Epic battles

Gliding around peacefully among the clouds is all well and good, but what's the point of having a head mounted flamethrower on a flying oversized lizard if you can't use it to wreak some havoc? That's where the battle system comes to the rescue.

As you may have seen, the goal is to let the player take part in truly epic battles straight out of a fantasy movie from the back of their dragon. Together with the strategic mode that has been discussed before, this forms the strategy game aspect of Dragontwin. There is a lot to say on this topic, too much for a single post, so in this post I will focus on what scale we are aiming for with the system and what role the player has in battles.

In terms of scale, we are aiming for huge battles. I would say unprecedented scale, but unfortunately the game Ultimate Epic Battle Simulator 2 holds that title and we're not about to compete with their absurd unit counts like 300 spartans VS 2 million ducks. However, the new engineer who will be working on the system did some digging and it looks like the tech they developed for UEBS2 is very similar to what we have been exploring, so it doesn't seem too unlikely that we could reach something like 100K units. This opens up the door for very interesting end game crisis events where the world is invaded by some ancient enemy, maybe a powerful necromancer that raises huge zombie armies (totally not the Night King), or a demonic incursion where hordes of demons spew forth from hell gates and you get to incinerate endless waves of enemies while your outnumbered army holds the line.

In terms of gameplay, currently the plan is to go easy on hardcore RTS elements and focus mostly on being a dragon riding combatant/commander (or just a dragon). It would be more like Mount & Blade than Total War if you know those games, where you may do some pre battle setup and then once the battle starts it plays out mostly on its own instead of having the player micro manage unit orders. There are several reasons for this, the most important one being that the battles are mostly there to serve the dragon gameplay, as that is the main selling point of the game. It wouldn't make sense if you spend more time clicking around units like a regular RTS than you do playing as a dragon rider in battle.

Instead, I've been thinking of ways to merge the strategic gameplay with the dragon gameplay. One idea is that you can only communicate with units that are within a certain radius from the player, so you need to physically fly around the battlefield to give orders or use certain abilities. In a scenario where you might click a unit and activate an ability in a regular RTS game, you might instead fly to a unit and sound the dragon horn to give them a morale boost that makes them fight harder or something. This way you can take on more of a support role if for example the enemy is too dangerous to engage directly from the skies. It adds a unique strategic layer to the battles that only enhances the dragon gameplay instead of replacing it.