Crucible XII 14/02/2014

Big news! Crucible has now become a real time game. Mid way through this week I thought it might be a good idea, tried it out (very crudely), and it is! The game is now paced much better, and being real time means that decisions the player or enemy makes have far more immediate effects. You don't get the opportunity to pore over each turn, planning out every move, you must make flash decisions and make the best of every situation. This has resulted in various changes that I will detail below (along with the fun stuff I have added).

State of the Game (Build 0.69):

• Changed from Turn Based to Real Time strategy. Resources are now earned on a per-second basis. Much easier for me to control resource generation. Ship movement is now based on speed rather than number of systems moved per turn. Reduced the difference in Capital generation between races- Humans now gain a base of 0.6 p/s, Selkies gain 0.5, and Nereides gain 0.4. Turn timers are now cooldowns (this means there is a 2 minute no-fire period at the start of the game, a timer for hero levelling etc.).
• Hero invasions now working. A great deal of balance is required for this but at the moment the basic invasion mechanics exist. If the invading player destroys all the system defences before they destroy the inhabitants (ownership) the player gains control of the system, otherwise the system becomes unowned.

• Heroes now inherit abilities from their ship and relevant upgrades to the ship. The actual tech tree for this is tough to understand and will require work. Bombs are not currently working as they have a completely different usage mechanic to Artillery and Dropships.
• Once again I have done a great deal of optimisation and cleaning up (at first the change to real time caused the game to use some ridiculous % of my CPU).

I had hoped to have the pool of systems working by now, but the balance, naming and positioning of the systems has proved to be difficult. However I believe the map I have come up with has great potential, and hopefully I can show it off next week. Thanks for reading!

P.S Apologies for the lack of pictures in this update, most of the work I've been doing this week is not complete and so cannot really be shown, since I'm still converting the game to real-time.