Phase 2 - Progress

Phase 2 of Bella Factionum is progressing nicely, and I'll likely release it imminently.

It's mostly polish nowadays, but there have been some nice additions worth discussing.

Coalition Improvements

The first improvement is, when holding down B and Left-Clicking, you now spawn a "Beacon", making a sound, which other Coalition members see. This can be very useful in Multiplayer for showing your human allies something.

Secondly, Coalition Resource Sharing is now a thing. Every Resource Point controlled provides all Coalition Allies with a specific amount of Resources (1 by default, can be set to 0).

Squad and Resource Limits

In the latest Phase of Bella Factionum, there is a limit for Squads of 100, and a limit for Resources of 200. While it can be customized in Gamerules, I feel like it is quite an arbitrary limit - for instance, on a large custom map, 100 Squads isn't nearly enough, whilst on a small map, it becomes overwhelming.

So, I implemented a Point-Based Squad Limit - there is a "base" amount of Squads you can have (5 by default), and, with each additional Point you control, that adds more (5 by default) to your limit. That way, on small maps, there will be fewer squads and less chaos, and on large maps, you can actually send a decent amount of Squads instead of getting bogged down with holding the huge amount of points.

A similar principle applies to limiting Resources - I added the limit mostly because, in really early versions of Bella Factionum, Factions could end up having tens of thousands of Resources stored up thanks to controlling lots of Resource Points, which removed the strategy of capturing opponents' Resource Points to slow down their growth, because they would still be pumping out Squads.

This however brought two issues. Firstly, no matter how many bases your Faction controls, only a handful of Squads can be produced at once (because of the limited Resource Storage). Secondly, it punishes certain Faction strengths and weaknesses - if a Faction has the "High Manpower" Strength, Squads cost 50 Resources, so the default 200 can "store up" 4 Squads, whilst the "Low Manpower" Weakness means, with a cost of 200, a Faction can only "store up" 1 Squad.

So, here's how I fixed this - there is a "base" Resource Limit for Factions, and, for every Base a Faction controls, this Limit is increased. Furthermore, it is scaled depending on your Faction's Strength/Weakness - if you have the "High Manpower" Strength, your limit is half as much, whilst if you have the "Low Manpower" Weakness, your limit is double. In effect, this means you "store up" an equal amount of Squads, which I think is better balanced.

Graphical Starting Base Selection

Honestly, a picture says 1000 Words.

Here's what selecting a Starting Point in current versions of Bella Factionum looks like:

And here's what it will look like in Phase 2:

Fun fact: I don't know the names of points in the default Sanctum map (which I made...),  so this is very useful for me!

Navigation Overlap Fix

When forcing my friend to play having fun in multiplayer with a friend, we noticed that, sometimes, Squads would get "stuck" in inaccessible parts of the map. Well, turns out that, when you draw overlapping map obstacles in the Map Editor, Godot would interpret them as walkable area, instead of combining the obstacles - not anymore, everything works really well! And, to my massive surprise, it took a few minutes to fix.

So there we are, I think we're in the homestretch now, Phase 2 should release before long.