Over the last week we have been working on our unit ability systems. One of the major challenges we have been tackling is adding the framework for ability adaptations. We have vaguely talked about ability adaptations in these posts here: Dev Blog #35, Dev Blog #7.

Basically ability adaptations will allow players to change how their units abilities work. An easy example would be an ability adaptation that will allow colonizing enzyme to heal allies in addition to harming enemies. Another example would be an adaptation to the Colonizing Enzyme that makes all dead units inside the colonizing enzyme automatically begin to digest. We plan on adding at least a few Adaptations for each ability in the game adding lots of variety to strategies players can use. Ability adaptations can indeed be powerful, our goal however is not to build straight ability improvements; for example we don�t want to make an ability adaptation that just makes an ability deal double damage. However we could see adding an ability adaptation that makes an ability deal double damage, but will change how it is cast or the area of effect etc. We can also use ability adaptations to make more subtle changes such as changing what type of damage an ability deals, or what resource you use to cast it. Perhaps some player could see an advantage to having colonizing enzyme deal metabolic damage instead of corrosive damage.

Adaptations will be unique genes that will drop like any other gene, however most will be fairly rare. These genes will have new special criteria requiring your to have the ability gene in your DNA to activate the ability adaptations. Assuming you have the required ability and add the ability adaptation to your DNA bar it will become active and your ability will now be using that adaptation. Another design decision we have made is to try and make the ability adaptations able to all work together. If there was ever a reason to have an ability adaptations not work together we will add a criteria to those gene that requires the opposite adaptation is not present in the DNA. We feel this system is fairly simple and hopefully people will be theory crafting new strategies in no time. We hope to be adding in the first wave of adaptations soon and we will go into more detail on each ability adaptation when they are released.