Wot we've been up to in lockdown

It has, as usual, been too long since we last did an update! And, as usual, a picture is worth 1000 words, so let's have a few gifs to show off some of the things we've made in the last couple of months.

Little guys

Here we can see some tiny little tripedal units. The "tiny" chassis size only occupies a quarter of a game map tile - 8x8 voxels at most. They are wiped out instantly by just about anything that hits them or even steps on them, but each one can carry a blaster or similar small armament. They're fast and cheap and you can use them to soften up your opponents' shields before the big guns hit. Because they can be so numerous and speedy, they're quite hard to take out with the bigger, slower-moving, slower-firing units. The only sensible option is to take them on mano-a-mano (boto-a-boto?) with similar tiny units.

Or, in direct contravention of just about every war crimes convention since 1997, you can lay down minefields :)

Antigrav drive

Antigrav drives are especially important when it comes to difficult terrain. Antigrav units sail straight over rough ground, and water, and crevasses, without impedance, allowing droids so equipped to sneak round the back of an enemy's flank if they weren't expecting trouble from that direction.

The main disadvantage of antigrav drives is their cost and their low tolerance for carrying loads. Once you've factored in the weight of the drive and chassis, there's precious little capacity for armour without making them incredibly slow moving. So they're best suited to fast attack units.

The one pictured here is a "large" size chassis, armed with twin blast cannon, and is probably about as heavy as they come.

Wheeled drive

Wheeled drives have a number of major advantages over other drive types. Firstly and most importantly, they are the cheapest available drive unit to manufacture, which means you can put more wheeled units in a particular army. Secondly, they are capable of carrying high loads, and at high speed. Thirdly, a wheeled unit can travel on smooth terrain much, much faster than any other drive unit type.

The chief disadvantage of wheeled units is over difficult terrain, where they are much, much slower than any other drive unit.

Here's a twin-blast cannon equipped "Owl" with wheeled drive:

Hovercraft

So, imagine you've got lots of rough terrain and maybe a fair bit of water to deal with too, and need to get some heavily armoured, heavily armed units into battle. Wheeled units get bogged down in the rough, nobody can cross the rivers except via a miserable pinch point bridge with about 20 cannon pointed directly at it, and antigrav droids haven't got enough armour to withstand a withering hail of light blaster fire.

What you need is a hovercraft drive unit. Travel unimpeded over rough ground and water, while carrying huge weapons and covered in heavy armour.

Laser beams

Blasters are all well and good, but they have a tendency to take a while to reach their targets and can miss as a result. They're also only good to hit one target.

A laser beam fires in an arc sweep of 20 degrees, and has a particularly long range, so it's best employed on droids with fancy sensor arrays that can see a long way. Its continual beam bores through armour effectively, causing widespread damage as it sweeps. At range, the arc sweep can hit multiple targets and wipe out a whole front rank of minions in a single discharge.

The only problem with lasers is that they can be very effectively thwarted by laser-reflective paints, rendering them entirely useless. It is possible to get laser-reflective barricades as well as units.

Shown here is a twin laser. Twice as deadly.

Autoguns

Besides armour, many units (especially larger ones, and turrets) will employ ray shielding, driven by generators, which is very effective total protection from blasters and lasers while they remain charged. If an enemy unit can recharge its ray shielding faster than you can zap it away again, you'll never even get through to the armour underneath, much less its delicate innards.

One way around this is to resort to conventional old-fashioned ordnance. Yes, we're talking about good old flying lead and explosive shells.

Shown here is a quad-barrelled autocannon, which fires bursts of 100mm explosive-tipped shells. These will fly straight through ray shielding and quickly tear through armour, blowing everything to bits in short order. Their chief disadvantage is limited ammunition - as they are not powered by generators, they actually run out of ammunition! If they run out of ammunition in the middle of the battle... then you're left with very expensive paperweights. I suppose they could at least try and step on some of the smaller enemies and stomp them to bits.

Old-fashioned kinetic weapons are available in every size from 4mm assault rifles up to 300mm cannon. Use the right tool for the right job!

Various chassis

And lastly, here's a little pic of various different chassis sizes. On the left we have the "standard" unit size - "small". These are the most numerous droids in an army. In the middle we've got the "medium" size chassis. You'll generally probably employ these in a 5:1 ratio to the small guys.

On the right we've got a "large" unit. You might only have a couple of these in a moderately sized army. They're pretty expensive. 

Not shown is the "huge" size, which are about 50% bigger than the "large"... mostly because we've not made one yet :D They'll be generally very exotic. Huge droids are considerably more powerful than other droids (and turrets!) on the battlefield, and may have more than one weapons system too.

Well, that's all for now. We've been making numerous big tech enhancements in the engine - all on the roadmap and planned for some time - such as reflections and proper water - which I hope to show you in the next post!