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Yeah! So, mechs are often categorized in Lancer by their battle roles -- front-line brawler, damage soak, dps, debuffing enemies, and buffing allies: Striker, Defender, Artillery, Controller, and Support. There's often overlap between these, but it's a starting point for describing what someone's broadly doing in a fight.

My partner and I both play Artillery mechs -- we both sit in back and dish out damage from afar. But our mechs are almost diametrically opposed, within that category: she plays a Barbarossa (huge, slow, heavily armored, fires cumbersome superheavy guns, classically an Artillery mech; we call it "Count Chonkulus"), while I actually play a Tokugawa (small, quick, brittle, fires mostly tiny auxiliary guns, classically a Striker mech).

Anyway, when we first crash-landed on the planet we're on, we were attacked by a raiding party from the local warlord, which was led by a lady called Captain Phoebe, which we repelled pretty easily, disabling all the mechs but Phoebe's, who made a beleaguered escape.

Fast forward a few missions, and she shows up again, in an ambush, swearing over open comms to exact her revenge for the humilating defeat she suffered. In the first round of combat, my partner and I two-shot her mech. Specifically, as a Veteran, her mech basically has two health bars, and once you lose the first, you have to roll on a table to see the consequences: her consequence was her mech immediately getting KO'd.

It was really satisfying, too -- the second and lethal hit was from the Barbarossa's enormous Cyclone Pulse Rifle, which just deals bonkers damage on a hit, and has a nasty habit of one-shotting lesser mechs.

My partner's mech-pilot callsign is 'CABOOSE', and in reference to the fact that her enormous gun is devastating in action, her nickname is "Caboose on the loose." So that time, when Phoebe's mech got unceremoniously junked in one Pulse Rifle shot, my character chimes in over open comms, deadpan: "Captain Phoebe, I regret to inform you that Caboose is very much... on the loose."

I'm not gonna say where I'm from, but I've been playing Massif Press' Lancer, a science-fantasy mech-building tabletop game set in a utopian spacefuture! It's a lot of fun!

Granted! However, the time-stop doesn't cancel your momentum, so when you apply it, you go hurtling off into space at 67,000 miles an hour due to Earth's orbit about the sun... if you're lucky enough for it to be morning. If it's evening, your momentum carries you the other way, splatting you into the ground at Mach 87 and causing a small earthquake.

I wish to take advantage of the upsurge in objectivism across society to purchase a WWJGD ("What Would John Galt Do?") t-shirt, which I can wear ironically once the upsurge dies down again (due to people realizing that objectivism is a terrible philosophy).

Granted; however, most don't use them, due to a sense of personal attachment to the worldview spawned from their biases before they acquired those skills. Very little changes.

I wish for a parody miniseries making fun of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, airing on a streaming service I subscribe to.

Granted. However, you find out that this unique arrangement is only in place because everyone detests you, and the company would rather hemorrhage money in the form of a permanent paid vacation than have you come in to work. This is confirmed when you try to come in for work one day, only to be stopped by security, who claim there's an issue with your access badge; they'll call you when it's fixed. They never call. The paychecks keep rolling in, though.

I wish for some delicious berry jams and jellies to make sandwiches with!

Now that I feel like I understand the game a bit better, I've come to appreciate a deck that can get the cards I want into my hand quickly, since the actual turn-count of an average game (at least with two players) feels quite low, so having to sit around for three turns to exhaust your deck, then four more to actually get your newly purchased marketplace card into your hand after the deck reshuffles (to name a worst-case scenario) is pretty intolerable. To that end, I like:

- aggressively pruning low-utility cards with Memory Hole to keep my deck lean (looking at you, Pious Benefactor);
- cards that let you draw other cards (Confirmation Bias!);
- cards that let you root around in your deck for the cards you want;
- and cards with low belief cost (since the more cards you play past your third during your turn, the more you get to draw on your next turn!).

Also, I've come to realize that Edict has a lot of denial power, in addition to its aforementioned virtues as a tool for surprise maneuvers; you can use it to move targeted low units out of range of an enemy miracle, or move them into a destination tile (say, for Pilgrimage or Teleport) to block.

Well, I'm afraid you might be a few years too late if you're looking for consistent engagement, but I'll go ahead and ask you a couple of questions:

What games, if any, outside of Craig Stern's stuff do you enjoy a lot? Are you big into SRPGs?

Do you play any tabletop games? If so, which?

I want to be careful with questions like this, because it's easy to come across as demanding something or creating an expectation when it really is just a question, but--

I was wondering, what kinds of control schemes do you plan on supporting with the new engine? Mouse only, keyboard only, hybrid mouse/keyboard? [I'd ask about custom keybinds, too, but that strikes me as the sort of thing it's a bit simpler to throw in once you have keyboard controls, whereas the ones I asked about are things that I would imagine UI gets built around.]

So, what I was wondering was: does the AI across a team act in coordination, or are each unit's decisions made individually/independently, albeit perhaps with their role within the team in mind?

It occurs to me that if, for instance, each individual unit that has yet to move considers its options in parallel, and then the unit with the best option of all of them is picked as the next to move, and executes that action (and then everyone else recalculates), that's a sort of coordination where the "best man for the job" gets used, even if the algorithm used to weigh each individual unit's options has only that unit really in mind (though that might not be what your algorithm does!). Just, considering all possible action orders within an army seems O(n!) complex with n the army size (and thus presumably infeasible, in general!), so my assumption would be that there's a greedy algorithm at work in making the turn order choice, instead.

Also, a question in a very different direction: does your AI code, when evaluating the merit of the different courses of action, make explicit use of parallelization to speed up the decisionmaking (on machines that allow for it)? I don't know how good the support for parallelization/multithreading is in the language / environment you're working in; most of my personal experiences with it have been low-level and hardware-specific, which is obviously no good for a game that's shipping to a wide variety of machines.

Before I ask a rather specific question about the AI logic in your new engine: is there a thread or a Q&A out there somewhere where you talk about your AI in depth that I should look for first, rather than ask you things here for fear you might've covered them elsewhere? Or are questions on that topic fair game?

This is a bit of a broad question, but -- do you have a "guiding principle" or "personal rule" for deciding which aspects of your engine should be baked in / hard-coded, versus more modular in anticipation of modding?

An example would be status effects; it's not obvious to me whether the "right" thing to do would be to simply have a fixed number of status effects that appear in the game, and make sure that there're enough of them that their ability to model effects that modders might desire isn't too limited... or to lay down the framework for making more of them. You mentioned recently that objects are immune to mental statuses. It seems like one approach would be to explicitly list the statuses they're immune to, while another would be to give statuses "tags" like "MENTAL" or "SENSORY" or "ELEMENTAL", make objects immune to anything with the "MENTAL" tag, and let modders make their own statuses and tag them appropriately.

[This isn't, like, a suggestion or anything -- I'm just trying to give a decent example of the kind of difference in approach I'm getting at.]

In some sense it feels like a question of "where do you draw the line, when it comes to modularity?". The answer I've gone with so far in my own little projects is "when it becomes a headache", for lack of a more coherent principle, but that feels a bit... primitive.

So, I actually did the equivalent of that Fruit of Knowledge move just today, but with Indulgence instead, to a) block an avenue of attack I'd left open, b) get the three coins, and c) clear the last follower off the temple my messiah was on, to get two more followers the next turn! [I would've done it on my own turn, but there was no loss incurred by doing it reactively, and it kept my options open in case I needed to respond to a radically different enemy positioning or miracle.]

I've also been having fun with using Edict to pull last-second flanks, and to threaten/capture an ill-defended enemy temple that my low units were until that moment five tiles away from (two tiles of movement on enemy turn, then two tiles on my own turn, putting me adjacent).

Potentially silly question, but does

Code Select Expand

materials="Leather/Boiled Leather/Wood/Bronze" num="1-5" chance="20">Armored Plating,Light Plating,GEN:Main Gauche,

imply leather parrying daggers? Or is there some cool functionality giving each item, like, a list of allowable materials, so then the true list of materials an item can be made from is the intersection of its shop list and its inherent list? And if so, does something bad happen if the intersection is empty?

Yeah, that's definitely the bulk of it. I went through and listened to the rest of the soundtrack to check whether there was anything else lurking in my recollection, but nothing popped out at me. I kept getting crypt imagery, but I think that's because the piece sounds more somber and reflective, like some of the historical and Psy-related scenes in the game, as opposed to as excitingly otherworldly as the Ghost Waltz.

So, I was listening to an inverted version of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, and about forty seconds in or so, I started getting some serious Servants of God vibes. I seem to recall you compose your own music, so I was vaguely wondering whether a) you see it, too, and b) you had any remarks about the music theory that went into your work that might bear on this.

Of course, it might ultimately be a bit superficial, in which case there's nothing really to comment on.