RPGWatch Forums - Stellar Tactics - Combat System Progress Update

The Stellar Tactics combat system progress update.

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Combat system progress update

Space combat is moving along at a good pace. I thought I would share a quick video to show how the basic systems work.

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The combat system is turret based. All ships have a limited number of turret mount points and beam, projectile or missile turrets can be looted or purchased. Turrets come in light and heavy variants and each of the 40 ships have specific mount specifications. Heavy weapon mount points can take light turrets if you choose to equip them.

In combat you will be managing range, power, shields and your current ship speed as well as turret targeting.

Power is critical in combat. Your turrets, shields and systems take a base amount of power to spool up and maintain. Available power feeds your ship capacitor and weapons draw from the capacitor so if your capacitor is depleted your turrets will fail to charge and fire and will wait for an available charge. Each turret draws a certain amount of power from the capacitor every time it fires with beam weapons depleting the capacitor at the highest rate. If your energy balance is off, your capacitor will not maintain its charge.

Energy balance is maintained by the number of active turrets, power to your shields, number of activated devices and power to your engines. You can balance the power to these systems by deactivating turrets and devices during combat and setting the active power charge to your engines and shields. Reducing power used by your shields, systems, turrets and engines diverts that power to your capacitor.

Each turret has a range meter - keeping your active turrets range meter green is important because turrets have range accuracy falloffs. If you're outside a turrets optimal range, your weapons may not connect. The same goes for enemy ships. Smaller faster vessels with missiles and beam weapons can go up against much larger ships that have weapons with shorter range and less maneuverability by staying outside the range of the larger ship. You will want to optimize your equipment for maximum charge rate, range, strategy and damage.

Turrets target independently so you can have a unique target for each turret. This allows strategies like utilizing certain turret types that do more damage to shields, then switching those turrets to the next ship once the current targets shields are down. An example would be using your ion turrets on enemy shields to deplete them and then kinetic, plasma or explosive weapons once that targets shields are down.

Ship loot drops will be similar to the ground based loot drops with various quality tiers and different stats to choose from. Ships also drop cargo so if you want to be a pirate, or are not aligned with a certain faction, you can harass them as much as you want. There will be missions like the mission system in KZ-MR7 with various objectives that can be taken on stations, from other ships in space or from faction agents. Space combat can be profitable and dangerous. Scanning targets will be important because it may not be immediately obvious just how dangerous a ship or group of ships are.

I'm still working on things - elements of the UI may change and I'm balancing systems so what you see here is work in progress.

If you have any questions about combat or what you see in the video, please do post here or on the forums. I'll be happy to answer them. No ETA on the release of space combat at this time though you can see it's fairly far along. I'll be working on loot, vendors and ship merchants next week which need to be in place before the space combat release. I'm also considering adding a first pass mission system for the release of space combat so you have tasks to complete in Achmedius.

More information.