Codex interview: Broken Hourglass

[Grog]

Same reason why switching all your energy to lasers was a very risky idea in TIE Fighter - you are defensless, and unless you have a good strategy, you are going to be very dead very soon. The switching took time, so you couldn't power up your shields instantly. It worked very well. In fact, it worked so well, that I'll go and look for the disks right now.

Unless you were in the TIE Fighter, TIE Interceptor, or TIE Bomber, in which case you always wanted to power up your guns, unless you needed to make a run for it. :wink:

Of course with the bomber, I often dumped the guns for speed, and then just wailed on them with the insane amount of missles it could carry.

 

[galsiah]

The bit about healing eating up all of your remaining mana until you rest seems pretty confusing and inconsistent with the other magic effects described...I would think it would make more sense to have it be like the other buffs, where while it's in effect the target is regenerating health....

Doing it that way would either make combat healing extremely slow, or making total healing outside combat pretty much automatic.

I guess the intention is to have the party remain damaged between combats, so that combat has a meaningful medium-term impact. I don't see how you'd do that using a regen-style approach.


@jcompton - that looks pretty good.

 

[Grog]

Doing it that way would either make combat healing extremely slow, or making total healing outside combat pretty much automatic.

I guess the intention is to have the party remain damaged between combats, so that combat has a meaningful medium-term impact. I don't see how you'd do that using a regen-style approach.

I guess it all depends on what sort of damage model the game is following. I see 3 basic styles (assuming a hit point system) and I think my suggestion works for 2 of them.
1 - It's like most DnD computer games where you're expected to have lots of hit points, take lots of damage, and be able to recover that damage. In my experience, any party with a cleric in any of the infinity engine games always had ample opportunity to be full strength going into every battle. I think my suggestion would work ok for this case, since as you say, you're always able to recover between fights. However, you'd have the problem of not being able to effectively recover HP in battle. Perhaps an alternative needs to be added to account for this scenario.
2 - It's something like VD's game where you don't have many hit points, and are instead expected to avoid taking damage in the first place, either by dodging or absorbing it with heavy armor. I think my suggestion works quite well for low hit point systems, since the slow healing would be on pace with the rate that characters are actually expected to be damaged in combat.
3 - It's like the Rogue-likes where you can have lots of hitpoints, but are on an endurance run through the dungeon with few chances to recover between battles short of going all the way back to town. I agree with you that for this system, my suggestion wouldn't work well at all.

 

[Drakron]

Problem with TIE Fighter is this, you dont really get much out of playing with the recharge settings unless you are in a shielded craft.

A good trick was supercharge the shields and then fully charge the blasters from the shields banks, we had better speed with almost no cost.

Unshielded craft really did not had much to play with, it was either "run away" setting or "I trying to kill this" but the only thing the Rebel scum could throw at the mighty Imperial Fleet that actually was a challange was the A-Wing, you could outrun and outmaneuver everything else, of course they were shielded and nothing was more anoying that flying in a TIE/I and be shoot down by a Y-Wing that managed to get a good shoot in.

Look ... there was not much of customization in TIE Fighter, sometimes you could pick up the payload and/or a special weapon but when that happened you were already in a shielded craft, there were many ways to abuse the system (expecialy when we got the Missile Boat that was simply a SSD on a Gunboat frame) that worked because the enemies outclass and/or outnumber us (the entire missile boat missions that were pretty much one vs a fleet).