First Playtest: Mechs

One of the expansions I’ve been working on for Close Encounters is based around big robots that accompany the troopers to add some extra firepower (and perhaps other abilities too). I just got to the point where I could playtest this content for the first time… and it was a bloodbath.

As it stands at present, the mechs are a major advantage for the troopers. They carry heavy weapons and take multiple hits to bring down, so they need to be balanced quite significantly for the game to not be completely one-sided. I was testing out the balancing mechanisms for them in this playtest – allowing the opposing player to deploy stationary turrets and mobile Autonomous Weapon Platforms (AWPs). The main feature about these is that they can shoot at the troopers. I thought that this wouldn’t make a huge difference to the difficulty of dealing with them. But boy, I was wrong.

You see, up until now the troopers haven’t had to deal with an opponent that could hit them from long range. All the bugs have to get right up to you before they can do anything nasty, and a bug stack at the end of a corridor can safely be left alone while you deal with a closer issue. Since the troopers can shoot at longer ranges, they can make use of this to deal with the threats they face.

The turrets and AWPs turn this dynamic completely on its head, however. The turrets weren’t so bad – the troopers could hide in side passages and dart across the turret’s line of fire before it could shoot, so they didn’t cause too much damage (although they did alter the troopers movement patterns). An AWP only has to get into line of sight to start blasting away at the troopers, though, and even though they only had light weapons there was carnage on a scale I hadn’t seen for quite a while.

Restrictions on AWP spawn locations, movement, and targeting didn’t help much. The mechs (which I had anticipated taking the brunt of the incoming fire) were no help at all! They can only be in one place at a time, after all, and if the AWP spawn point isn’t anywhere nearby then the mech won’t play much part in whatever happens.

I’ll do more testing before I make any changes, but at this stage it looks like I may have underestimated the problems caused by having enemies who can shoot. The obvious options for balance are to increase the Defence values of the troopers or further restrict the weapons and range of the AWPs, but there’s a couple of other things I’m considering too.

I’ve split all the content for the mechs away from the other expansion content I’ve been testing because it felt like it all needed to go together to ‘make sense’. Although I’ve been testing modules independently (as I mentioned previously), this may be a case where I need to split things up even more and just test one item at a time.

The good news is that this shouldn’t affect any other parts of the game or proposed expansions. The mechs were always considered as a separate set of expansion content, so any issues there don’t tie in to the rest of it and I can continue with the other development work without interruption. It’s been a good reminder of the power of unexpected consequences, though, and in a way I’m glad it happened. It’s certainly given me a new perspective on what I had planned!