It’s been a busy week of testing and tweaking, but we’ve made an important discovery relating to balancing.
As mentioned in our last update, we’ve now re-worked the negative effect on morale that facing a larger creature has, and think we’ve got the balance right.
We also said that we believed at the time that there may have been a balancing issue with smaller creatures and our horde mechanics. So we spent some time this week testing those with a wider range of creatures, alongside the updated morale de-buff. This allowed us to Identify that the issue wasn’t in fact down to creatures being smaller than an opponent, but due to the way we originally calculated their battlefield value (and therefore points value) in relation to their overall stat block. More importantly, we discovered this affected all creatures great and small, so to speak.
As a result, we’ve shifted the focus of our 0.1.6 update to postpone work on the pile in mechanic and attack allocation review. This update will consist of just the morale de-buff mentioned above, alongside a re-working of our points allocation system.
We’re also considering stepping away from our current horde system as, the more we play test it, the more we find it doesn’t sit well alongside our core game play mechanics. It’s a shame really, as the system we built was unique and, on paper, adds an interesting bit of flavour to the games. However, at present, the system is built around skirmish combat rather than full on battles (which will come in future), and hordes don’t lend themselves well to the way it’s played at present. That being said, we do have a possible alternative mechanic called Overwhelm that could achieve what horde was meant to, whilst working much better within the current scope of the system. We won’t be addressing this in version 0.1.6, but expect to do so before we reach 0.2.0.
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