Heavily based on a tabletop wargame, Helorian Battles relies heavily on combat to determine who wins the game.
Throughout the combat system development, while not set in stone, several key features we want to include have driven our decision making:
- Dynamic lane based combat. The game starts with one combat lane, and can expand and contract throughout the game.
- Ability to play strong units on turn one. With points based deckbuilding, a player shouldn’t have to save up manna or money to be able to play some of their best cards at the start of the game.
- No board/mat required. Summoner Wars is a great LGC that is very wargame like, but requires a mat to play on.
We have evolved through several iterations of combat while developing the game, some turned out to be horrible. Some were fun, but had balance issues.
The most notable failure was players would end up spending every turn counting up their attack and defensive power, the opponents attack and defense power, and then determining if they should attack or not. There was a lot of counting, not much attacking, and even less fun being had.
And that brings us to our current combat iteration we are testing. It’s sure to change as we continue to playtest, and may be completely different by the time the game is complete.
The regiment system.
In the regiment system, units can be stacked with other units to increase their power and/or provide cannon fodder for the more powerful units. Players can also create groups of low power units to overpower stronger units.
Based off of this new system, there are a lot of different iterations and adjustments we want to test. Max units per regiment, combat between different sized regiments, ranged units in regiments, and more.
We’ll explore more of these combat mechanic systems and tweaks to the regiment system in future posts.
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