BIG NEWS:
Major change to combat system, update to alpha build
A couple of months on, I can look back on HOMD's early alpha release with a nice sense of perspective, and all told it actually went very well. There were many reports of instability and poor collision detection, but both of these major bugs were fixed within a week.One bit of feedback I didn't entirely expect, however, was the trouble that people had with the combat system. It was either much too easy or unfathomably difficult, with no reports of anything in-between. This honestly baffled me for a few days, but then I realized - nobody had much idea what was going on.
If you have no idea what's going on and then you win, that's too easy. If you have no idea what's going on and then you die, that's too hard.
This could be a UI problem, but I don't think so. It's a design problem. FTL gets away with real-time combat because the player only has 4 characters to manage - but in HOMD, you can have anywhere from 10 to 18 crewmembers! That's simply too much to deal with all at once. And the player in HOMD has no interesting decisions to make - the options are there, but it's simply too chaotic to parse cause-and-effect. (I suppose this is probably a fair representation of real-life combat, but like real-life combat, it just wasn't very fun.)
There's a rule of strategy gameplay that I strongly believe in -
the Sid Meier rule, coined by the Firaxis mastermind himself. "A good game is a series of interesting choices." Sadly, and it pains me to admit it, the old combat system failed this test.
Luckily, I think I fixed it.
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