Combat stats and abilities

Floaty damage numbers

Because armor, shields, and hull can take such different amounts of damage, and because increased bullet damage is a stat that you can collect, I wanted to be able to see how effective my shots were during combat, so I made a proper system for floating combat text. It adds up all the changes to pixel values from a bullet instance, color codes the number based on what you hit so there are different color numbers for hull, armor, shield, and critical hits, it also tells you when a dodge occurs. The numbers are even sticky and animated to look nice.

You can of course toggle these on and off in the settings if you are an aesthetics purist and RPG style combat text ruins your immersion.

Defensive stat changes

I've done a lot of fiddling with combat stats and RPG elements. First thing I changed was to consolidate some defensive stats and make them more balanced. For instance, stacking percentage decreases in damage taken could allow you to become invincible, which was bad and it was also confusing as to how the stats were multiplying together when you had multiple sources.

Damage reduction stats have been refined into these categories:

• Shield hardness

• Armor hardness

• Glancing hardness

• Glancing chance

Glancing blows replaces "everything" hardness with a chance to reduce any incoming damage regardless of what was hit. The amount of damage reduced by glancing follows the same formula as the new stats for shield and armor hardness, and multiplies the reduction with them. The formula makes hardness into an integer statistic that you can get an unlimited amount of and its damage reduction follows a constant increased time to live formula as seen below:

damage taken = damage dealt * (1 - (armor hardness / (armor hardness + 5000))

Critical strikes

For the longest time I have wanted to have a statistic for damage dealers that works like critical strike in literally every RPG. The issue, as it were, is that damage in Wayward Terran Frontier isn't simply calculated as a numeric value, but as a damage map applied to the alpha channel of a group of pixels. Simply numerically increasing the intensity of the map, or applying the map multiple times, has problems because it won't always deal consistent damage and it will rarely be visible to the player. Also dealing a bit more damage to some armor tiles doesn't really feel "critical" so I went back to the drawing board.

In every RPG that has "critical" damage, the number representing your damage is typically doubled in order to represent the abstract idea of hitting some critical location when your attack landed. Because most RPG characters don't actually have kidneys simulated inside of them, the damage of a dagger strike is just doubled, and the idea of hitting a vital organ is only theater of the mind. However...ships in Wayward Terran Frontier do have simulated kidneys...or at least they do actually have critical systems inside them that can be damaged. As such I have gone through all of our projectile types and added statistics to them representing how devastating it is for those bullets to get past a ship's armor and cause critical damage.

Each bullet type now has:

• a number of critical rolls representing how many times the crit chance dice will be rolled

• an amount of critical damage representing how much random tile damage will be applied to a critical system if the roll succeeds

• a base critical chance representing how likely the shot is to crit without any modification from