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00:14The core of the combat system
00:15is the combat model,
00:17which Michael always talks about.
00:19It's a combat chain of
00:21who beats who,
00:22what units are good against other units.
00:24The goal with the combat chain
00:26was to be as realistic
00:28and as accessible as possible.
00:30We wanted anyone who's ever played a military
00:32or war game to be able to pick up and immediately
00:34understand how our game works
00:36and what the relationships are. And of course
00:38those relationships work in the real world.
00:40There's a reason that, you know, the real
00:42military fields that combination
00:44of units that they don't, the real military
00:46doesn't just do a tank rush or just
00:48do gunships. They have them for mission specific
00:50roles and their helicopters
00:52are tank killers and so on.
00:53There's seven unit types
00:55in total.
00:57What we think of as the core
00:59combat chain, tanks
01:01which are kind of heavy cavalry.
01:04Gunships, which are
01:05tank killers, so they're kind of light cavalry.
01:08And transports, which are
01:09dual role. So they transport
01:11infantry, but they're also anti-aircraft.
01:13So they kill the gunships. So those three
01:15are the core. Originally actually
01:17with our first iteration of the combat system
01:19that was all there was. There was no hit points,
01:21no damage, any of that. We
01:23added some hit points, some damage.
01:26When we had the weapon systems
01:27we would add various different
01:30damage versus
01:31different types and
01:33just basically built up on that.
01:36Actually we got
01:37to a stage where the calculations
01:39were actually too complex.
01:41And we had so many sort of variables
01:43and things that we had to
01:45tweak that it made balancing really difficult.
01:47Then you've got two classes of
01:49infantry. It's kind of heavy infantry
01:51and light infantry. And the thing
01:53with infantry, they're kind of
01:56alongside the combat chain. Basically
01:57the key thing with them is they've got
01:59to be in cover. And then there's two other
02:01units, again which are outside of the
02:03core combat chain for various reasons.
02:05One's the artillery and the command vehicle
02:07which is kind of an intel
02:10and support vehicle.
02:11so we've actually toned it all
02:13the way back down.
02:15Now it's fairly easy for us
02:17to balance. If we find that the
02:19helicopters are too strong
02:21then we can tweak them individually.
02:24If they were too strong against
02:25infantry, we could do that.
02:28We could control that individually.
02:30We had all sorts of
02:31really quite complicated systems
02:34for flanking
02:35and for morale systems
02:38and fatigue
02:40and weather systems
02:41and if you're playing the game
02:43and they weren't actually making
02:44a big difference to the players' decisions
02:47or to the players' fun.
02:49So we just constantly purified
02:51down the experience
02:53to the core strategy
02:54and I think we ended up with a much deeper
02:57much more accessible
02:58much more fun game.
03:00We'll be right back.
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