Over the weekend I had my favorite Twitch/Youtube indie game developer AdamCYounis playtest my game and give a 23 minute stream of solid feedback.  While I'm still in the process of working on a lot of his suggested changes, there was one in particular that I spent all weekend implementing and that's a full on strategy/tactics RPG combat system.  When a unit's turn comes up, the player now has complete control over their movement/attacks.  The game no longer has autobattler elements.

Let's do a deep dive into why I changed the system this late into development.  

My last devlog focused on the hybrid strategy RPG + autobattler combat.  When a unit's turn would pop up, you could play cards you had mana for, but once you clicked End Turn, your unit would move and attack automatically.  This brought a lot of advantages over the full on autobattler combat system I had previously, but it still presented a couple lingering problems.  

The first problem was that your units would still act very stupidly, rushing into certain death with no health remaining.  With the game pausing and giving you time to plan your turns, there were some situations where you'd still get stuck not being able to save a unit because no matter what, they were gonna run in and die.  This is always a design risk because you could easily make the argument "Well that's just what happens with autobattlers, you should have planned better!"  The one problem with this argument is that sometimes there's really not much more planning that could have been done to prevent deaths like this.  In a game with randomized card/loot drops, there's no reliable way to make sure all of your units have ways of escaping death.

The second problem was that playing your cards and then having your unit act automatically was confusing and non-intuitive to new players.  AdamCYounis specifically said it doesn't feel good or natural to have a system like that.  An argument could be made that it's just because the player isn't used to this battle system, and while that is true, there's not really a ton of evidence that would make me believe this novel battle system is better than the tried and true classic SRPG battle system.

My own experience playing this new battle system has been extremely positive.  It feels incredibly satisfying to plan and pull off cool combos now, especially with the Ninja class.  Shuriken to finish off a low health nearby enemy, Dark Passage to swap places with a backline enemy, then run in to assassinate a sniper.   Each battle gives players complete control over their units which means victory or defeat is entirely dependent on the player and positioning matters more than ever.

Right now I see 2 potential issues with this battle system that I'm going to have to monitor.  The first one is that now players can leave one enemy alive while they retreat and heal up between fights.  The small map size can help combat this, but if the enemy left alive does not deal enough damage to cut through your heals, this can still be exploited.  I'm still monitoring this to see if it's an actual issue, but the possibility of this is now very real.

The second issue is that battles will take longer now that the player has more choice.  I've taken measures to prevent runs from dragging on too long by reducing the number of nodes needed to reach a boss.  The average play time of a run seems to fall at around 30 minutes now which feels acceptable.  I will also be testing making enemies deadlier so that proper positioning will be even more critical to your success.

More potentially sweeping changes will be coming in the future, but for now, I'm feeling very positive about the direction the game is heading.