July 14th, 2024

This last month has been reimplementing some of the old systems from the Unity Game back in Unreal, and it’s allowed some good iterative changes to the systems and UI. In particular, the new counterpart to regular combat called “Dueling”. Some enemy units in the game have the Duel Option which allows the 2 units to fight until one of their HP reaches 0. Units that are duellable have a star hanging over them.

Duel victories result in specific stats being tracked for that unit which ties into the “Title” System that provides passive bonuses for units. The previous iteration of this system, had it so that once titles were “earned” they could be equipped and unequipped from units like items. In the current interation this was overhauled so that once a unit earns a title, that title and its bonuses become “active” and replace the old title.

In the picture above, a unit that “holds” a title will have its sprite visible. If a title is held by a unit in the crew, no other unit can earn that title. This makes it so there’s an extra layer of planning required to maximize the bonuses that titles provide to the crew and to decide which duels should be taken by specific units.

Flanking was also added back into the Unreal build. One change to simplify the UI was to simply have the attacking unit deal damage instead of all flanking units adding an additional damage source and therefore number to the overall outcome. It got complicated in that all the flanking units would have all their own individual calculations, and that took away from the main interaction between the attack instigator and defender. Instead now the flankers provide bonuses to the main attacker, like +DMG, +HIT or +CRIT.

With both titles and flanking both affecting the battle calculations, there is now a tooltip that shows how the end number is affected by the bonuses.

Duels and Flanking/Guarding were 2 of 3 primary new combat features relative to normal FE games. The next major feature is to implement ship attachments, which is to add “useable” attachments like cannons and crows nest to change up how the map interacts with units.

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