Dev Journal: Balancing Rarities (Patreon)

    One of the difficulties of adapting the gacha framework for a non-monetized game is what to do with rarities. In VT I'd like for each unit to be useful in their own way, but that runs completely counter to your typical rarity system. After all, in almost all gachas higher rarities are objectively better than lower ones.

   What's nice is, this kind of works in VT, for the most part. Rarity can be used as a measure of a character's strength and their ability as a pred. Because they're easier to obtain, lower rarity units can have mechanics which may land them in sticky situations or make the player want to feed them to other units. It all balances out, except for one thing... The player can only take a certain number of units into battle. If playing optimally, no one would ever decide to take prey units with them. However, I also want the player to be able to take their favorite units into battle, so I don't want to force players to only take certain rarities

    That's where this new mechanic would come in. When organizing your squad, you'll be able to take a team of around 4-6 active units, and an additional reserve of 2-4 units. On your turn, you will be able to deploy any dupes you have in your barracks for any of the units on your squad, which will cost a resource called Deployment Points (Or something along those lines.) DP can be gained by digesting enemies, or it can be gained by performing role actions: being digested for a feeder, digesting another unit for a pred, healing a unit for a healer, or ending turn with safe prey for a carrier. Likewise, DP will be lost if your non-feeder units are digested by an enemy.

    Different rarities require different amounts of DP to deploy. N units (i.e. The Brunch Squad) can be deployed whether they are part of your squad or not and cost 1 point. Rs cost 2 points. SRs cost 3 points and may only have 1 dupe deployed. SSRs and monsters cannot have dupes deployed.

    When deploying a unit, you can either deploy them from a beacon at the original spawn point, or teleport them inside of an allied unit's stomach. Units deployed inside an ally will not struggle, and will not be able to act on the turn they appear. This gives carriers an additional purpose, as they can be used to safely and quickly deploy new units into the middle of battle.

    I think this system will be a good way of shoring up the gaps in the current game balance, because it not only serves as a buff to lower rarity units, but also plays into their use as prey by not punishing you as harshly when they're eaten. It also gives carriers, which are somewhat lackluster right now, a much greater role, and lets the Brunch Squad be more useful in battle despite being the worst vessels in the game. The only thing I have qualms about is that it may be very difficult to lose when you can keep deploying more units, so that's something I'll have to keep an eye on.

    That aside, development is going well! I'm working on a feature right now that will hopefully automatically reduce the size of mods to a few MBs and take care of all the memory and loading issues, though I'm still mostly operating blind when it comes to more complex stuff like this lol. Otherwise, I'm also planning out the base system and Dyson's design, so expect to see more news on that maybe in 2-3 months or so. Thank you so much for reading and for all of your support, I'll see you next week!