Wartales - Combat

Wartales Q&A #2: Combat in Wartales

Attention Mercenaries!

Welcome to the second of our weekly Q&A's with the wartales development team!

This week, Quentin, our Lead Game Designer/Producer gives us an insight into the easy to learn but hard to master combat system of Wartales, providing more information about how best to approach every fight, how your choice of weapons and units will be pivotal in your fights and why you'll need to thoroughly prepare for every confrontation that awaits you in wartales.

Read on to find out more…

What makes the fighting system in Wartales stand out from other turn based strategy games?

"We wanted to offer the player a combat system that is quick to learn but whose richness and depth unfold over the course of your playtime. Since the management component is one of the main aspects of the game, it was essential to link it to the combat system. In short, there are two layers of combat mastery; The first is simply winning the battle. The second is winning the battle efficiently, i.e., with as few wounds and armor repairs as possible.

Of course, winning a battle under catastrophic circumstances can be very resource intensive and can negatively impact the player's progress and economic expansion. Thus, the basis of a healthy economy is a good mastery of the combat system.

Wartales is not just a matter of fighting a skirmish to the death, we wanted to make a large variety of fights available to the player: you will be offered different combat objectives such as reaching a point in a given time, defending an area for a certain period of time, escorting a VIP, burning rats nests, fighting in arenas, attacking merchant caravans, assassinating a champion…

We designed a combat system that is malleable and adaptable to all of these requirements. The variety of objectives, encounters and game rules go hand in hand with the procedural generation of the battle area: this guarantees quality gameplay and replayability. The player must then deal with the battlefield, which is directly linked to the environment in which the fight was initiated (in the world) and procedurally generated according to the rules that govern these locations: is it a forest dotted with trees and tree trunks which archers can hide behind? A swamp in which the mud and mire make it difficult to get around? A mountain in the middle of a snowstorm that makes visibility almost impossible? The variety of combat environments and their procedural generation guarantees that the player will fight in a constantly renewed space and, by extension, always experience a different battle."

Why did we choose this particular combat style?

"Wartales' combat system was designed to meet two requirements: the first being to distinguish itself from traditional tactical games by offering a more organic and faster system to learn and play. To do this, we removed certain mechanics such as the chance to hit and replaced them with a system of engagement that is simple to understand but whose mastery will make the difference between a perfectly executed fight and a mass grave.

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