Devlog #2 - The Combat System
Greetings Mercenaries!
During your adventures in Pathbreakers: Roaming Blades, you will face many challenges, and sometimes your fighting skills will be your only path to survival.
Battles will play a significant role in your journey. While you can always concentrate on other aspects, such as exploration or trading, to minimize conflicts as much as possible, you must remember that you are leading a mercenary band. If you wish to gain experience and improve as a fighter, there is only one way to achieve it. Only you possess the power to determine your party’s path: will you earn more coin by slaying bandits and monsters, or will you acquire your gold through trading? Still, one thing is certain: there is no mercenary without at least one bloodstain.
Combat Overview
Pathbreakers: Roaming Blades features turn-based battles on a hex grid. The player can field up to eight units and has a roster of 14 mercenaries.
We chose a hex grid system, which is a better fit than a square for our higher count of deployed units and gives more prominent weight to positioning during battles. Creating a smart formation, such as deploying a sturdy frontline to protect backline units, is sure to play a role in your victory. Combined with an attack of opportunity system and zone of control passives for tankier classes, it gives the player a broad set of tools for controlling the battlefield, picking the strategy that suits their playstyle and enhancing the party’s skillset.
Fights can be triggered from various situations, most notably on the world map when encountering other units, but also in dungeons (which we'll dive deeper into in a later devlog) and from raiding enemy lairs situated across the world of Pathbreakers.
Battles are turn-based, and each unit will roll initiative at the start of every encounter. Typically, each unit has nine action points they can utilize during their turn to perform various actions. Moving from hex to hex consumes action points, depending on the difficulty of the terrain and other factors, such as the presence of water, fallen bodies, or being in a zone of control. Attacking and using spells or special attacks also incurs a certain cost in action points.
This means that you need to be careful when planning your offensive. Every action you take has a weight that can define the fight's outcome.
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