Here it is finally: the attack of the city fortified in the previous video.
It took slightly longer as expected to show a proper battle as there was a huge amount of bugs to fix to make it functional enough for a first release:
All the terrains beeing procedural combined with the fact players can build their fortifications in any way they want makes it quite challenging because the amount of different ‘cases’ to deal with in battles is huge.
There is still obviously a lot of things to improve (both visually and in battle code), but at this point i need to move on to the next tasks as i’m running out of time !
For now the barbarian “AI” is really basic and all units are individually attacking without any global strategy.
One idea i have would be to keep this basic behavior for primitive armies, and that more advanced strategies would be unlocked by technologies or maybe the presence of commanders in armies.
For now, battles themselves are entirely automatic ( that is because in a multiplayer context, 'online' players must have no advantages over 'offline' players ). It means players do not actually control the units in battle.
Players affect the battles outcome before the battles actually happen : the defenders through organizing the defenses as shown in the previous news, and the attacker through orders and mission settings setup before launching the attack.
Attacking units can automatically pass walls and cliffs with ladders, breach gates with siege rams and embark in rafts to cross rivers when there's really no other choices.
When launching an attack, you'll be able to choose a privileged technique of assault.
It's still a bit crude , but i hope you guys will like it and find this decent enough!
Looks really good. Tracking!
Anonymous because the SSL isn't working correctly on this site and I can't connect.
It works greatly ! There are still some things to improve such as the enemy army not attacking the archers, but it is already well made !
Considering it is automatic, it could be interesting to be able to set nested defense areas so that when the outer area is entered by the enemy (for example when a palisade is breached), the troops (especially archers) retreat to the next biggest area.
Not easy to explain but for example, here you would define a large area containing the "peninsula" and the whole fortress. Inside it a nested area containing the zone on top of the cliff, and another smaller area with only the castle.
It would have allowed the two archer troops defending the bridge to retreat to the inner palisades.
Actually if you watch the last video with the defensive gameplay, i kinda did something close to that already : you can create defensive zones and assign troops to it.
However yes, for now, the troops will remain in the zone they are assigned to. Adding the option to make them retreat to another predefined zone if one is overrun could be a nice addon.
But i still havent implemented "morale" into battles, and retreating goes with that. So i'll keep this in the to-do list ^^.