April Dev Update: New aquatic race, ship combat update, battlefield generation, and more

Posted by Brendan Drain on May 8, 2013

April is over and development on Predestination is going well. This month we completed the internal workings for the ship design and weapon technology systems, finished hooking the tactical combat system into the main game and tidied that system up. We implemented tons of your ideas into the ship combat system, like smart-missiles that deploy mines around the target, weapons that fire clouds of charged plasma, and deployable minefields for planet defense. Thanks so much for all of your great ideas and feedback!

Character artist Connor Murphy has finished our final core race (the yet-to-be-named Aquatic race) and completed a fantastic visual reboot of our first robotic race, The Starforged. You can see the new artwork for both races below! We’ve also been working with Connor on figuring out the best way to approach the backer-sponsored race artwork.

Based on your feedback, Connor has already started to revamp the feline race we showed in last month’s update with more realistic artwork that matches the rest of the game’s visual style, and I think you’ll be pleased with the results when it’s finished. Once that’s finished, we’ll be in touch with all of our race designer backers to get started on getting them into the game.

The yet-to-be-named Aquatics are our sixth and final core race apart from the backer races, and we’d love to hear your ideas on what they should be like in-game. We see them as aggressive militarists who see ownership of every ocean planet in the galaxy as their sovereign right. We see them as a dictatorship that interacts with other races through intimidation and military threat more than diplomacy. Industry and research would probably take a hit from working under water, but their natural hunting instincts would make them excellent ship pilots.

The Aquatic race will definitely start the game with some kind of mech suit that grants bonuses to ground combat, as they needed this technology to achieve space flight and interact with other races. They are just as at-home on Terran planets as Ocean, but would probably actively flood Terran worlds to make them less useful to other races. They may also have developed technology that can thaw out a tundra planet by injecting radioactive elements into the planet’s core and flooding the atmosphere with greenhouse gases.

Rather than deciding on the race’s abilities and name ourselves, we’ve decided to open the Aquatics up to the community! We’d love to hear your suggestions for a name for this race, stats or traits you think they should have, and any special technologies they should start with. We’d also love to hear your ideas on what technologies and special traits you’d like all aquatic races in Predestination to have. Leave a comment here or head over to the aquatic race feedback thread on the forum and let us know what you think! We’ll publish a full race reveal in two week’s time when we’ve picked our favourite suggestions!

Above is the rebooted artwork for The Starforged, the first race we revealed during the Kickstarter campaign. Connor felt that the art needed an update to match the visual quality of newer races like the Sauros, and I think he’s done an amazing job on the reboot. The Starforged soldier unit is on the left, the scientist is in the middle, and the worker/civilian robot is on the right. We’ve nicknamed the worker the “Espresso machine”

Combat resolution: One of the things we implemented this month was the combat resolution system that decides when fights happen and what the battlefield looks like. Fleets in Predestination move in FTL once per turn and only meet each other at destinations like stars and temporal rifts. When two fleets meet, both players can select from four courses of action and the combination of options selected determines what happens:

Attack Planet: Attempt to attack a selected enemy planet in the system. The enemy must have a planet in the system for this option to be highlighted. You start on one side of the battlefield, and the enemy planet is visible in the background on the other side. Planetary defences like starbases and orbital cannons are automatically placed on the enemy side.
Defend: This puts your fleet into a defensive posture and does not engage the enemy fleet. If the enemy fleet selects to attack a planet in the system that you own, your fleet automatically defends that planet and is included in the combat against that planet.
Intercept: Attempts to intercept the enemy fleet early and engage. If the enemy fleet selects Attack a planet, this option will instead engage the enemy in open space (no planet bonuses). If the enemy fleet selects to Defend, there’s a 50% chance that you’ll catch them in open space and start combat and a 50% chance that no combat will happen at all.
Retreat: Attempts to retreat and set course to the nearest friendly star system. If the enemy fleet selects the Intercept option, there’s a 50% chance of catching your fleet and beginning combat in open space and a 50% chance they get away safely.

Battlefield generation: The battlefield will now take into account the star system you’re in. Battles in systems with asteroid belts are likely to take place inside the belt, while battles inside a nebula will be filled with nebular gas clouds. Battles over a planet will also display the planet in the background behind the defending fleet, and orbital cannons and starbases will be placed on the battlefield.

We have a few more ideas up our sleeves for more natural battlefield modifiers, like pirate hideouts in a system or even space monsters interrupting your battle! The battlefield size will also scale up with the number of ships involved and the maximum range of the ships involved. This way every battle will start with the opposing fleets placed between one and two turns worth of movement away from each other. This should stop snipers from dominating as nobody will be in range to fire on the first round.

Ship placement round: Before each combat begins, you’ll place your ships and structures on the battlefield. We plan to make it possible to pre-design a layout and save it with your fleet for future battles, but right now that feature is not implemented. Battles in orbit of a planet will have starbases and orbital cannons in fixed positions if the planet has built them. Researchable technologies will also add deployables like mine fields, shield bubbles, cloaking fields and nebulae so you can come up with a clever strategy for system defense and design your ships around them. The ship placement phase is a blind phase, so you don’t know where the enemy has placed his ships or structures until you submit your layout. Think of this like setting up a chess board, except you get to decide where each piece goes.

First combat round: The first round of combat after placing ships in Predestination will be mostly movement. The longest-range ships will not be in firing range of the enemy fleet yet; missiles and drones can be fired but will take at least two turns to reach the enemy. This lets you set up strategic positioning to counter the enemy’s selected fleet layout. For example, you may notice that the enemy has laid a minefield in front of its snipers and decide to send ships around the side to avoid them.

The rest of the combat: The player’s and enemy’s ships will will take turns as usual for the rest of the game, like a game of chess where each move is a reaction to the other player’s. For example, the enemy may fire missiles at your large battleship and you may move some point defense frigates into positions where they can shoot down the missiles. Combat ends when all of one side’s ships have been eliminated or are no longer on the battlefield. Ships can retreat at any time during the battle by activating the Warp Drive module (built into all ships). This has a charge-up time of one full round, making the ship leave the battlefield on its next turn.

We’ve been working on a lot of the core planetary and fleet combat code of Predestination so far, but it’s difficult to show off interesting ship weapons or galactic exploration without a good user interface. The next step for us is to work really hard on those user interfaces and get as many of them into the game this month as possible. As a side-effect, we’ll be able to show you more of our progress in videos and live demos, giving a clearer impression of how the game will actually play when it’s finished.

So far we’ve focused on trying to put together one big monthly update for our Kickstarter backers and fans following the Predestination development blog. We’re doing a lot of work steadily throughout the month but then trying to cram it all into one roundup article like this or a race reveal post. We’ve had a few requests from backers for more frequent updates and more community engagement, so I wanted to put this question out to the community. Would you like to see more frequent updates containing earlier work-in-progress artwork, game development, user interfaces, buildings etc? Our options are essentially:

Monthly updates: One big update every month summarising that month’s progress (like this post).
Frequent updates: Posting early work-in-progress artwork, buildings, gameplay and user interfaces separately with just a few lines or paragraphs of text explaining each one.
Both: Do the smaller updates, and then summarise them each month in a smaller roundup article on the blog and Kickstarter.

We’d love to start doing more frequent updates if that’s what the community wants. The updates would be a lot more rough and subject to change, but it would let us collect feedback earlier in the development process. Please let us know in the comments or head over to the official update poll on the forum and vote!

Cheers,

– Brendan, Lead Developer

March Update: Fleet Combat, Backer Reward Update, and Work Experience

Posted by Brendan Drain on March 26, 2013

The past month has been jam-packed for the Predestination crew. We made a lot of progress with the fleet combat part of the game, designed our first reptilian race (The Sauros), and hosted work experience weeks for two students aiming for careers in the games industry. We also moved to a new house with more office space to work in and applied for some government funding to help your pledges stretch further.

Update notes for fleet combat:

Added projectile weapons such as mass drivers, with their own graphical effects.
Added dumb missiles that travel to the target hex and explode, or explode early if they enter a hex with another ship or object in it.
Implemented smart missile AI that locks onto a ship and follows it, avoiding obstacles.
Added interceptors. They use the smart missile AI and attack the target ship every turn until destroyed.
Implemented area-effect weapons (smartbombs, area missiles).
Implemented proximity mines and cloaked proximity mines.
Created some basic explosion effects with screen shake, and a timing system to synch explosion graphics and screen shake with sound effect volume.
Implemented a module system that lets us create interesting non-weapon ship technologies. Modules added so far include: Holographic Projector Matrix (creates decoy holographic ships), Afterburner (double movement for one round, then takes a round to recharge), Shield booster (consumes movement points to boost shield hitpoints), Cloaking device (ship is invisible until its next turn, but then takes a round to recharge).
Fleets can now engage each other in the galaxy view, which switches to the fleet battle screen.
Ships can now retreat from combat. They will wait for one full round without moving or attacking and then warp out.
Combat now detects the winner when one side’s ships are all destroyed or warp out.
Ships destroyed in combat are now removed from the galaxy view.

Dozens of backers have now given us their ideas for interesting weapons and ship modules over at the Predestination Community forum. If you have any ideas, feel free to post them in the official fleet combat thread!

Kickstarter Backer Reward Update:

As part of the Kickstarter campaign, many people selected rewards such as your own custom-designed commander, missile, building, singleplayer level or core game race. Almost everyone has now submitted their commander and missile ideas, and our race and level designers have let us know how they’d like to be contacted to discuss their ideas. We had hoped to get back to all of you by now to confirm your selections, but are unfortunately running a little behind schedule due to moving house.

Those of you who have submitted commander, missile, or building designs will be emailed by Tina soon to confirm that your designs are good to go. Level and race designers will be contacted personally to get a brief outline of their ideas, but don’t worry if you haven’t got much of an idea yet as we don’t need the full details just yet. If you wanted to upgrade your pledge for any of these rewards but missed the end of the campaign, you can upgrade your pledge at our Paypal Upgrade page or send us an email with your inquiry.

One of our big goals with Predestination is to help kickstart the Northern Ireland games industry and help emerging talent get into game development. With that in mind, we’ve spent part of this past month organising work experience weeks for students aiming to get into the industry. Our latest student was the extremely talented budding concept artist Nuala Mc Garry, who is already producing fantastic character art at the age of just 15.

In addition to giving Nuala some experience in the industry and advice on education paths, we were able to send her home with a new graphics tablet and an upgraded PC to help her continue developing her talents. This would not have been possible without all the support and pre-orders pledged through Kickstarter and Paypal. Your support has made a big difference to one talented young artist this month, and on her behalf we’d like to say thank you!

As part of her work experience, Nuala created her own race with unique concept art, technology and lore. They’re a species of intelligent feline humanoids whose culture revolves around entertainment and gadgets and treats fighter pilots and scientists as celebrities. The race isn’t named yet and we’d like to open that up to the community. If you have any name ideas or just want to give some feedback, please head over to the race’s official thread or leave a comment here on the blog!

Background Lore:

The [Suggest a name] are a feline humanoid race discovered on a Terran planet near the Human empire’s borders. It’s not known whether the species is natural or the result of genetic experimentation, but they predate the Human empire and have shown incredible intelligence and adaptability. Their society revolves around entertainment and research, with great technological accomplishments being spurred by competition to make the ultimate gadgets and televised sports.

The race to achieve space flight, break the lightspeed barrier, and colonise other worlds were all sponsored by entertainment megacorporations looking for the next big show. When first contact was made with the Humans, the event was televised across the homeworld and eventually led to an alliance between the two empires that persists to this day. Not to be underestimated, the [Suggest a name] have repelled several attempted invasions of their space by turning the war effort itself into a form of entertainment. Fighter pilots became celebrities overnight, and research labs competed to make flashier and more inventive defensive technologies.

When the Revenants were unleashed on the galaxy, the [Suggest a name] were the only race able to sometimes successfully evade the attacking ships. Using clever holographic modules to hide ships and project decoys into space, pilots were able to evacuate millions of citizens from colonised planets across the sector. It’s thanks to their efforts that so many ships survived to take part in the final battle with the Revenants. Now sent back in time, they seek to explore space, find their former allies, and develop technology that can stop the Revenants once and for all.

Possible race stats and abilities:

As a humanoid race, the [Suggest a name] are most at home on Terran worlds but can adapt to live in other environments. Their diminutive stature makes them poorly suited to ground combat, but quick reflexes makes them excellent fighter pilots. The celebrity status their society grants fighter pilots attracts a lot of legendary ship captains, and normal ship crew are more likely to achieve legendary acclaim following a successful battle. Their culture emphasises openness and honesty, increasing morale on all planets but making them vulnerable to spies. They also freely trade their entertainment programmes with allies, adding a free empire-wide morale boost to all trade agreements with other species.

Example stats: (not finalised, just to give an idea of the abilities we think they’ll have)

+10% Morale On All Planets
+2 Research Per Turn From Research Labs
-20 Ground Combat Rating
-10% Spy Mission Success Chance
Cultural Traders: Your empire freely exchanges its culture and entertainment with other nations. Trade pacts with your empire increase global morale across both your empire and the empire you’re trading with by 10%. This effect can stack for each new race you establish trade agreements with, up to a maximum of 50%.
Natural Fighter Pilots: Quick reflexes make your people natural fighter pilots who favour small hulls over larger ships. +50% beam and projectile defense on small and medium sized hulls, but -25% beam and projectile defense on larger ships.
Legendary Pilots: Double the normal chance for a legendary ship captain to emerge following a successful fleet battle, and ship captains will cost half as much per turn to employ.

Possible starting technologies:

Each race starts the game with several advanced technologies that are either not available for research or can only normally be researched late in the game. Possible starting technologies for this race include:

Camera Array (Ship module): An array of high-definition cameras are fitted inside and outside the ship, recording footage of fleet combat to be used as propaganda. If your fleet wins a battle with a ship carrying this module, all planets in your empire get +10% morale for 10 turns.
Holographic projector (Ship module): Holographic projectors are hooked directly to the ship’s power core, allowing the ship to project fake versions of itself into space. This ship module can be activated in combat to split the ship in three, moving the real ship into one of the three hexes directly ahead and placing decoys in the remaining two hexes. Decoys last for one full round and are instantly destroyed if fired on, but are otherwise identical to the original ship.
Cultural Hub (Building): You can only have one of this building in your entire empire. The city it’s built in becomes a huge cultural hub, completely eliminating all morale penalties on the planet. This allows higher taxation and prevents revolts and unrest.

Thanks for your feedback!

A huge thank you to everyone who has supported Predestination on Kickstarter or via Paypal, and a special thanks to fans who have contributed feedback on updates and shared their ideas on our forum. As always, we’re eagre to hear any feedback you have on this update or any ideas or questions you have relating to it. Head over to the official feedback thread or leave a comment on this post!

Cheers,

– Brendan, Lead Developer

Tactical Combat ideas: Crazy weapons, The Junker and more!

Posted by Brendan Drain on February 23, 2013

Throughout February we’ve been working on Predestination’s planetary exploration and colonisation gameplay, designing the first Reptile race, and sorting through the ideas from our Kickstarter backers. With the core planet gameplay complete and the reptile race reveal in the works, we’re shifting development focus to a part of the game we didn’t really get the chance to properly show during the Kickstarter campaign: Tactical fleet combat.

Every space 4X game has some kind of ship combat system, but most games have chosen to discard the MOO2-style tactical combat in favour of realtime 3D gameplay or even automated fights that you have very little control over. With Predestination, we plan to not only revive turn-based tactical combat but revolutionise it!

Read on for a breakdown of the Tactical Combat system, details of some fun new weapons we worked on with our work experience student Niall, and to submit your own ideas for awesome ship weapons and special abilities!

Continue reading →

Are you designing a commander, missile or building?

Posted by Brendan Drain on January 10, 2013

As part of the Kickstarter campaign, many of you picked the option to design your own commander, missile or building for Predestination. This post will explain all of the options you have to choose from for each. When you’ve made your selection, email the details to tina@brainandnerd.com along with your Kickstarter username. If you have any ideas that aren’t in this post, please post a comment here or include them in your email.

Continue reading →

New screenshots: Galaxy map, planets, system window and planet exploration

Posted by Brendan Drain on November 18, 2012

There are some big announcements coming in the next week or so for Predestination, but until then we have some new screenshots of the game in action. These screenshots show the three main parts of the game: Galaxy Management, Planetary Exploration, and Tactical Fleet Combat. All three areas are still work in progress, but they’re really starting to come together.

Fleet combat hex system first prototype

Posted by Brendan Drain on July 6, 2012

This week I’ve been working on the fleet combat system for Predestination. When all of the core mechanics are implemented, we’ll be releasing this as our first beta test to get some feedback and improve it. Fleet combat is an important part of a 4X game, and it will have to be iterated on extensively to make it as awesome as possible. Our goal is to create tactical turn-based combat system that’s more like a game of chess than an RTS. We’ve already tested the movement and combat mechanics with a pen-and-paper prototype, and this week I started putting it all in code.

It doesn’t look very pretty yet, but I want to show you what I’ve got so far. I’ve finished the hex grid system and ships can be placed on the grid and rotated to face any of the adjacent hexagons. All ships involved in the combat roll initiative and then take their turns in order. For moving ships, I developed an efficient recursive algorithm that determines the shortest route to a hexagon based on the three simple rules below:

Moving into any of the three forward squares costs 1 move point
Turning by 60 degrees costs 1 move point.
Two ships cannot occupy the same square

The result produced the exact pattern that my prototype design predicted:

With everything in code, I finally got to see what direction the ship would be facing when it got to each square and I wasn’t happy with the results. Since you can move into any of the three squares in front, the ship often didn’t need to turn to face the direction it was moving, so it appeared to be sliding sideways. I fixed this by changing the movement rules slightly to the rules below:

Moving into the square directly ahead costs 1 movement point
Turning by 60 degrees costs 1 movement point
Two ships cannot occupy the same square
Every ship gets 1 free 60 degree turn per round.

This produced the exact same movement costs and pattern, but now the ship always turns to face the direction it’s moving in. I’m very happy with the results, and the free 60 degree turn adds an interesting mechanic, as modifying the number of free turns per round changes the movement pattern significantly. Two free turns makes moving sideways as easy as moving forward, three makes a ship able to move the same speed in all directions, and no free turns produces the pattern below:

One of the core elements of Predestination is designing your own ships and making tactical tradeoffs in the design process. You might want long range on your guns, but to get it you have to sacrifice damage or the weapons might take an extra round to recharge. Once you’ve researched the appropriate technology, you’ll be able to do the same with your movement speed and movement pattern. You’ll be able to make tactical tradeoffs by modifying your thrusters to get additional free turns every round. That will make your ship more maneuverable, but as a tradeoff you might lose some speed or have to fit power-hungry thrusters that will reduce the energy available for weapons and defensive modules.

Ships blocking each other

Since two ships can’t occupy the same square, you can actually block off a ship’s movement by putting other ships in the way, forcing them to take a longer path around. This is something I might make into a big tactical element, perhaps by letting small ships pass through the squares of larger ones. Technologies that let ships phase through each other or teleport instead of moving could also be fun. Below is an example of a ship with its movement blocked off:

Updates to follow:

The next things I’ll be adding are:

A translucent ghost ship on the square with the mouse over it indicating the direction the ship will be facing if you move to that square. Currently this is done with an arrow, but a ghost ship would be more intuitive and obvious.
A line showing the route from the current ship to the target square.
Left click moves the ship to the selected square (with movement animations), right click turns toward that square.
End turn button to move to the next ship.

After that I’ll get stuck into developing the combat system, and I’ll put up a post on that next week to keep you up to date with how it all works. The current design uses a module hotbar and lets you activate weapons and other modules at any point during your turn, but I’ll go into further detail once I’ve started implementing it and can see that it works. We also plan to have environmental effects like asteroids, gas clouds etc, which I’ll go into more detail on in a later post.

As always, if you have any thoughts, suggestions, ideas, or other feedback, please do leave a comment. I do really appreciate getting feedback on ideas, and I think it’s a vital part of the design process. Thanks for reading .

Tactical space combat: A prototype design

Posted by Brendan Drain on June 9, 2012

My original plans for tactical space combat in Predestination involved making a good attempt at turn-based 3D combat, which is something no game has done well yet. I had intended to make line-of-sight mechanics and area effects a big part of the gameplay, but every combat would have quickly become a chaotic mess. Our main goal with Predestination is to bring proper turn-based strategy back to 4X games, so after discussing the idea with the rest of the team we decided to use a classic 2D combat plane on which tactical decisions are much more obvious.

I started prototyping the combat system last week with a chess board and some coloured squares, but I quickly ended up with pages of complicated rules and movement/attack tables. The Art Director suggested a hexagonal grid and we quickly hashed out a very simple, intuitive system using that grid that we’re all very happy with. We prototyped the system using a big hexagonal gaming mat and paper cutouts and ironed out all of the flaws we could see. The end result is a tactical combat system I’m really excited about:

Movement on a hexagonal grid:

Each ship has a movement speed value based on its size and thrusters. I costs 1 move speed to move into any of the three hexagons in front of the ship, and 1 move speed to turn the ship by 1/6 of a hexagon. These two simple rules combine to produce the movement chart below, which shows the minimum movement speed required by the ship to reach each square. The turning costs make it faster to move forward than sideways or backward. You might be able to get special engine mounts that decrease turning cost or increase speed but make turning more expensive, which would produce very different results.

Attacking on a hexagonal grid:

Each weapon has a range in squares and a firing arc type that determines the area in which it can fire. The default is a standard forward arc the covers the three squares in front of a ship and those in front of it, and doesn’t spread out. Other possible firing arcs include an extended arc that spreads out, a focused arc that only covers squares in a straight line, and a 360 degree arc. You’ll modify weapons to use particular firing arcs by fitting them on a special weapon mount. For example, an artillery weapon mount might double the weapon’s range but reduce its firing arc to a focused line, or a point defense mount could half a weapon’s range but give it an extended firing arc and another bonus. 360 degree arcs would probably have to be restricted to starbases, stationary defense platforms and point blank area effect weapons. Two examples of firing arcs are below:

Reactive Strikes:

One of the main goals for Predestination is to add more strategy to today’s 4X gameplay, so for combat we knew we had to do something more strategic than basic move and fire gameplay. We drew some inspiration from chess to come up a system we’re calling Reactive Strike. When a ship moves into the firing arc of an enemy ship, that enemy gets a free automatic shot at him. Moving out of a ship’s firing arc doesn’t cause a Reactive Strike, but every square you move that ends with you inside someone’s arc will cause one. There’s no limit to the number of times a ship can fire a Reactive Strike, so if you move through four squares that are each in an enemy ship’s firing arc you’ll be fired on four times! These shots are free, they don’t use up a ship’s movement or firing for the turn.

In the image above, two Destroyers with 2-range forward arcs are blocking a Battleship’s movement. If the battleship moves into any of the light red squares, he’ll trigger a reactive strike from either ship. If he moves into the darker red squares, he’ll trigger a reactive strike from both ships as these squares are in both Destroyers’ firing arcs. In real game situation, the battleship would probably opt to stay still but turn and fire on either ship. This could be part of the red player’s strategy, to stop the battleship moving forward for one turn by sacrificing small ships. There’s also nothing stopping a player from doing this with larger and tankier ships.

The goal of this system is to make moving and positioning your ships more than just a matter of getting in range to shoot. Ships can group together to form barriers to enemy movement, areas that if the enemy moves through them he’ll be torn to shreds. You might decide that the chance of being hit and damage dealt on a Reactive Strike is low enough to take the hit, or use longer range guns to outrange the enemy’s firing arcs. There will even be special weapon mounts that increase the damage done by Reactive Strikes, allowing smaller ships to really threaten larger ones. I could also make weapon mounts that increase a weapon’s damage but remove its ability to fire Reactive Strikes.

Inititative system:

A problem that every turn-based game has is that the player who goes first gets a major advantage. I’ve tackled this problem with an initiative order system that merges both sides’ turns into a single action order list. Every ship on both sides of a fight rolls initiative and ships then take turns from highest to lowest initiative score. The initiative order of all ships is known at all times, so you can plan a combat strategy around knowing that certain enemy ships won’t be able to move and fire for a while. The initiative roll is a random amount plus the ship’s initiative bonus, with smaller and faster ships getting a higher bonus.

This means each side will reliably start the fight with its smallest ships, so you can build a strategy around those ships. For example, you could give all of your frigates point defense weapons and set up a perimeter to stop the enemy breaking through to your bigger ships. The battlefield will be big enough that players can’t reasonably get in range to fire on the first turn, so the first turn will be about moving your ships into tactically superior positions to the enemy. You’ll block off areas with your firing arcs, move to the sides to try to get in firing range of an enemy without entering his firing arc, etc.

I’m very excited about this system and hope to start programming an in-engine gameplay prototype soon (as free time allows). I find that the best tactical gameplay usually arises from the interaction between a few simple rules, and I think the system above captures that well. All the rules are simple enough to pick up in a few minutes, and yet in our pen-and-paper prototype play tests we found quite a bit of complex strategy coming out of them. Elements like firing arcs, turn order and valid movements can be easily shown via the user interface, and the Reactive Strike system turns the battlefield into a chess board. If you have any feedback on the system above or suggestions for ways it could be improved, please leave a comment and I’ll definitely take it on board.

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