Alpha Devlog 3: Combat Changes

What Remains

Rank-based Combat

Four gals in a column is an amazing combat system. It makes positioning impactful and easily allows multiple roles on a team. So that remains.

Tokens

Tokens are also great. They visualize effects, which is a necessity. So that remains.

Of course the tokens themself will change, I don't really like Dodge tokens (especially since missing is now handled differently), and Daze will certainly be removed (Stun also, due to the change in turn ordering). A lot of tokens (like silence or hobble) also no longer make sense, since those are taken over by stats. The concept of Token-, Token, Token+ also feels like clutter. Rather, the strength of a token should depend on the amount of tokens a player has.

DoTs

DoTs are actually just tokens (and in Ero Dungeons you can replicate all effects of a DoT with a Token) but they are an easy way to represent tokens that trigger an action at the start of a turn (or in case of speed at the start of a round). So that remains. 

I want to be a bit more creative with DoTs in the future however. As said, any effect that happens at the start of a turn/round can be turned into a DoT. It removes some clutter from the tokens.

Moves

Movescripts have been changed during the Script Rework of Ero Dungeons (version 1.4), this is still valid. This means that moves use the same scripts and targetting as tokens, gear, effects, etc... Handling the moves, including floating texts during combat have also been reworked then. It's a very easy to change system now. So that remains.

What Changes

Move Targetting

You may (very unlikely) remember that in one of the earliest Ero Dungeons devlogs I mentioned that I originally wanted moves to be auto-targetted. The idea is that it saves the player a bunch of clicks. You just select the move, press it again, and it fires, instead of also having to select the target. Moves now support a bunch of random targetting options.

Turn Order

In Ero Dungeons, the turn order is decided at the start of a round depending on the speed of each target. Once every girl had her turn, the turn order is reset and a new round is started. Rather than that, I want the turn order to be dynamic. At each point, all girls are in the turn order, each with a certain "delay". The one with the lowest value has her turn, depending on the move, this "delay" increases, and the turn order is recalculated.

This of course means that the concept of a "round" will possibly disappear.

Charged Moves and Lust Interrupts

More powerful moves require some charging time. They target a specific rank, rather than a target, so this gives you time to get out of the way (or push an enemy into the way). While charging, the move can also be interrupted.

This is where lust enters the picture. Apart from being a potential move requirement, any increase in lust has a chance of breaking the girl's concentration, interrupting her move. The higher her lust, the higher the interrupt chance. Unlike in Ero Dungeons, lust exists for both the player and the enemy, giving you a reason to use lust increasing moves.

Fatigue

Healing is a problem in games, since it allows you to grind indefinitely. In a game with capture chances like Ero Hunters, this often makes the most optimal gameplay the most boring one. A game like Darkest Dungeon II, healing moves have limited uses. There it rewards a very aggressive, kill everything immediately gameplay, so I'd like another solution.

I'm thinking of adding a fatigue stat. This directly lowers the maximum health, and increases after each combat. Additionally, healing moves will add some fatigue to the target (depending on the power of the move). As a result, healing is somewhat limited, preventing stalling somewhat without being overbearing.

Throwing Gear

One of the reasons for crafting gear is that you can throw it at the enemy. Depending on their remaining health and any other gear that they are wearing, this has a chance to affix itself to the enemy. This gear has the same effects on the enemy as on the player (since there's no internal difference between the two). Some equipment can also capture the enemy.

In general the idea is that you slowly weaken the enemy with gear to maximize your capture chance while rendering them harmless.

Throwing stuff is always done on the same rank (so rank 3 targets rank 3) to prevent you from focus firing to easy and make positioning even more important.

Durability

Durability is fully removed from the game.

Death's Door

Death's Door is fully removed from the game.

Kidnapping

Kidnapping is fully removed from the game. If an ally loses all health, they respawn back in your base.

Damage Rolls

There are no more damage rolls. Moves do a fixed amount of damage. Moves are also no longer affected by the girl's stats (except for stat requirements, see below). So your lvl 1 commoner will do the same damage with a punch as your lvl 100 divine paladin. Though the divine paladin may know something like divine punch which does more damage.

Criticals

My goal is to make criticals conditional. For example, a move may always crit if the enemy has a weakness token, or if it hits rank 1, orif it targets a certain enemy type, or still just with a set chance. It offers more tactical choices, but more importantly you don't risk accidentally killing a target that you wanted to capture with a crit.

Missing and Requirements

The old variant of move requirements (using the same conditionals as other scripts) still exists. But apart from that, all moves have stat requirements. A swordslash for example will require 100 Manipulation and 100 Sight. If the girl doesn't meet this stat threshold she gains a miss penalty. For example at 60 sight (after wearing a blindfold), she has a 40% miss chance. At 0 Manipulation (after wearing an armbinder) she has a 100% miss chance. Apart from requiring higher levels, more powerful moves will also have higher stat requirements.

Progress Screenshots

Note that what I mentioned above isn't implemented yet. It's what I want to implement, and it's what I take into account while refactoring the combat. Here's what I actually did this week. 

Encounters in the Overworld

I've updated enemy encounters and streamlined them a bit. Stuff like manual and automatic interaction triggers are now unified. Enemies no longer need to be placed in rooms manually, but they can show up on pre-set spots. Enemies also have a back and side view now (since they use the same puppet as the player), which is the first step towards moving enemies. Rats now have ears, a tail, and a snout. Both for their Small and Medium puppets.

This streamlining is the first part of eventually creating an editor for dungeon rooms. This wouldn't just allow modders to make these rooms themself, but would also make editing them easier and less error prone. You may notice a lot of "Curio X was completely broken" in the Ero Dungeons bugfixes, this should remedy that.

Combat Refactor

It's not really visible to you as the player, but the combat system was a complete spaghetti mess. I've cleaned up the largest part of it, which was necessary for the turn order and move targetting rework. In code, it's a lot cleaner and shorter now. Of course, for the player, it looks pretty similar.

The biggest difference is that clicking a selected move immediately executes it, Random targetting is also shown as purple in the move indicator (big purple means the amount of targets, small purple the possible target ranks).

Move Editor

To set the visuals of the moves, I had created a move editor late in development of Ero Dungeons. Two actually, since in that game moves are still different between players and enemies. For Ero Hunters I've improved its capabilities and made it display the actual visuals correctly rather than showing something similar.

You can view a combat animation here: https://x.com/madodev18/status/1847225819560661208

Thanks to the previous refactor, I can allow this editor to use the same code - and resulting visuals - as the actual combat, making adding visuals and sounds to moves a lot easier. This also applies for modders of course.

Finally, I'm reworking effects to be more versatile. This allows for giving delays, position changes, colors, and so on, to effects. For example, the triple arrows in the animation above would be completely impossible in the previous system.