Cogmind Battle Royale is off, but you can play it here (Patreon)

Sadly the Battle Royale mode I was describing earlier will not be officially released...

I spent a fair amount of time developing the fundamentals to get it playable so I could test it out, and as soon as it was semi-playable immediately realized it wasn't quite going to work, at least not without a crazy amount of additional investment that just wouldn't be worth it for a special mode.

In the end, Cogmind's mechanics and gameplay weren't designed to be all that compatible with 1v1 fights between equals, which is what Battle Royale tends to boil down to--you have a bunch of essentially identical players all vying for the win, but Cogmind is meant to be a more tactical one vs. many game (or many vs. many, with factions) in which most bots die quickly and the situation keeps changing as a result, rather than just sitting in one position pelting enemies, which is often what BR mode using Cogmind mechanics ends up as. Certainly you can do a fair amount of stationary farming in regular Cogmind, too, but there's still a lot of thinking that goes into the plan before the fighting even starts, and that determines how the fight will be likely to go--this is something the AI can't really do on an equal footing with the player, and it ends up being less interesting as a result.

In BR mode, AIs spot a target and then sit there doing their best to pummel it to death if they're capable of it. Without a much smarter tactical AI that can come up with environment-related tactics and exercise more forethought, it just doesn't work well.

There are certainly ways to design around all this--BR mode could work, but it's not worth it since I don't think the results would be satisfactory given development constraints.

Too bad, because the random name generator was fun ;)

There is some good news in here though!

• 1. As patrons you get to play around with it anyway, if you like.
• 2. This means we'll get yet another mode for AFD2020.
• 3. The AI developed for it will likely still get some use, and that's where most of the time went, anyway.

How to Play

If you want to try it out, start by downloading the entire thing here. It's not available on Steam, and you'll see why in this copy of the instructions included with the download:

While you can copy your Cogmind /user/ directory contents from your normal install over to this one in order to retain your custom settings, it is NOT recommended to copy any data back to your normal install, since it could have a negative impact on your play history meta data. Playing this separately is probably a better idea.

TO PLAY Battle Royale mode, simply run COGMIND.EXE. No need to do anything with the command line, as this build is already set to automatically run in that mode.

Note that this mode is INCOMPLETE, which has a number of implications but probably the most important among them is that the ending screen and process was not redone as planned, meaning that technically this mode could be an easy way too the animated ending for a standard Cogmind win, since this is only one map, and it's probably no too hard.

Just a SPOILER WARNING in case you win this mode and haven't yet seen that particular Cogmind ending :)

Note BR mode will not be available in future releases of Cogmind, only via this particular download, although it can always be found here (and in the full release collection available to Sage+ tier supporters).

Mechanics run-down from the readme:

• There is only a single map, "Wartown", and it's you against 29 other "Players" in a free-for-all death match.
• Everyone starts with the same base stats, but randomized gear.
• There is no matter cost associated with attaching parts.
• Attacks enforce RPGLIKE-like damage redirection where some part damage is transferred to the core, but in this case the rate is only 50% (and armor transfers only 25%).
• Cogmind's parts do not have high-integrity critical strike protection, and no bot can have their core automatically destroyed by a critical strike.
• All bots use the normal player/Cogmind rules for increasing system corruption when his with EM damage.
• In addition to salvage, destroyed bots drop both Matter and Protomatter, the latter of which does not decay and is applied in full each turn where necessary/available just by standing on it.
• On destroying a target, the attacker gains a new random slot (awarded on the following turn).
• Ambient heat slowly spreads from the four corners of the map towards the center.
• Once only one bot remains, an exit appears in the center of the map.

Some of the stuff this mode is missing, which I didn't get to but would have addressed later:

• Balance
• Prefabs (including special stockpiles and especially better treatment for the center area)
• More attention to machines
• Message log details about who's taking out who
• Haulers that teleport in and carry great gear, and everyone gets a ping of their locations
• Different enemy colors to reflect their state
• Different gameover screen, a leaderboard ranking all the "players" (unique scoring system) and showing their build classes
• Better AI :P

The AI is actually probably decent for what it was trained to do, but that's pretty much purely how to build and maintain itself, not any kind of tactics!

Development

In today's image collection we have some development shots... I actually decided I wouldn't be going forward with Battle Royale mode as soon as I did some quick playtesting with AI and basic mechanics, but since I wanted to give all of you a chance to play with it, I actually continued working on it for several more hours after that to polish it up a bit and add some important missing features.

Plus I honestly really just wanted to see what the heat expansion might look like ;)

That's heat encroaching on the center area, and here's a neat shot of it having fully reached the center, blazing hot outside the central room which it cannot enter.

There's a ton of destroyed walls because I allowed to heat to overload and blow up machines, as well as melt parts on the ground.

Catching the heat mid-glow after it's covered the map:

^Procedural art!

I also recorded a bird's eye view of the heat expanding from a corner:

^More procedural art! :)

Anyway, at least we've gotten some cool stuff out of the endeavor, with probably more to come if and when I reuse the self-building AI for something else.

Reminder Again

Last reminder to join in the latest feature voting. Yeah it's been going on for a while but that's because I've been busy with this and other stuff :P

No rush anyway, we'll get to it soon enough! The front-runner is still the front-runner, so I've been thinking about the possibilities and we'll be going over those next (unless there's like some last-minute shift in the votes, but anyway it's all stuff I've been thinking about at one point or another).