Reinforcemints (Part II)

A few months ago I made a post about the soon-coming ability to summon reinforcements, lengthening the battles and adding another element of strategy. After slightly longer than planned (due to various implementation difficulties, a long and busy winter vacation, and MAGFest) the feature is ready for the public!

Where They Come From

In many missions you'll be allocated a certain number of reinforcement ships. However, you can only sustain so many ships in a battle at once. As the dinner forces cunningly and cruelly destroy your drone fleet, you'll be able to replace them using the reserve ships. Once you drop below a certain limit you'll be able to open a menu where you select what type of ships you want to warp in.

Beacons and Arrival

After you've selected a drone type, you next choose a point in space and place a beacon. The beacons can be placed anywhere in the battlefield, but you must use caution, as the enemy could possibly notice it and destroy it before your ships have a chance to arrive. If the beacon manages to survive long enough, a new squadron will warp in right at the beacon's location and you'll have the ships you need to take the upper hand in the fight once more.

In the video below, you can see an example during the All-You-Can-Eat mode. The player loses a large number of fighters to the dinner forces and places a beacon to call in replacements. Unfortunately the broccoli bombers catch on and destroy it before the new ships can arrive. The player then has to place a new beacon further away, which survives and spawns a new squadron to defend the mothership. You can also see the enemy warping in new burger fighters near their mothership.


P.S. I apologize again for my less-than-ideal videos, somehow it refused to record the sound on this one...

Squadrons

As you keep warping in new drone squadrons, the number of squadrons you'd have to deal with could quickly get out of hand. To solve this, squadrons will now automatically merge together. Whenever two squadrons in the same wing lose enough ships that combining them would not overfill one, they are automatically combined.

Try it Soon

Obviously there are still a couple of things that need work, most notably a real beacon model, an actual reinforcements button, better menu art, and a better way to display how many ships each team has in the field and in reserve. All of that is on its way and should be in our next playtest demo within the coming weeks!