Speedy Mass Combat Testing (debug feature) (Patreon)

Sometimes I need to balance large scale combat between armies. I mean I can certainly make some educated guesses based purely on numbers alone, but in the end there are a lot of factors involved, be they build-based, environmental, event-related, or whatever, so I do have to at least watch entire battles play out from start to finish and see if the final results are within expectations. And of course the process includes a fair bit of randomness, so multiple tests are needed to confirm the range of possible outcomes.

Attacks are fast enough that watching small-scale confrontations or a smaller portion of a larger battle is fine, since much of the action is playing out beyond Cogmind's FOV and therefore resolved instantly, but what about when I also want to see the entire process as it happens? (in order to more make more accurate adjustments) Well, that's pretty darn slow, as you might expect if there are hundreds of bots running around shooting at each other each turn :P

Like the 0b10 attack on Exiles that can happen early on, I spent a couple hours just watching that play out again and again, making gradual adjustments to get the desired outcome. Fortunately that's only a few dozen bots in all, and not even a fair fight with much shooting! You can imagine some of the bigger confrontations ;)

Anyway, today I was thinking I could speed up balancing processes like this if I could watch battles play out without any combat animations, just the bots moving around and attacking, but their attacks are resolved instantly. It didn't take a ridiculous amount of time to implement since I do already have the "instant resolution" code for battles happening out of view/earshot, it was basically a case of finding the 7-8 different places where combat animations might be triggered and forcing them to instead use the instant resolution system. And it's done! Here's a mock battle I threw together in the caves purely for entertainment purposes (and of course testing purposes):

So that's that system working, but after finishing it I recalled an older system I put in place (for fun) to also turn Cogmind into a sort of action game where all attacks and movement happen simultaneously, or as fast as the CPU can do them all, anyway. Seeing as I already had this neat little subterranean battlefield set up, I thought I'd activate that old system to watch it play out with more bangs, booms, zips, and zaps:

Pretty...

Note that as cool as it is, I couldn't actually use this system for proper balance testing because it can give inaccurate results considering things are happening in real time rather than true turn-based fashion! Bots can technically dodge projectiles, and there's lots of misfiring and hitting unintended targets :P

For fun I did another recording of the visible version, this time with audio enabled, so you can see the crazy amount of sounds going off at once by the time the battle gets closer (Cogmind is in the base). Plus there's RNG so of course it plays out differently. Enjoy the light show :D

In hindsight it might have been cool to have another recording without any labels popping up as well, but either way it's fun :)

Beta 10 Progress

Still going full speed ahead on the next release, and if all goes well I think I'll have a prerelease available for you some time this week! Then it'll go public this month, possibly the week after but we'll have to see--in the time that I've been working on these new endings, a few more relatively high-priority things have popped up so I want to try to fit all that into Beta 10 as well...

I've attached the gifs from this post as an archive in case you want to download them and view at their largest size, in case they appear too small in Patreon.