Fantastic General by quasilyte
A turn-based tactical game.
Playing at itch.io is more convenient (because of full-screen mode)
Controls:
- Use your mouse, read tooltips
- TAB is "guard" action
- Camera: edge scroll, wheel drag, arrows
- CTRL toggles between move/rotate actions
Hints:
- Level up your core units!
- Don't fill 100% casualties right away - the price is rising
- Attack from behind (or a side) whenever possible
- The units for hire and artifact drops are random!
- Sometimes you can find a big discount for hiring - consider using it
Every unit has a number of moves (SPD stat), but it can only use a single action point at once. During the turn, all units get their share of actions one by one, until nobody has action points remaining. You can see the amount of action points a unit has above its banner (white dots).
This game has 8 predefined missions, after that you'll get randomly generated maps of increasing difficulty. Conquer as many battles as you can!
This game is written in Go! (Ebitengine)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nu0fRFn5eAU
Unit stats:
- ATK - increases damage, opposes DEF
- DEF - decreases incoming damage, opposes ATK
- SPD - a number of moves (action points) a unit has
- CON - a number of hit points per squad unit
- DIS - discipline improves unit morale (especially its recovery)
- ACC - accuracy (a chance to hit per unit)
Some stats, like ATK and ACC can have two values - for melee and ranged scores. A ranged score is in bright color.
Traits are not described in the game, so here is a missing link:
- Soul Harvest - can raise own dead units when killing enemies
- No Retaliation - target retaliation in melee is not triggered when attacking
- Mighty - every unit makes several attacks Regeneration - heals to full after every turn
- Stun Attack - melee attack decreases action points to 0
- Charge Resist - negates cavalry charge bonus when attacked
- Anti Cavalry - extra attack against cavalry
- Inf. Morale - infinite morale, this unit will never flee
- Causes Fear - unit deals more morale damage in melee
- Arrow Resist - extra defense against ranged attacks
- Arrow Weakness - decreased defense against ranged attacks
- Diag. Moves - the unit can move and attack diagonally
- Charge Attack - extra damage per every step made in this turn
- Flanking Resist - enemy gets no flanking bonuses when attacking this unit
- Bloodlust - killing enemies in melee recovers morale
- Pathfinder - no movement penalties for forests and swamp tiles
- Crippling Shot - like a stun attack, but ranged (also weaker)
- Stun Resist - immunity to effects like Stun and Crippling Shot
| Link | https://github.com/quasilyte/ld57-game/ |
| Link | https://quasilyte.itch.io/ld57-game |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/fantastic-general |
Ratings
| Given | 28🗳️ | 17🗨️ |
The turn ends when all units used their action points for this turn.
my suggestion would be maybe the unit should be more like of a game piece than an icon?
I got to mission 7 and my entire army got destroyed by a troll. I liked that the enemy is unpredictable, but it seems that they make a lot of suboptimal moves. Having a morale mechanic and enemies running away is a great idea too.
If the player loses a lot of units, it's very difficult to come back. You can't really pick your fights so each battle becomes more and more difficult. This can lead to a situation when you start a battle knowing you don't have a chance to win it.
Also, I couldn't find where to see current hp of a unit (could be useful with the troll, I didn't even know if I was close to killing it or not) and I couldn't figure out the turn order mechanic (couldn't guess who will take a turn next).
Overall, a great game with a lot of strategic depth. 😁
The AI also seemed capable. It avoided some of my "traps". Kudos for that. All in all a very nice gameplay experience. The graphics does the job well. I can easily distinguish the different types of units. I would have preferred using "units" instead of symbols/icons, but that may be a taste thing. The sounds could have been better, but I guess they do the job. Overall a nice submission!
How is this game connected to the theme? I could not make a connection, maybe "strategic depth"?
The level progression is good. After each level was a new unit to discover. I personally would have liked to gain access to the archers after I defeated them.
Everything is really great, but I think the audio was the weak point.
It's cool, that you could level up your units and I like the style of the UI.
Really complex game for such a short time! :)
@lllarso nah... there is no real connection. I gave up on trying because making it "every next battle is a descent into a dungeon" felt too weak of a connection that would not have any mechanical impact (making tiles/levels work differently would take more time than I could invest, or maybe I was too busy adding units and items). I opted out of theme for this reason - there is no connection and I fully admit it. :)
It's a very rare occasion for me to come up with a good and interesting theme-based game as it mostly ends up a worse game than a better game. :(
This time, I spent extra 2-3 hours testing and polishing the balance. It was probably a mistake to include 3 playable races instead of 1 or 2, but I felt lucky. I'm pretty confident with Humans (mercenaries) balance, undead were tested only 1/2 of that time, and horde being mostly untested. :)
This is probably a lesson here for me - 3 races don't make the game better for LD, but it can make it worse.
I did, however, make a unique turn order where you can't use all action points at once, but rather 1 of them at a time, meaning a cavalry moves 3 tiles per turn, but not right away in a single move, but after 3 "rounds". Units with N action points get N rounds spread across the turn. In a sense, it makes interruptions possible - you can stop the cavalry from running past your units by attacking them (and causing -1 AP in the process).
The Lays with crab taste are on their way btw (I'll play your game, that is)
It took me a couple of rounds to get a full grasp of most of the mechanics and I kept finding more as I went through.
Some things I would like to see in future versions:
* A tutorial level or even just a wall of text with some more in depth explanations besides the screenshots would be nice. (I saw your description here after I played the game once, oopsie)
* Soundtrack / more SFX would absolutely elevate the game
* Some turn order indication (maybe a highlighted border on who's next) to help strategise more
The artwork and the gameplay has a super old-school vibe which I absolutely love and the gameplay has a lot of depth. I found myself playing for quite longer than I expected! Awesome entry :D
P.S. The menu buttons for credits and settings didn't work for me.
I got destroyed by the troll, it just walked from one unit to the other and completely wiped out my army, I wonder if there's a specific tactic to kill it, or was it just that my army was underleved, I wonder...
I usually add these buttons at the start of the jam and it's a rare occasion when I have some free time and mood to implement them. :D
Thanks for the feedback btw.
And by the way, making it till the troll is a good result. This game is not intended to be fully completed. It's about how far can you get until the game overwhelms you, which can depend on luck (random items, units for hire, enemies).
Cool game! I'm not very good at it but I had a good time. Everything works well and I wasn't confused at any point, which is more than I can say for most strategy games lol. The sprites are charming and everything plays smoothly, overall really impressive compo!
I've seen that others have already mentioned most of the issues I had with the game. One more thing that I did find a bit confusing is with one of the missions where all my units started spread around the edge of the map. Before I managed to regroup them together, during enemy turn I could hear enemy attacking me, but couldn't see which unit attacked where. Maybe moving the camera to the enemy unit before it attacks would have worked better here for some combat awareness.
There are probably two difficulty spikes: mission 3 with orcs (requires the use of flanking and/or attacking from behind and/or luck with ranged troops), and mission with a troll (which needs to be killed in a single turn, otherwise it would regenerate to its full health). Many players found it confusing to figure out how to flank/backstab, so I failed at highlighting that mechanic in the game (the floating text doesn't help).
That level was a test of this concept for a less optimal scenario and it shows a flaw of this system - since you can't choose who is going next, the camera may be annoying. I found a solution to this, but it's not implemented in the game. As you mentioned, showing the attacks would be he part of that solution.
It was the goal to make a game that can be played like Fantasy General, which does provide missions with multiple area deployments (e.g. attacking from 2 sides, etc.) That would require fixing this issue, but the camera toggle between the units was the best thing I came up with during the jam.
How does the turn on our work though? I sometimes got to move twice with the same unit but didn't understand why.
Imagine a single turn as 100% of time.
Now let's consider some examples:
* 1 AP (e.g. zombie) would move once per turn
* 2 AP (e.g. most units) would move twice per turn
* 3 AP (e.g. cavalry) would move 3 times per turn
The "action" phase for a unit can happen at arbitrary time in turn, but there are rules:
* 1 AP can take action from t=0 to t=1.0
* 2 AP will have first phase in t=`[0,0.5]` interval, and then at t=`(0.5,1.0]`
* 3 AP means 3 phases following the same logic
Now we mix-in all units to get a full action queue. Units can lose their action point mid-turn, like when they do an action like attack (consumes all AP) or when they get attacked (-1) or even stunned (sets 0 AP). A double turn usually happens when other units that could move in-between lost their AP (or died).
Take this action order:
```
[phase1] [phase2] [phase3] -- cavalry
[phase1 ][phase2 ] -- infantry
```
If infantry unit is killed or loses its phase2, the cavalry will have 2 actions in a row (given that there are no more units in the queue).
Generally speaking, it's enough to pay attention to the "dots" above the unit that represents the AP counter. If it's empty, the unit will not act during this **turn** (you can see the turn counter to the right).