.

[Jaeger]

One of the my problems with Cursed Lands, is despite the deteriorating defense, I found battles took way longer than they should, or least that's true for the Arena battles. Enemies took very little damage (even SP skills only inflicted a few points more), until their defenses were very low, by that time they are nearly dead anyways.

Anyways, perhaps you can make the enemies less have less HP/defense but more in the lethality or debuffs.....though I wouldn't give too enemies paralyze or something of that nature. Some battles in Cursed Lands were annoying because a lot of the enemies were able to lock down the player's characters.

[jack1974]

I see, in your opinion in SOTW they were longer or shorter? this game will be more similar to that other one, meaning that equipment will be very important and there won't be auto-healing unless you go back to the base.

[Jaeger]

I see, in your opinion in SOTW they were longer or shorter? this game will be more similar to that other one, meaning that equipment will be very important and there won't be auto-healing unless you go back to the base.

Honestly, I'm not sure if the combat in SOTW was actually shorter, but at the very least there were more opportunities for the player to utilize different skills in battle, especially mid-to-late-game where SP becomes less of an issue.

In Cursed Lands, attack skills don't seem to inflict the damage it should...it's possible that enemy defenses are too high. For example, I maxed Jasper's Head Shot (250% damage), yet it only inflicts 23 damage while the regular attack does 18. When the SP pools for both enemy and player ran dry, it mostly boiled down to slugging it out with regular attacks, which happens often given how small the SP pool is and replenishing required a consumable or wasting a considerable amount of turns resting.

[jack1974]

Ah I see what you mean now. Well so far in my tests with PS2, the weapon damage/types have a big impact on final damage dealt, and I'll need to tweak it accordingly. But you'll be able to deal a big amount of damage at cost of something else (high delay, etc).
I'm also thinking if to implement Troyen's suggestion about each damage type inflicting a bonus like:
explosive: minor splash damage (not too big otherwise would be too powerful)
armor piercing: ignore 50% of armor (but doesn't mean it reduces armor, just ignore)
energy weapon: inflict DoT (like burning or something)
acid: deteriorate armor (I mean more than normally it would)

but such effects could become too powerful, so I need to see if it can be done or would hurt too much the game balance

[Troyen]

Keeping in mind I'm only to the first moon in CL, I'd say the battles are about the same length as SotW. (I think I played Hard for both games.) The reducing defense helps but you really need 3-4 turns of it (per mob) for it to start becoming noticeable and by that point they're already at or under half health (unless it's a boss, in which case it certainly helps!). So the start of battle is generally slow, but speeds up near the end. Then again, the first few turns are often the most dangerous as all the mobs are up flinging their high SP abilities around, so maybe that's okay?

If you do decide to add dangerous abilities, it'd be nice if the AI was blocked from using them on the first turn. With your combat tuning, enemies often get the first strike even when maxing speed builds, and being locked down before you even get to go just really sucks. (This is more a comment on SotW and QoT, since I haven't gotten far enough into CL.)

[jack1974]

Yes I think I made CL this way to avoid, in case of enemies getting the chance to move first, to be able to inflict big damage too early.
In SOTW there was more healing so you could still "save the day" even if enemies attacked you first, but then I thought healing was dragging the SOTW combat too much. Perhaps though it wasn't the case.
In SOTW even enemies could heal or resurrect, so even if your party had big damage dealing skills, it wasn't unbalanced because of that. I guess depends how people prefer to play it. I'll need to decide for PS2.
Personally I like the defense breaking system, this way even if characters can heal/resurrect, the battles won't last long because over time the defense will go down so much that the battle will end a way or another

[jack1974]

As you can see I decided to scrap the previous system and try something new
In my previous fantasy RPG until now the critical hit damage was always fixed - either 50% more damage, or double damage, etc. Now that damage will depend on the weapon
I think this is a good idea because this way, I can add even more variety to weapons (a slow weapon maybe with a low base damage, but that has high accuracy and a crazy critical damage, and so on). Of course sniper rifles will usually have a high Critical, as expected, but I'll add a bit of randomization when creating the items.
I think it should be fun