Age of Decadence - Development Update

While we wait for The Age of Decadence combat demo, Vince has posted a fairly detailed development update on the official forums to explain what they have been doing:

Here is what we've been doing for the last few weeks.

Ranged:

- enemies advance too fast, ranged is basically melee with fancy weapons -> doubled movement cost
- ranged is useless against heavy shields -> heads are no longer protected by shields (but it's a very hard aimed shot), decrease vsRanged bonuses, give AP ammo 30% chance to ignore shields
- ranged penalties (accuracy loss over distance) are too harsh; the life of a ranger is hard enough as it is -> let's remove penalties completely and see what happens
- holy shit! rangers pwn everything in sight! retreat -> new penalty curve: there are small penalties for blank shots and for >80% of the range (each ranged weapon has a range) -> seems to work very well

Aimed Attacks and Criticals

- aimed attacks are useless (i.e. other attacks are clearly better) -> changed cost and special effects
- special effects happen rarely; either no effect or insta-kill (CS' passive trait kicking in and overriding special effects) - removed insta-kill, changed formulas
- works perfectly, aimed attacks are da bomb, who needs other attacks -> changed formulas
- high CS against light armored opponents = criticals on every hit -> changed CS passive trait to vsCriticals, tweak the formulas
- very low Criticals with AP ammo, high Criticals with regular ammo -> changed formula from (damage x2 - DR) to (damage-DR) x2

Spears:

Too powerful -> now can't use long spears up close and personal, must step back
That whole coming and going business with rangers and spearmen is getting out of hand -> added opportunity attacks
Etc.

It takes awhile to test, get feedback, discuss options, implement one, test, tweak, test, check how one change affects everything else, tweak, check, etc. Every day we have a new build to work with. It's a lot of work and it would be awesome if you bastards were doing the testing, but I don't want to give you an unfinished product and I don't want to see a bunch of "feature X sucks/useless/doesn't work well" threads once the demo is released.

The game is real. The demo is real. It's a-coming. Your patience is appreciated. For realz, yo.