Every body fights for itself
Three weeks of alpha. Combat rebuilt as formation versus formation, enemies re-authored from the ground up, a server-wide Great Work, and a queue for long actions.
The last dispatch said work had started on real multi-enemy combat. That work has now been completed!
Combat is a battlefield now
Fights used to pool everything. Formations were summed into one stat block, the enemy into another, and the pair traded a single exchange every tick. A ten-unit line and a solo unit fought the same way at different magnitudes.
Now a fight resolves body by body. Both sides field up to ten units on a five by five grid, and every unit brings its own stats, health, and place in the initiative order. Attacks land by lane, with the front-most body absorbing what comes down it. Units react to round starts, hits landed, hits taken, and allies going down. Knock one out and it grays out where it stood while the formation fights around the hole.
The client displays all of this. Idle combat and harvesting open with both formations side by side, one cell per body, and a ticker of the round beside them. Drawing the actual battle also fixed something the old view had been getting away with: a fight against eight cable-mites rendered as a single enemy carrying eight times the stats, but now it is eight separate bodies.
Units also dilute each other. Ten of them amounts to about four and a half times what a single unit does. Adding bodies helps (individual attacks can knock out opposing enemies faster than a single, really buff unit), but it is no longer strictly optimal.
Under the hood
Grindshell now has a harness that embeds the real engine and drives it with an automated player, which means content can be measured by playing it. The first full run corrected two numbers the design math had been confident about.
Enemies, rebuilt
- Levels are gone. Enemies are authored from six base stats and carry no level at all. Difficulty gets measured afterwards, at the point where a fight flips from loss to win, so a creature’s placement comes from evidence.
- Defense is more of a factor. Resistance counts for much more against an incoming hit, so fights run longer and read round to round.
- Zones are allowed to be peaceful. No more filler creature standing in every empty zone.
- Creatures drop parts of themselves. A new rendering step turns those parts into gear materials.
- Merchants have been expanded. Bring creatue parts and trade them for credits.
The Great Work
The first world event is live. A Great Work is a server-wide project that everyone contributes to at once, and the first one is the Runoff Haul Line.
Actions and progression
- Long actions queue. Crafting, construction, and travel line up behind whatever is running. Combat and harvesting are excluded on purpose since those use a different queue system.
- Skill unlocks are visible in advance. A Skills tab lists what each level opens up.
- Teleport links can be published. A route one player opens is available to everybody.
- The per-action knowledge cap no longer applies to crafting. It was written for combat and harvesting, and it had been quietly taxing recipes.
What’s next
More of the world to fight through, and the questline the new units were built for. The beta is still coming, and alpha progress wipes when it arrives.
Guest accounts are open at online.grindshell.com.
About the wipe
Alpha progress will be wiped when the beta arrives. The changes above rewrote every fight in the game and took about a week, largely because no save had to survive it, and there is more of that coming. What your time buys right now is influence over the shape of the game.