NPC Rebake, rests & repairs, community maps

Lancer Tactics

Hello, happy May! Summer in the northern hemisphere is fast approaching. I’ve been having a nice time whenever I stumble outside, blinking in the unfamiliar sun, smelling long forgotten floral aromas.

A new build, 0.2.6, is available for download via itch.io. If you’re a backer and haven’t yet, you can still check your digital downloads on Backerkit for your itch download link.

I’m updating my Linux dual-boot machine in the background as I’m writing this, so depending on how that goes we might have a Linux build up in the near future as well. Fingers crossed. How hard could it be.

NPC Rebake

Here’s something I think is a good idea but want to run past y’all since it’s technically a divergence from our Kickstarter promise of porting the core rules as straight as possible. Kai Tave, author of the Solstice Rain, Winter Scar, and Suldan modules, has been working on a Lancer supplement called Lancer: NPCs Rebaked which does a design pass over the core NPCs “with an eye towards transparency, ease of use, readily graspable tactics, and memorable challenges”. It’s designed to be able to be as easy a 1:1 swap with the core NPCs as possible while still giving them some (imo) sensible updates.

Here’s a paragraph from his design notes on the Demolisher rebake, to give you a sense:

But being both slow and a melee unit does present some difficulties when it comes to having the Demolisher play an active role in a fight. It can be very easy for players to simply ignore it and focus on other matters, leaving it little opportunity to be a contributing member of the OPFOR. For that reason, rather than making it faster, I elected to give the Demolisher more stuff to do at a distance. Earthshatter lets it golf club chunks of terrain at people it can't reach with the hammer, extending its potential danger radius, along with Seismic Destroyer and Drag Cables. The core rulebook Demolisher does have access to the frankly absurd Concussion Missiles optional, which in my opinion is something that's weirdly a bit too good at what it does, hence why it's no longer present here.

My concerns with using the Rebake rules in Lancer Tactics:

  • I want Lancer Tactics to be a good neighbor to the tabletop game; people should be able to play LT and then come into an in person session well-equipped to play at the table. Since the redesign is mostly GM-facing, I don’t think this will be an issue, but there will be discrepancies.
  • Sticking to the core rules was very helpful in answering the question “why don’t you take this opportunity to fix ?" because we could say that we're limiting design scope by only making changes necessary for the adaptation to video game.
  • A common refrain (see the comment section in dragonkidd11’s video, below) from people encountering LT is “wow! I wonder if this could be used as a Virtual Tabletop if they add multiplayer!” This makes me nervous. I’ve been clear as possible that multiplayer is out of scope for now, but we’ve accidentally stumbled into an uncanny valley of LT as a 1:1 port of the core rules (e.g. Megamek). Being in that valley could make people upset that we’ve had the audacity to make game design changes that don’t line up with their expectations — this whole thing can open up a Pandora’s box of political opinions.
  • This seems like mod territory, right? Why not do both and let users choose? => I don’t wanna do twice the work. It’d be a big mod, and I’d rather just do the version that fits LT better from the get-go.

Why I think it’d be worth it to use ‘em anyway:

  • It replaces all Veteran & Ultra optionals that only really make sense with a human GM running it or flatten possible player tactics (e.g. ejecting, NHP copilot, blanket immunities). We could have just skipped those, but having templates that are holistically designed with a different set of abilities from ground-up seems strictly better.
  • It shaves off the rough corners of some NPC systems that were going to be a pain to both implement and communicate. The Archer has fewer “if you do this I shoot you” duplicates, Priest Investiture no longer shares its System save, and Seeder mines are no longer the only hidden info in the entire game.
  • It removes multiattack scaling from NPC tier. A tier 3 core Ronin is a blender that forces players to have invested in Hull or die. A human GM could moderate this by judging if it made sense to take the insane focus-fire option possible for high-tier NPCs or spreading things out a little more, but a computer is not as good at making “what would make for the best gameplay” calls.
  • If Baldur’s Gate 3 was able to make Shove a bonus action and add a boatload of weapon-specific abilities and people still accept it as D&D, I think we can get away with some NPC changes.
  • We’re not trying to be a Virtual Tabletop! You know what makes a good VTT? The existing VTTs out there!
  • It won’t be a significant change in workload. There will be fewer and simpler abilities overall for me to implement, but I’ll have to re-do some of the existing NPCs, so I think it’s a wash.

The other changes the rebake makes — consolidating each NPC’s tactical role to be more cohesive (e.g. Ronin doubling down on being an anti-ranged melee threat), incorporating the years of playtesting since Core release (e.g. the Sniper no longer comes in two genders: ones with Moving Target for free reloads and ones without) — are ones I’m a fan of but can’t honestly come up with a reason for using beyond “I agree and think they’re neat”.

You can see the 1.4 Rebake PDF for yourself here. Our primary obligation in this project is to deliver on our promises to backers, so I’m interested in hearing any thoughts you have about this.

Changelog & Updates

People

  • Eld will be doing the map and encounter design for the first campaign! His previous Lancer map design work includes the Solstice Rain, Winter Scar, and Shadow of the Wolf modules.
  • Added three “community” maps from Titania Bird. We’d love to have a more automated way for folks to share maps, but until we do I can just include them manually. If you’ve made something cool, send it our way! Three community made maps
  • Carpenter reached out to all the Pilot-/Vehicle-/LL12-/Xiong-level backers to start finalizing the work for custom token rewards.
  • Dragonkidd11 made a nice short video covering Lancer Tactics! <3

Features

  • Added repairs + persistent damage across Instant Action runs, with the option to clear it all out and reset. Wrecked mechs can be repaired. Repair destroyed mech screen
  • Maps can export a top-down view of themselves as a PNG for potential VTT usage. Top-down images of three maps

Mechanics

  • Reworked LOS a bit to let tall objects cast “shadows” to reduce the number of situations where you’re clearly hiding behind something bigger than you but somebody at a taller elevation is still able to see you. An assault drawning line of sight to a mourning cloak behind a building.
  • Fix ace barrel roll being used against tech attacks
  • Make it so you can attack with two ordnance weapons
  • Make it so you can double up on a quick tech option
  • Shepherd drone movement respects movement costs
  • Fix caltrops/other deployables not being able to go on setpieces
  • Fix massive slowdown on using ideal image; deploying size 2+ objects no longer lag the game
  • Fix dimensional emblems not being placed next to the target. Dimensional emblems placement action now uses the main invade’s description.
  • Exiled targets no longer count as valid units; all reactions that require a targe unit and are passed someone intangible will categorically fail.
  • Mines no longer trigger off of intangible units. Grenades can no longer be used while intangible to damage tangible units.
  • Bombard cannon prone effect no longer hits intangible units.
  • Goblin CP gives knockback+prone immunity while active.
  • Involuntary movement should no longer separate a sybiosis’d goblin and its host.
  • I Kill With My Heart no longer applied bonus damage even when you’re not consuming it.
  • Don’t offer IKWMH as an option on followup no-bonus-damage attacks. Fix thermal charge not working in specifically instant action (it was the same bug as the below Apoc Rail phantom everest, actually! game - dev is weird.)

UI & Graphics

  • Updated to Godot 4.4.1, which should allow the game to automatically fall back to Compatibility mode for people with incompatible hardware with Godot’s default rendering pipeline. This means not having to download a separate DEBUGCOMPAT build. The different in rendering pipelines is frustratingly different; the Forward+ lighting settings made the Compat mode look like this flashbang went off (below). I’ve fixed this by disabling some visual features in Compat mode (weirdly, having shadows enabled was what was causing the brightness). This is something I can’t test on my own since I don’t have hardware that triggers the fallback, so please continue letting me know if you see crashes or really weird graphics on the new versions! Tutorial but very very bright and the recolor shader isn't working.

  • Hide mini heat bar for units without a heat cap
  • Placing large deployables (only two in the game T_T) has proper UI (still shows a slightly wrong “placeable” area)
  • Format for the correct NPC tier in kit tooltips
  • Implemented “dioramas” as an alternative to plain backgrounds for downtime beats; miniature maps that show your lancers and their mechs. Reworked the downtime UI flow in general so it’s more of a hub with a series of buttons & modals rather than switching between tabs. Downtime mechs standing in a field. A sample "briefing" modal above the diorama.
  • New batch of weapon and ability FX.
  • Escape is the new default “cancel action” instead of backspace
  • Added secret F1 key to toggle UI on and off for trailer work.
  • Fix how we were making copies of units & their loadouts in instant action that was causing weird everest tokens to show up on Apoc Rail firings.
  • Correctly say “on crit” in action descriptions such as variable sword
  • Human tokens on map no longer have glowing hair
  • Filter out duplicate bonus damage sources in log
  • Correctly show weapon mods in action tooltips.

Editor

  • Updated internal format of dialogues; use DialogueManager’s tag system instead of specific commands for emotes. Similar update for “chorus” simultaneous speech.
  • Fixed “jump to conversation” dialogue commands.
  • Gave in-combat speaker subtool access to the parent module’s Origin Characters and Narrative NPCs
  • Added a new Stage Direction to emit trigger signals mid-conversation — dialogues can now run other sitrep triggers mid-conversation! Use this power wisely, this seems rather dangerous.

Schedule Updates

As mentioned last time, I have to take on some grant work for Crescent Loom for the next two months in order to bring myself through the end of year financially. Similarly, Carpenter is going to be traveling for his dance work for the next month. We’ll still in contact with the rest of the team & contractors as they work through making content (Josh is going to be implementing a sketch of Dia’s campaign in-engine), but expect the next few updates to be a lot skinnier.

Take care ~ Olive

🦴☠️🦴 LANCER TACTICS BONES 🦴☠️🦴