Hi, and welcome back to my series of Fate of an Empire developer diaries.

This week I intend to stay away from the regular progress updates and instead talk a bit about my vision for this updated version of Fate of an Empire. Two of the major improvements that I’ve previously talked about is the map editor and the hexagonal map.

Today I would like to discuss another improvement that I’m planning to introduce that will make Fate of an Empire an even better experience.

Combat and race mechanics

I’m thinking of making three changes that will affect ground combat. One is to increase the hit points for each soldier from 2 to 4 (1 to 2 for Krant). This increases how much damage each soldier can receive before becoming a casualty.

The above change will see less casualties from combat and prolong battles and increase the chance that a battle between two larger forces will continue over several turns.

The other change is critical hits. Each combat phase every soldier makes one attack. This attack can either hit and make 1 damage or miss. A company with 500 soldiers and a hit chance of 10% will, on average, make 50 hits which kill 12 enemies if each enemy soldier absorbs 4 hits as I talked about above. We exclude armour saves in all examples.

During an attack, if the dice roll is below 10% of the hit chance, it’s a critical hit. A critical hit will make between 2 and 6 damage instead of the normal 1. The average is 4. Taking the company above, with a hit chance of 10%, the results will now be a bit different. There will still be 50 hits but 5 of them will be critical hits. This gives, on average, 65 hits which kills 16 enemies.

For reference, in the current combat system the company above would make 50 hits which kills 25 enemies as each soldier absorbs 2 hits.

The third change I plan to introduce is a limit on the number of combat rounds in a battle. Today the limit is 100 combat rounds, this essentially means that the armies will fight until ones dies or retreats. The new limit will be somewhere between 10 and 20 combat rounds. If no winner has been declared during that time the battle will end in a draw and the attacking side will retreat back to the hex he came from.

The above changes will see a decrease of the kill rate by one third. This will have to be playtested quite a lot to see if these are good changes or if the critical hits or length of combats should be further adjusted.

Next week I plan to discuss the new terrain properties, another major change in the game mechanics.

Cheers!