Facing, Flanking and Back Striking

[Anonymous]

Facing, Flanking, and Back Striking

Hi Guys,

So I just today stumbled across your lovely, lovely game. I myself have been dying for a deep tactical rpg set in a medieval fantasy world, with an engaging metagame strategic layer. So, understandably I’ve fallen in love :)

I have spend most of my day playing your demo, and I can’t sing your praises enough. Even in early alpha the battles are brilliant, and tense.
But I have a niggle, only a slight one, and I suppose as a result… a suggestion.

Currently, the two opposing factions face opposite directions. The Battle Brothers facing to the right, the Undead (or enemy faction) facing to the left. This to me looks and feels awkward… but opens up the possibility to make the game much more deeper. Judging by some of the videos. The Enemy AI is already very adept at flanking the players units. What if, a strike to the opponent from the rear, allows a greater percentage chance of hitting, and a slight damage increase? in a similar vain to Final Fantasy Tactics Advance.

The units could change direction to reflect the direction of their movement, and the direction in which they are attacking (either left or right). I wouldn’t bother with up and down facing, because that would mean creating more 2D assets, which isn’t necessary.

You have already implemented the (north/south) map rotation, so its clearly possible to reverse the 2D sprites.

…Perhaps, I may be jumping the gun and this is already planned. But, I thought I’d drop in and make a suggestion just incase
Anyway keep up the good work guys, this is my Most Wanted Game of 2015 :)

[PsenBattle]

Hi Drew,
first of all thanks for all the praise, we’ll give our best to not fail the high expectations :)
Concerning the issue of flanking and backstabbing there are two reasons we decided to use the “overwhelm” mechanic instead.
I quote one of our earlier blog entries here:

—“Battle Brothers does not have a Flanking mechanic per se. We toyed around with the idea, but two points irked us: A combatant in real life can turn around in a split second, so determining that any combatant would be attacked from the back only for the fact that he couldn’t turn around because it isn’t his turn currently seemed very artificial. Second, it would require a very clear indicator of what direction any character is currently looking at – in other words, we would have needed character busts for every one of six possible directions. Sadly, our resources are very limited, and we’d rather spend them on more important things.
What we came up with instead is the Overwhelm mechanic. The more individual characters attack any defending character in close combat within a single round, the easier it gets for them to score a hit. Or in other words: We’re granted a to-hit bonus for each character that attacked our target previous to us in the current round. This way we simulate the difficulty of defending against multiple opponents that attack from multiple sides without the need for any fixed character headings.”—

We really had long discussions on this topic and even experimented with direction indicators on each character (I think telepath tactics has something like this). In the end it felt smoother and easier to understand to us to go with the overwhelm.
My personal thoughts on this: I admit flanking would add tactical depth, but I also think flanking applies more to regiments of soldiers fighting each other. An individual combatant doesn’t really have a flank, because it takes him only a split second to face another direction. The only situation where you can’t turn around to face your opponent is when you fight against multiple opponents.

Anyways, welcome to the forum!
Cheers!

Overhype Studios - Let´s roll!

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[Anonymous]

Thanks for the quick reply, its not so much the lack of flanking. But the direction of the units the niggles me lol.

I totally understand why you’ve opted to go with overwhelm mechanics over flanking. I think it would just be nice to see the units face the direction they move/attack in, be that left or right. It seems awkward that they have a fixed direction thats all :)

[PsenBattle]

Actually we still have a bit of an ongoing discussion on that end :)
Technically it would totally be possible to just let the unit face the last direction it was moving in.
But that topic is of a pretty low priority right now. We’ll let you know if there are any news on that .)

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[Anonymous]

Excellent news! I’ll wait eagerly :)

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