Alpha 17 Update - Combat and Code Cleanup
- Reduced the cost of some ship parts along with boosting the base HP of heavy ships and reducing the base cost of ships (colony module costs increased)
- Added in a maintenance cost to ships and defensive satellites. (0.5% of cost with an additional premium on ships with missiles) (tech will eventually reduce this)
- Made some changes to the way that taxes are increased if a player ends up with an automatic loan
- Planets can no longer have negative populations or production (disabled in demo mode for testing purposes)
- Fixed a bug with auto-scouting causing the turn system to malfunction sometimes
- Can now see what the bombing power of a ship design is in the ship design menu.
- Bombing power of ships is now calculated based on the ships damage rather than based on the ship template
- Updated ship combat maps to add asteroids on random tiles
- Updated the combat system to allow moving more than one tile at a time
- Added a Pathfinding preview of what tiles the ship will need to move too in order to reach its target
- Ships now do retaliatory damage if they are fired at in close range
- This only happens once per turn, per ship. So focusing on a single ship is a good idea
- Implemented a limit on the number of missiles each ship has equipped
- 5 for now, will depend on the weapon in the future, resets after battle
- Changed the orientation of the hexagons in the ship battle system to make it easier for moving left and right.
- Added a text log of what was happening in the battle near the top of the screen
- Added a wait till end of turn button for ships, so they get pushed to the back of that players queue
- Coded in a few other possible features related to combat, which are not fully implemented yet
- (code implemented for ship teleportation and healing, but not used yet)
- Improved Tech Tree so it techs get sorted better visually
- Also found a few techs that were coded, but not actually in the tech tree for some reason
- Colonies can now be destroyed when a planet is bombed (was a bug)
- Added in a new victory screen which actually shows the victory type and who the winner was
- Fixed issues with ships sometimes dissapearing under some rare circumstances
- This took a long time to actually track down, as it was so rare and only really happened late into a game
- Fixed an issue where the death calculator was incorrect after a empire died
- Added a new win screen which actually says who won and how
- Added a new button to recenter the screen around the currently selected planet
- Fixed a few issues with the AI's ship designs, mainly around a few minor incorrect calculations
A significant portion of the code related to ships has been updated to allow for more than 5 ship designs to exist. Currently I lack the graphical assets for this, but this was done as the new method is better and easier to deal with while also breaking a previous limitation. Some stuff would still need to be changed to allow for 6 ship designs to exist, but most of those are related to UI design rather than code. For example the ship send panel would need to be changed to allow for a 6th ship to fit on the screen, but it is now coded in such a way that it would actually be possible to do with only changes to the layout.
A significant portion of the games code was redone to reduce the size of many scripts, mainly focusing on reducing the amount of functions that were duplicated. For example, 4 different scripts were set up for sending ships (AI, Transfer menu, Planet Rally, Battle System). This was then merged into one function of a auto-loaded script, which now manages this for any other script. Ship designs had 3 different nearly identical functions in three different scripts which were used for calculating costs, size, ect. This caused many minor calculation bugs if I forgot to update 1 function for the AI or for the auto optimize. The calculations are now done by one separate script, and the optimize now uses the same code for the AI ship designs (was already almost entirely the same script).
No major performance improvements were made by all the refactoring. Although that probably has more to do with how light the game already is, using far less than 1gb of total ram according to the engines monitor and barely showing up under cpu and gpu load. But it does make many scripts cleaner, and easier to maintain in the future, as the code base shrunk by 25%. I was also able to decrease the number of nodes substantially, as the scenes were cleaned up as well. It also makes testing somewhat easier and adding or updating features way easier since I don't have to worry as much about hunting for all these similar functions if I make any changes to one.
I did notice some improvements in load-times for the game itself, and I was also able to decrease the map setup times down to a 1 second minimum.
Files
Get Zirka Dominium
Zirka Dominium
A 4X Turn Based Strategy game made using Godot
Status | In development |
Author | AlexChmilar |
Genre | Strategy |
Tags | 2D, 4X, DRM Free, Godot, Local multiplayer, Multiplayer, Pixel Art, Singleplayer, Space, Turn-based Strategy |
Languages | English |
More posts
- Alpha 16 Update - combat AI and spy stations76 days ago
- Alpha 15 Update - Save System and Planet GovernorMay 30, 2025
- Alpha 14 Update - Menus and Bug FixesApr 24, 2025
- Alpha 13 Update - Bugs, Visuals and Information SystemsMar 27, 2025
- Alpha 12 Update - Tech and spiesFeb 10, 2025
- Alpha 11 Update - Animations and Tech SystemJan 07, 2025
- Alpha 10 Update - Graphics and QOL ImprovementsDec 07, 2024
- Alpha 9 Update - Diplomacy Continued + Graphics UpgradesNov 03, 2024
- Alpha 8 Update - Diplomacy and Planet DefenseOct 06, 2024
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