The New World Update #28

The latest development update for Iron Tower Studio’s colony ship RPG The New World offers a brief general status update and then proceeds to talk about the game’s slightly unusual implementation of power armor that either provides you with a damage-absorbing shield, or helps you deflect incoming attacks. Check it out:

There isn’t much to report at the moment (we’re making good progress, the combat AI is now taking the first steps and attacking the player with extreme prejudice; the starting town is looking better and better; Joao is working non-stop on the assets which helps us tremendously, Mazin is working on randomizing portraits*, Ivan is making armor models, etc), so let’s talk about the power armor and armor in general.

I dislike linear progressions in all forms, which is why we went with damage resistance vs chance to dodge (the heavier the armor, the harder to dodge attacks) in AoD, instead of generic Armor Class, whatever that is. Still, two key stats would only take you so far, which is why we added different types of damage: melee, ballistic, energy. Now you can have great ballistic armor, for example, but if you let some bersekers get into your personal space, you’ll find yourself at a major disadvantage.

Anyway, the problem with power armor is it has to be awesome, which isn’t bad in itself, but this awesomeness tends to make all the other armor obsolete (not to mention that *traditional* power armor should be pretty good against all types of damage, which would make the different types of damage pointless the moment you get your hands on such armor).

So we decided to explore a different direction. The power armor isn’t really ‘armor’. It’s a device that creates a defensive field around you. As such it doesn’t have any damage resistance whatsoever.

There are 3 basic types: light, medium, heavy. You wear it like a vest. You can’t wear other vests, so it’s a trade off: damage resistance vs shield vs deflector. More on that in a moment. You can wear a jacket or a trenchcoat with it, so you will have some DR, just not as much as with a tactical vest.

At the moment the armor comes in two varieties:

– an energy shield that absorbs all damage until depleted (no DR). Essentially it grants you immunity for the first couple of turns, then you’re on your own. If you can’t use this immunity wisely and kill a couple of enemies fast, the armor isn’t for you. The other energy shield (the gadget one) is weaker and doesn’t absorb all damage (i.e. has DR), and can’t be moved (i.e. you ‘cast’ it on a tile). Light, medium, heavy – 20, 40, 60 HP.

– a deflector that turns a critical into a regular strike, a regular into a graze, a graze into a miss. The deflector will lose power with every turn, so we’ll need to count turns and reduce %. For example, a heavy model will start with 90% chance to deflect at turn 1, 80% at turn 2, 70% at turn 3, 60% at turn 4, and so on until the deflector is out of juice (0%). Medium will go with 90, 75, 60, 45, 30, 15, 0. Light – 90, 70, 50, 30, 10, 0

Since it’s non-linear we can easily expand it and add more properties and different defensive abilities.