Colony Ship: A Post-Earth Role-playing Game - Upcoming System Changes Detailed
-
Category: News ArchiveHits: 1536
A developer post on the Steam forums for Iron Tower Studio's Colony Ship RPG outlines some upcoming changes to the game's combat system, and in particular the way it treats grazes, misses and evasion, and the general combat skill progression.
Check it out:
We are working on a systems update, to be released in early October. The main goal with this update is to re-arrange the system for the final content, and to adjust it based on your feedback.
We changed how grazes, criticals and evasion work since the previous system worked fine in the early game but once the weapon damage and armor value increased they started to have issues (grazes that did 0 damage, high evasion fully removing grazes, critical bonuses inconsistent with regular damage). The tweaks we implemented makes them more consistent no matter the game stage.
Burst attacks are being adjusted, as they were quite strong and didn't require much investment. In AoD, we balanced the multiattacks by lowering their damage (so that damage per AP was more consistent). Here, lowering the damage of a bullet would be odd, so we end up with attacks that have a very high damage per AP ratio. As grazes are way more viable now, we made the bursts depend more on them, by lowering the chance of full hits. With STR you can counter their hit chance penalty, making STR based ranged builds more viable, and a bit more of a requirement for burst builds. We also increased the AP cost to better match the damage per AP ratio to the snap and regular shots.
Regarding melee weapons, we adjusted their AP/DMG ratio, so that faster weapons aren't way better than the higher AP cost ones (that was the main source of "blade better than blunt"). We also tweaked the damage from STR as the current formula was inconsistent in how much damage it gave per STR point, and it went too far at STR 12, creating a big overlap in the AP tiers of melee weapons.
At this point of the game many combat builds "capped out" (reaching very high values in some things), so we are doing lots of small tweaks to keep values within the growth range, like switching the effects from a "base 5" to a "base 4" (meaning something that gave 15 now gives 12). We also tweaked the values of weapons and armors, reducing the spread between early and late equipment. As for feats, we adjusted them based on the feedback we got about their balance, improving many feats that were not used (like Dodge This, Fast Runner and the weapon specializations). We are implementing a few new feats as well.
