Shop Revisions
Hi! For those of you just joining us, I’m Kiva, the Lead Designer on BATTLETECH. In our third dev diary, we’re diving into a big revision to Stores that’s going to appear in our next big free Update, 1.3. I’ll also talk about Flashpoint Rewards and how the new Store system factors into them.
An interesting tension in the development of BATTLETECH has been the opposed forces of “story campaign game” and “simulation sandbox game”. From the beginning we knew we wanted to do both, but a lot of the early design work was squarely aimed at the sandbox. Shops are an excellent example of this design focus.
If you’re a modder, you’ve seen the jumbled way we assemble the contents of a shop. The intent isn’t to create a consistent shop experience, but to give a random cross-section of possible gear and weapons and supplies that seems appropriate for the location you’re in. “Appropriate for the location” is the key phrase there -- the underlying principle is that we don’t have to look at each individual planet to construct its shops. We could, for instance, expand the game to cover the whole Inner Sphere, and as long as we tagged all the systems in reasonable ways, the shops would just naturally work themselves out.
Unfortunately this approach collided with the story campaign very early on, when we realized we wanted to provide a path for people uninterested in sandbox play a route through the campaign. That meant scattering ‘Mechs -- the Griffin and the Dragon, in particular -- in front of the campaign player, where they could buy them and fill out their roster. Sandbox players would be gathering parts of ‘Mechs from side content, and increasing their drop tonnage organically, but campaign players were in for a nasty surprise if they tried to take their Weldry-capable lance to Smithon.
We had to break the shop concept for those ‘Mechs, in those systems. Modders, again, will see the hacky work-around we used, in which a special shop file looks for a tag that contains a system’s name to include itself. It’s ugly, but it worked. But it got me thinking about how I’d like to control shops if I had the chance to go back and revise the system.
The new model for shops is far more deterministic and structured. Rather than a large pool of undifferentiated items, we’re creating weighted tables of items, and a given planet will have a selection of tables on which it “rolls” to pick out what will be in its inventory. Instead of hoping that particular items will show up, we can directly force them to, or we can let random chance pick a handful of interesting things from a given category. (Old school nerds: the process is very much like rolling up loot on the treasure tables in the back of the AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide.)
Here’s an example of the shop table, for minor Liao systems.
The system’s shop will include all possible base ammo types (that’s what the 0 means -- a Reference type, plus a 0, means “include the entire contents of the referenced table”), and all possible base components, meaning jump jets and heat sinks. It will also include 5 “stock” weapons, chosen at random from the named table, and 2 non-stock weapons from Liao-specific manufacturers.
Here’s the shop table for “Weapons_Liao_common”:
You can see that we’ll be picking from manufacturers with a strong presence in the Capellan Confederation: Mydron, LongFire, Ceres Arms and Holly. We’ll get one roll on whichever manufacturer’s table we happen to choose when we pick one of these entries at random.
Here’s the table for “Weapons_LongFire_common”:
In this table, there’s a new wrinkle: the final column, Weight, isn’t all the same. That means that when we roll on this table, there’s a higher chance of getting an LRM5 than an LRM10 or 15. (The chance is 10/24, if you’re curious.)
By creating a lot of these tables, in a lot of detail, we can get extremely specific about what items are in which shops. We can include extremely rare tables, with items you’ll almost never see, and sprinkle them like seasoning across a few important systems. Here’s a sneak peek at a table you probably won’t see very often in play:
What you will see in play is much more highly tailored shops, including both black market shops for the criminally-minded, and faction-specific quartermaster shops only accessible to closely-allied mercenary groups. You’ll be able to predict a shop’s contents a bit more easily, and we’ll be able to create very specific content-driven shops for interesting planets, Flashpoints, and story locations.
Flashpoint Rewards
We’re going to be using shops a lot more aggressively as rewards, as methods for getting interesting items into the game, and as a way to gradually introduce new items into the game economy. And we’re going to use these Item Collection mechanics for something else entirely: random treasure rewards for completing Flashpoints in our first Expansion.
We think loot is cool, and it’s a great motivation to finish a Flashpoint. But it serves an additional purpose as well. When flying around the Periphery earning your mercenary pay, mission choice is often a matter of trying to predict what ‘Mechs will be present, with what weaponry, and withdrawing if the OpFor isn’t interesting to salvage. So we want a way for you to predict -- at least partially -- what kinds of loot you’ll get from doing so.
I mentioned previously that this was very much like treasure tables in the Dungeon Master’s Guide, and that’s not accidental. A weighted table for picking items is a useful way to construct shops, but it’s just as easily used to construct a random reward or collection of rewards.
Perhaps you’ve completed a major Flashpoint for the Draconis Combine. You’ll get the payout that was agreed on -- c-bills and salvage, as usual, as well as their gratitude. But this Flashpoint was hard, and had you doing back-to-back missions with no time to repair or refit. You want more than just the usual rewards to take a risk like that.
And the Kurita rep agrees: you’ve done a great job, and you should get three of these:
Throughout all the Flashpoint content, we’re going to be including special rewards like these. You won’t know what you’re going to get in advance; in this example, you might be told that you’ll get “Rare ‘Mech Parts”, but otherwise the specifics of the reward aren’t known, and will be different each time you play the Flashpoint. Different factions will offer different rewards, depending on both their power and influence, and what sorts of technology they’re likely to have on-hand.
We’re pretty excited about how this new model will allow us to fine-tune both shops and rewards, and give you interesting reasons to choose one Flashpoint over another, or visit one system over another. If you have any questions, we’ve got a livestream coming up shortly and I’ll be on hand to give you answers!
