Multi-tile enemies

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

Would it be impossible to set up enemies the span more than one tile/Block LOS?

Because if not we could really make for some intense encounters.

Examples:

A 2x2 size monster that can easily smash through obstacles or outpace the average player bounding in hot pursuit of a reckless motorcyclist.

A 1x8 worm moves its flexible body to surround a player. Each segment they lop off becomes a half worm.

Idle blobs congeal into an infinitely larger and larger pool of goo.

etc.

2

This has been suggested before, and the devs had said that they would like to add something like this too, if they can find a good way to implement it.

3

Then I suppose this should turn into suggesting good ways for it to be implemented. I’ll mull this one over and open the floor to ideas.

4

Yeah, the big difficulty here just comes from:

  1. Finding a way to map the game successfully handle a multi-tile creature
  2. Getting pathfinding to work with said creatures.
5

The blob I think would be the most simple.

Any nearby small blobs path to each other if no enemy is present, when 4 touch they are replaced with one normal blob.

same with the 4 normal blobs into ‘Big’ blobs. just tougher variants, still single tile

Finally, when these 4 big blobs path to each other they become ‘tethered’. They attempt to stay within touching distance at all times. This allows them to squeeze through smaller openings. One blob is designated as the leader and selects the movement path. This is determined by proximity to the enemy.

Would that be at all possible?

6

Ha this reminds me of a funny issue in the old xcom where a 2x2 enemy would have one section fall asleep and the rest of it would keep moving. Anyways yea I would like Multi-tile enemies.

7

Or where you could mind control one quarter of a 2x2 enemy. Or where explosives dealt 4x damage to large enemies, because it hit every tile.

That second one might be an issue, I could understand larger enemies taking slightly more damage from explosions, what with having a greater area to hit, but 4x might be just a biiiit too much.

8

How about treating large creatures as organic vehicles of some sort? With the NPC revamps I’m guessing that some thought went into NPCs driving vehicles. This would also simplify the “big monsters can crush things” logic for houses/cars etc. I imagine this would work particularly well for non-differentiated aggregate monsters like blobs as damage-per-section makes a lot of sense.

Also opens up the possibility of riding things like moose. Or a mind-controlled hulk. Yeah. That.

9

[quote=“ClockworkZombie, post:8, topic:4874”]How about treating large creatures as organic vehicles of some sort? With the NPC revamps I’m guessing that some thought went into NPCs driving vehicles. This would also simplify the “big monsters can crush things” logic for houses/cars etc. I imagine this would work particularly well for non-differentiated aggregate monsters like blobs as damage-per-section makes a lot of sense.

Also opens up the possibility of riding things like moose. Or a mind-controlled hulk. Yeah. That.[/quote]

I was reading through and JUST about to suggest this… In previous discussions on robotic enemies I suggested that certain drones/mini-tanks be implemented through expanded vehicular code as the gateway to multi-tile enemies. As you suggested, benefits in being able to damage certain ‘components’ of the creature itself are quite likely.

If it was successful enough one could even use this expanded system to simulate critical component damage to single tile enemies as well (after all, what is the skeleton but the frame to our own body?)