Towards Fun

I spent a lot of time today rewriting the way that Legacy handles regions, after I found some pretty bad issues yesterday in the course of working on AI. The new system is fast and flexible and I think it will hold water for a while. In the process of fixing that up I squashed a lot of bugs that were messing up the AI and the game generally, so now I have (what appears to be) a game that runs with no broken assumptions.

At the end of the day today I spent some time tuning AI, for performance and quality. After all the performance work I'm able to easily explore 40k scenarios per move, where before I was setting that number to 1.5k to 3k. I finally feel like the algorithm isn't starving to death. The big quality changes were that I lowered the "exploration factor" and increased the bias and the aggressiveness, by making the scoring system care much more about the enemy's health than its own. There are still some funny scenarios though, where it gets into standoffs, and I think right now it relies too much on the "roll out" to do the damage, so it spends time running away instead of biting heroes. I think I can tune that out.

Well anyway the game almost feels like a game, but not yet a very fun one. The surround mechanic is alright. I can't tell if it's going to get tedious or not. Right now it's the only way the heroes can do any real damage to the boar, which means I spend most of my time trying to set up a turn where I surround the boar, without letting him bite me. If the boar were more aggressive that would likely feel better, since yeah I might get bit but I wouldn't have to chase him around the map with a rolled up newspaper.

The main mechanical problem I see is that attacks are wildly unpredictable. I'm using an attack roll similar to Fate, and I think what I'm seeing is that Fate has a ton of mechanics around modifying the result after the roll, by tagging this or that. Legacy doesn't have those right now, and what that leaves you with is the raw dice, which are pretty brutally random.

The other thing that feels bad is that the heroes don't have quite enough tools. They need either an overwatch, or some heroics, stunts, saving throws, healing surges, fatigue potions, some kind of extra rule-breaking mojo. Some way to break up the "I walk up to you and end my turn and you hit me" gameplay.

So, if you can't tell by my tone of voice, this is extremely exciting! I'll be thinking about the combat formula, and about what kind of abilities I can add in to round out basic melee. It's like a game!