One of the things that sticks out to me about that game is that every encounter is a little puzzle. Every ship you fight is an opportunity to earn or lose scrap. And as you play through again with a different setup, the tactics you use vary as well. To look at just ship combat, it has an essential structure which is, penetrate the other ship's shield to disable its systems, and then press your advantage to destroy it, while it is trying to do the same to you. Most (almost all?) of the control you have over the game can be applied to the situation, either in attack, defense, or escape.
The structure and novelty of the puzzles the game presents, as well as opportunities for mastery and an unrelenting challenge, have proven to be very compelling (to me personally anyway.)
XCOM can give the same feeling, particularly when you're in a tight tactical spot and you need to pull out something with a fall back, smoke grenade, rocket the chrysallids kind of flavor.
The feeling that every encounter is a puzzle that can be solved, if only you approach it correctly, is something I want to capture for Legacy. So to me that means veering away from straight up slugfests, and focussing on abilities that allow you to safely deal damage to the enemy, if used carefully. When you head into that cave, your goal is to never let them through your armor. Of course they will likely get through anyway, and it will hurt.. That's simply a question of balance.
So then here are some mechanics that we've been brainstorming that help us to get at this kind of tactical depth.
- Flanking/Surrounding
- Immobilizing
- Fire
- Grapple
- Attacks that affect the enemy's sight radius (Distract)
- Situational defensive buffs and debuffs
- Stealth or Hiding
- Debris and Furniture are important
- Abilities that affect multiple heroes
For example, one fight plan might be, Hide, Distract, Surround, Immobilize, Destroy.
Or, Light a fire, Buff the warrior, Grapple the monster, Fire Combo to destroy.
These ideas are not yet fully formed. Just a sort of bubbling stew of game mechanics. The other ingredient that I should mention is the Fate RPG system. It encourages conflict to take on a cinematic flair by favoring the "create an advantage" verb over the more familiar "attack" verb. The central mechanic is to apply aspects to things, and then to invoke those aspects to gain numerical bonuses to other actions, such as attacking. Note, a computer game implementation of tabletop ideas needs to take care, because unlike a tabletop RPG, there's no inherent feedback mechanism against cheese.
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