Legs++

Voting complete! Yesterday I ended the recent Beta 15 feature poll after a full week had passed, with most of the votes having come in the first few days, followed by a trickle and then just about one participant by the second to last day. You can see the description of each option in that post, but below are the final results (376 votes in all):

For the first couple days we had five options clearly all within striking distance of one another, the same five seen above with the highest totals, although the Scanalyzer expansion eventually fell behind more as time progressed. By the last couple days it was just between the top three options, which remained neck and neck until the very end.

"New alien artifacts" originally had a bit of a lead for a while, but legs and melee caught up and slightly overtook them at various points.

Personally from a design standpoint I was probably most excited by the Scanalyzer possibilities, but it also would've been quite a lot of work, so maybe better later anyway :P

However, I am also a big fan of the Legs++ option that ended up winning, since legs are a neat propulsion option that can use more expansion, especially at the higher ratings where there has always been a dearth of possible types at all. There's only a single non-prototype rating 9 leg, after all, compared to two types of treads, and at rating 8 only two (one of which is rare) compared to four tread types.

So as described we're getting some new high-tier legs, though because they will also be getting some mechanical adjustments, rather than have these new options suddenly appear at those tiers, we'll have some down in the mid-tier range as well. Non-prototypes. Not rare.

There are two main categories:

Thunder Legs

Coming in regular and Improved versions at rating 6 and 8, Thunder Legs have standard speed and support, but a lower overweight penalty, and average integrity but higher coverage.

While that means they might be destroyed somewhat more quickly under normal circumstances, they would hopefully take fewer hits in concert with certain play styles since unlike other legs with their 5% accuracy/evasion mod, these will likely give a 10% modifier per level of momentum. So while running at full speed enemies have a -30% to hit.

When under the influence of this modifier, instead of RUNNING the HUD movement readout indicates WEAVING.

I've sketched up some art for these here.

Shield Legs

At ratings 7 and 9 we have Shield Legs, which brings a siege-like mode to legs...

It's not as slow as siege (probably 3 turns to activate/deactivate, as opposed to the 7 turns for sieging, which was recently adjusted for Beta 15), and the effect is also not quite the same.

Although entering the mode also results in temporary immobility, this defensive stance doubles their effective coverage while vastly decreasing the amount of damage caused by direct hits on them by angling to dodge or glance incoming attacks. Such legs are marked with SHIELDING for the duration.

Shield Legs themselves are slower, not unlike exoskeletons, though with relatively high coverage and somewhat higher integrity. To help them last longer, naturally one would prefer to use their shielding mode. Also combining these legs with a build that otherwise uses less armor or other high-coverage parts could help keep total damage down for the duration.

I'll see how the legs look in the data when they're actually created and these new mechanics are in place, but above are the general design principles for our main new leg options that will likely open up some new strategies and variation.

Up Next

While I've been waiting for the voting to reach completion I've been handling other little features here and there on my short-term list, now getting into further expanding the scoresheet with a bunch of interesting stats, but I'll probably write a bit about that separately later when I'm done with them.

Then also of course be adding new legs!