Combat Overhaul

Work is progressing well. We've made some changes to combat, with the goal of keeping it simple, strategic, and focused on the characters. By way of simplification, Heroism was confusing, so we removed it. Then we added a pair of rules that encourage careful positioning of your heroes. 

Walling: when a hero is standing directly adjacent (not diagonal) to an ally, she gets +1 armor.
Flanking: every attack on a unit that is at a 90-degree-or-more angle to a previous attack this turn is considered flanking and is guaranteed to hit.

Walling encourages heroes to stand close together, and flanking encourages them to split up. We think this tension is going to be interesting. To make it easier to think about, we've added in-world feedback during the move interaction. So as you hover over a square, you will see who you will be walling with, which enemies you can attack from that square, and which you can flank. Hot sauce.

Another big change is that we've removed randomness from hero weapon damage. There's still a chance for the attack to miss, but with flanking it's possible to mitigate that significantly. We think that making hero performance more predictable will encourage players to make more complicated plans.

To reintroduce some variation, we've added weapon and armor types, and weapon wield, which is how light/heavy the weapon is.

Wield affects hit chance by interacting with the monster's block and dodge stat. Heavy weapons are easy to dodge but hard to block. Light weapons are easy to block but hard to dodge. So, depending on the enemy's defense, a light or heavy will be preferable.
Armor Type affects hit chance and damage. Certain enemies will be rigid, or slippery, or tough, and weapons will be classified as thrusting, bashing, and hacking. An attack can have advantage, or disadvantage, or be neutral.

Together, these rules should add variation without relying on randomness. We think it will be satisfying to pull out that ultra heavy mace against the rigid blocker, but the intention is more to add flavor, not to make the heroes useless if they bring the wrong weapons.

Instead of crits, we have stunts. Stunting now has a variable effect on the enemy, depending on the enemy type. These follow the theme of the enemy and should add some nice flavor and strategic depth. Here are a couple of examples:

Gorgon Animal -> Confusion: The seed of corruption is momentarily disrupted, and the animal wanders aimlessly on its next turn.
Thrixl -> Feedback: The being loses all interfusions and takes one damage for each interfusion lost.

So, a stunt against a gorgon animal means you can safely ignore that creature, because its next turn will be harmless. On the other hand, many thrixl rely on interfusions for defense and control, so a stunt presents a perfect opportunity to focus down an otherwise tough foe, or disrupt the battlefield in other ways.

Certain weapons and skills will give bonuses to your stunt chance, and we think it will be interesting to build some characters for stunt chance instead of for straight damage. Unlike crit, it's not simply higher damage variance. Instead, choosing to build for stunt chance is a tradeoff between damage and tactical opportunities.

So, those are the big combat changes. Next time maybe I will to talk about where we are with character development. Lots of progress there too!