Zodiac Legion: A tactical RPG with kingdom building elements

[Norfleet]

Trying to redefine your directions doesn't work when gravity and walls are present and your team faceplants into a wall as a result.

[Galdred]

Roads and rivers are most often straight lines, just like architecture. I'm also not aware of any real military formations that would fit on a hex grid instead of a square one.

That said, many people like hexes and I hope your game does well.

Straight lines work just fine with hexagons too. The main difference is that you cannot have orthogonal lines, but rivers rarely make 90° turns either.
For roads, it depends. Crossroads are usually orthogonal, but old dirth path usually are more curved, so hex grids are a better fit there.
Triangles would work better on a hex grid, but I'm still not sure they really were a thing. That said, formations is not a very useful concept there, as the possible party sizes will remain between 4 and 12.

[Nooneatall]

What a bunch of idiots, just use circles. Or even better spheres

[rusty_shackleford]

hexes are just neat, and gamedevs know it

[Galdred]

The secret to making architecture that matches hexes is to look at the ground irl. You'll see it all the time!
If you offset a square, you get a hex grid:


All the benefits of hexes without having to deal with a six-sided shape.

It goes further than this!

[rusty_shackleford]

Did you just come out as french?

[Galdred]

Did you just come out as french?

I thought my hatred for cowardly longbowmen had given it away already!

[WhiteShark]

Difficulty with straight lines is a feature of hexes, not a bug:

[Galdred]

Oh, btw, someone liked the game:

https://bigbossbattle.com/zodiac-legion-preview/

I updated the demo with scaling and a few QoL improvements (and UI bug corrections):
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app ... 7703705549

[rusty_shackleford]

Oh, btw, someone liked the game:

https://bigbossbattle.com/zodiac-legion-preview/

It’s big appeal

[Vergil]

Oh, btw, someone liked the game:

https://bigbossbattle.com/zodiac-legion-preview/

I updated the demo with scaling and a few QoL improvements (and UI bug corrections):
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app ... 7703705549

Congratulations, hopefully it gets more eyes on the game.

[Acrux]

I updated the demo with scaling

Thank you!

[Luckmann]

I had not heard of this, it looks absolutely fantastic.

[Galdred]

Oh, btw, someone liked the game:

https://bigbossbattle.com/zodiac-legion-preview/

I updated the demo with scaling and a few QoL improvements (and UI bug corrections):
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app ... 7703705549

Congratulations, hopefully it gets more eyes on the game.

Actually, it did. I got 300 WL out of it, but funnily, it didn't come with the article itself, but the wishlist count blowed up the day Google pushed it to my Android news feed, so I suppose others got it in theirs too.

[kyosuke]

Game looks seriously great so far, keep up the good work man.
Hopefully the game get a full release before I get

[Cloharp7]

I am now working on the semi-randomized level generation. It is a mix of the OG X-COM and XCOM 2 approaches, in that we randomly place preset blocks in a preset map.
But as we are also using a lot of dungeons, it is a bit trickier, because we need to make sure that all areas are reachable, and the resulting map is not too imbalanced (with large empty areas, or lot of backtracking to do).

The reason we went with the idea of reawakening magic was that it allows us to start from a "purely feudal" world, and slowly transition to a fantasy one. We also wanted the game to be rooted in realism, especially when it comes to combat, so armor will be very important early on, and require some efforts to bypass (by making the opponent fall, or getting critical hits to reach the weakest parts), but as the game goes on, your heroes will have more tools at their disposal to deal with it.

Devs posting here? Wishlisted, will watch with great interest.

[Cloharp7]

Difficulty with straight lines is a feature of hexes, not a bug:

So that's why my positioning in Battle Brothers was always messed up

[Galdred]

Difficulty with straight lines is a feature of hexes, not a bug:

So that's why my positioning in Battle Brothers was always messed up

That reminds me of the Great Battle series (my first wargames on PC, with Steel Panthers as I played on Atari before):


But heh, we have to pick our poison at a time.
Btw, I started to implement the aforementioned combat authenticity changes, dive further into turbo autism, so the armours will now be split in 6, with 6 extra "weak point" locations, each with its individual armour value, coverage and encumbrance (yes, it is partially lifted from Cataclysm: Dark Days ahead).

Btw, there is a Steam update here with what we changed, and what we are planning(mostly leveling up and armour rework):

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app ... 5974793808

► Show Spoiler

Zodiac Legion update for the Wargames Fest
(almost) as the game got in the fest and not in at the same time
Attention, knights!

Zodiac Legion is going to be featured during the Wargames Fest on Steam! Remember to drop by from April 28 to May 5 and charge headfirst into battle with Taurus, the stalwart patron of this time.

We’ve made sure to add a few things for the occasion that ought to be of interest to many of you. The first is a basic level-up system for your units. Now when the knights under your command return home from their perilous quests, they will use the experience to grow in strength. Thus, units may level up after missions, giving you a selection of attributes to improve. This is the first iteration of the system, and we plan to expand it with more than just statistics.


Apart from that, we’ve introduced a combat log that should make the battles more readable and give you a better insight into how the dice are rolled in the background. A major fix to memory-related issues will also make the game less prone to crashing.

We also made the first steps a bit more straightforward and made the tutorial separate from the "real" missions.

While these are the bigger news for the moment, we ride on to deliver more in the future. In our efforts to give you an authentic medieval combat experience, we’re now working on overhauling the way armour works. Soon, armour will stop being a “global” value for each unit, and will instead make use of our robust paperdolling to apply different coverage values for each body part, depending on how it is protected. The attacker’s weapon type and the armour’s quality will come into play here as well.

Furthermore, stamina will have increased importance for all characters, and not just mages. Shock damage from blunt weapons as well as certain actions will deplete stamina at a rapid pace, and once out of breath or passed out, a combatant will be easy pickings for anyone around. This should be particularly useful for bringing down enemies protected by full plate armour, as the world of Zodiac Legion still has to invent can openers.

For now, you can dive into the game and level up your knights while perusing the million D20s rolled in each encounter. But remember – to level up, they need to survive! And that, my friends, can be quite the challenge when you’re beset by wicked forces from the precipice of hell!

Until we meet again!

TLDR:

• combat log

• damage/armour/penetration overhaul (now penetration is rolled vs armour):

if penetration = armour +1 : 100% damage
+0 : 75 %
-1: 50%
-2: 25%
-3: 12.5%
-4: 0
(rounded down, but with 1 dmg minimum, unless you rolled -4 or worse).

• stat increase on level up (perks will be added soon)

• a skip tutorial message box

• option to disable scroll on edge

• font size option

[Galdred]

So, some recent news:
We have made good progress on our armor autism implementation.
You can read what it is about with more details here:

The base system is in place (damage localization, new armor system, made of 2 stacked layers with coverage, armor and encumbrance), as are some special attacks (thrusts, and I'll add some kind of called shot system later).
The only micro-issue being the lack of UI to support it at the moment.

I also improved the performances by a lot (like 95% faster calculations of Line of sight, which was the main bottleneck before, especially during AI turn), and we added a lot more levels to the rotation, including outdoor ones.

I plan to update the demo with these at the beginning of next week, once I solve the issue of the objective sometimes being 1 room away from the insertion point, and the AI being confused by teleporters.
Another issue is that I have a lot of art to import, to add some armor variations, and allow opening visors, for improved breath at the cost of a risk of face-tanking hits.

[rusty_shackleford]

Looking forward to this.

@Adventurer You guys should wishlist this if it's the kind of game you like

[Tweed]

[SniperChris]

Looking forward to this.

@Adventurer You guys should wishlist this if it's the kind of game you like

Neat. Thanks for letting me know!

[Red7]

Looking forward to this.

@Adventurer You guys should wishlist this if it's the kind of game you like

can jew decorate his castle with fucknuggets?

[Unhelpful Contrarian]

Looking forward to this.

@Adventurer You guys should wishlist this if it's the kind of game you like

Looks neat but I don’t have any interest buying early access games only when it’s finished ( feature complete/ version 1.0) will take a look in the final release.

[TheEmptyRoad]

Looking forward to this.

@Adventurer You guys should wishlist this if it's the kind of game you like

This looks interesting. Anything else like this, King Arthur: Knights Tale, or Wartales I should look for?

[Trickster]

Looking forward to this.

@Adventurer You guys should wishlist this if it's the kind of game you like

Hmm.
This looks like a very promising game for a tactics-strategy RPG enjoyer,

► Show Spoiler

which is me

. Thanks. Added to my wishlist.

[rusty_shackleford]

If you didn't notice it's being made by our good friend of the HQ @Galdred, so I give it my full-hearted endorsement and you should buy it at full price

[Vaako]

Looking forward to this.

@Adventurer You guys should wishlist this if it's the kind of game you like

Not really a fan of games which use these honeycombs spaces on the ground. Breaks my immersion and looks more like a boardgame then.

[Galdred]

Looking forward to this.

@Adventurer You guys should wishlist this if it's the kind of game you like

This looks interesting. Anything else like this, King Arthur: Knights Tale, or Wartales I should look for?

Wartales is closer from Battle Brothers. I think it is more forgiving, but it has more non combat related things to do. King Arthur:Knight's Tale is a very good game. It plays quite differently (RT exploration + smaller combat encounter, and a fixed sequence of missions), but I liked it a lot (apart from the exploration).

The Crown Wars: Black Prince, or MASSIVE CHALICE are pretty close from what we are making, but both suffer from a lot of issues (Crown Wars is very bland and buggy, and offers very little build variety. MASSIVE CHALICE was done by Double Fine, and has a weird pokemon breeding system which kind of detracts from the squad management aspects).

Looking forward to this.

@Adventurer You guys should wishlist this if it's the kind of game you like

Not really a fan of games which use these honeycombs spaces on the ground. Breaks my immersion and looks more like a boardgame then.

I could add an option to remove the grid, though. Would that be enough, or are you against the idea of hexagons themselves, because the latter is not negociable.

[Magick]

I could add an option to remove the grid, though. Would that be enough, or are you against the idea of hexagons themselves, because the latter is not negociable.

I'm not against it either way, but an option to visibly hide the grid (and just show border of highlighted bit on mouseover) would be sensible.