Monday, October 21, 2013

Reinforcemints

Another new feature! Woohoo!


As large and epic as some of the battles in Galactose are, all too often they're still over too quickly. And unfortunately current technological limitations mean that there eventually comes a point when you have to stop adding ships. Luckily, there's another way.

The Concept


We want battles to last a good long time, and there's a couple of ways to do that. One option would be to give everything more hit points, but then killing anything takes a long time, and it's no fun when you only get to explode something every couple minutes. So, the obvious solution is to just have so many ships that it takes forever to kill them all. Unfortunately, doing so naively winds up being logarithmic in scale, and that doesn't really work out so well. The way around that is to not have everything deployed at once. Each team gets a few groups of reinforcement ships, and whenever a certain number of their active drones are destroyed, the admiral can summon a new squadron. It's a rather common solution, but it really works.

Calling Them In


Let's say you just flew and entire squadron of bombers right into the enemy fleet. And you forgot to send any support for them. Whoops. Well now you're screwed. Unless! Now's your chance to summon your reinforcements. You place a beacon for the remote squadron to lock onto and warp in towards. A minute later, you've got your new ships and are good to go. Meanwhile, your interceptors have been shredding the enemy fighters, and the cunning dinner admiral places his own beacon to get replacements. But you're better than him. The loss of your bombers was actually just a clever ruse to lull him into a false sense of security. Before the burger fighters can arrive, you make your way to the beacon and destroy it, leaving them hopelessly lost in interstellar space. Time to eat away his forces faster than he can cook 'em. Sure, they just keep coming for a while, but he'll be out long before you, and then victory'll be outta the oven in minutes.

Coming Soon


Expect videos in the coming weeks demonstrating it all in action, and even better: it'll be in the next playtest build, along with a bunch of other improvements and a few surprises you're all yet to hear about!

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