Units can now equip a variety of weapons greatly adding to the variety of play. Each new weapon has different characteristics but first let me say a little about the new mechanics.

Posted by Ionising on Apr 3rd, 2014

At long last I was able to spend some time working on the weapons system in Isomer! This has been something I've wanted to do since the start of the year, if not sooner, but other development priorities kept coming up and it was not until this build (0.8.4.1) that I was able to devote the majority of my development time to this task. I'm really pleased with the results, units can now equip a variety of weapons greatly adding to the variety of play. Each new weapon has different characteristics but first let me say a little about the new mechanics.

Each weapon has a number of extra attributes as can be seen from the unit weapon selection screen above. New in this build are 'rate of fire' which relates to how quickly the weapon cools down between shots, the number of 'shots per blast' that each weapon emits - some weapons like the scatter rifle fire lots of smaller projectiles making them great for clearing small areas. Each weapon now has an 'accuracy' rating which is used in the overall hit/miss calculations alongside the skill of the unit. Lastly, each weapon has a set number of shots before the unit must pause to reload (the magazine size), the reload speed will also vary depending on the complexity of the weapon.

So as you can see, there's a big difference between the new weapons with some being rapid firing autocannons and others having a lower rate of fire but blasting out a number of projectiles in a shotgun like fashion. There are also dangerously accurate and heavy hitting sniper weapons available to both sides, and of course you can loot and use enemy weapons should you wish to!

As an added quirk, enemy units can loot alien weapons from your fallen units and may swap their own equipped weapon if they like the alien one better!

Not only are there many new weapon mechanics, but the Lancer weapon types finally appear (they've been in the code since before the first public alpha build but disabled), Lancer weapons deal slightly less damage than Blaster weapons, however the power of the weapon blast is not degraded by the armour rating of the enemy unit the weapon blast hits! That makes these weapons very useful against enemy Heavy units.

This build sees the start of the equipment store with weapons being bought from the supply ship and looted from enemies. This concept will be built on for the next update which shall greatly improve trade, economy and the supply ship mechanic. It will also be able to sell looted weapons in the next build and biomass will play a much bigger role in the game, becoming the primary currency as well as a resource. Much is planned for 0.8.5.1, but I'll talk more about this in the future.

Games saved in this build will be not able to be played in previous versions due to a bump in the save file schemas.

The full change log is below:

New: Added lots of new weapons.

New: Added magazine size and weapon reloading cool down mechanics.

New: Added ability for weapons to fire more than one projectile per blast.

New: Added weapon stats information to unit stats view.

New: Added updated sound effects for weapons.

New: Added ability for enemy units to have a random weapon (based on their class and rank) on spawn.

New: Added unit weapon and equipment selection screen.

New: Added special case for AI when looting from alien corpses. If the enemy unit determines the weapon is worth pilfering they will take it and use it instead of their own.

New: Added healing animation when health is looted from corpses.

New: Player can now loot weapons from corpses.

New: Bumped game options schema. Games saved with this version/revision will not work in previous builds.

New: Added automatic upgrade for older save games to include new schema elements.

New: Added hints relating to new weapon mechanics.

New: Weapons can now be bought from supply ships.

New: Added mouse-over text for each resource icon.

New: Added inactive HUD button for when a worker can't be mutated either because they are not on a mutation pad or moving.

Improved: Alien workers now can spawn with either pistols or scatter pistols.

Improved: Reorganised and improved the way in which weapon resources are stored and looked up internally.

Improved: Removed redundant weapon code.

Improved: Removed redundant code and resource from pre-alpha weapon selection screen.

Improved: Fixed weapon Y position alignment bug in HUD.

Improved: Corrected change equipment button and mouse-over mismatch.

Improved: Tweaked weapons power values.

Improved: World objects being destroyed by weapons fire now is dependant on the strength of the weapon blast rather than using a static percentage change as before.

Improved: Improved handling of build task failure notifications so remaining build queue is no longer cancelled.

Improved: Improved entity notification manager to display weapon images when required.

Improved: Added snazzy background to Title/About and in game shunt screens.

Improved: Tweaked text colour to make it easier to read on new tiled background.

Improved: Supply ships now offer more to purchase options each time they appear.

Improved: Hints shown during saving, generating and loading screens now change every few seconds.

Bugfix: Fixed bug preventing screenshots when modal screen were active mid-game.

Bugfix: Fixed mouse held event causing mlitiselection mode to be triggered even when a modal screen is shown.

Bugfix: Fixed bug relating to building on top of nonblocking sprites.

Bugfix: Refactored code in BaseEntity to remove duplication of resource reporting.

Bugfix: Corrected menu elements to not have white border.

Bugfix: Fixed bug with mlitiselection occurring when a modal screen was shown.

As usual, the update can be downloaded through the Isomer launcher.

If you would like to access the current alpha build, it is available on Desura as well as via the Humble Store on our website.