Greetings Mercenaries!
During your adventures in Pathbreakers: Roaming Blades, you will face many challenges, and sometimes your fighting skills will be your only path to survival.
Battles will play a significant role in your journey. While you can always concentrate on other aspects, such as exploration or trading, to minimize conflicts as much as possible, you must remember that you are leading a mercenary band. If you wish to gain experience and improve as a fighter, there is only one way to achieve it. Only you possess the power to determine your party’s path: will you earn more coin by slaying bandits and monsters, or will you acquire your gold through trading? Still, one thing is certain: there is no mercenary without at least one bloodstain.
Combat Overview
Pathbreakers: Roaming Blades features turn-based battles on a hex grid. The player can field up to eight units and has a roster of 14 mercenaries.
We chose a hex grid system, which is a better fit than a square for our higher count of deployed units and gives more prominent weight to positioning during battles. Creating a smart formation, such as deploying a sturdy frontline to protect backline units, is sure to play a role in your victory. Combined with an attack of opportunity system and zone of control passives for tankier classes, it gives the player a broad set of tools for controlling the battlefield, picking the strategy that suits their playstyle and enhancing the party’s skillset.
Fights can be triggered from various situations, most notably on the world map when encountering other units, but also in dungeons (which we'll dive deeper into in a later devlog) and from raiding enemy lairs situated across the world of Pathbreakers.
Battles are turn-based, and each unit will roll initiative at the start of every encounter. Typically, each unit has nine action points they can utilize during their turn to perform various actions. Moving from hex to hex consumes action points, depending on the difficulty of the terrain and other factors, such as the presence of water, fallen bodies, or being in a zone of control. Attacking and using spells or special attacks also incurs a certain cost in action points.
This means that you need to be careful when planning your offensive. Every action you take has a weight that can define the fight's outcome.
Pathbreakers is filled with diverse passives and abilities, many offering various options for managing action points. These options can increase mobility, enable more attacks, or reduce the action points of your enemies. Naturally, your foes will possess their own options as well…
You will also have numerous abilities at your disposal, including magic and skills, each with a different action point cost. Some abilities have additional effects, such as elements, buffs, or debuffs; others have a larger area of effect, and some may restore HP rather than deplete it. The aim is to provide players with options for various play styles and strategies.
The most basic goal of a battle is to eliminate the enemy forces, although different contracts and story missions could have varying objectives.
The Environmental Effects
Battles can offer some environmental interactions triggered by elemental attacks. Water-based attacks will leave puddles behind, which makes the terrain harder to cross and can be used as a conductive surface. Electrical attacks can be used on water puddles and will propagate electrical damage to all units in that puddle. They can also be used on a dry surface that will leave behind an electrical mote, which fire attacks can detonate. This will cause an explosion in a small radius, damaging everyone in that range and so on. Some passives will augment or reduce the effects of environmental interactions, so you'll have options to focus on them or not, depending on your play style.
The elemental environment system is meant to give the player more options for different strategies, but it is by no means the only or best way of winning. The environmental damage is being carefully tuned to ensure it creates interesting options and opportunities, but that it doesn't create overwhelming opportunities. It's simply one more fighting tool in your rich arsenal. With the large variety of classes, passives, and elements at your disposal, you're free to focus on strategies and playstyles that work for you. Just keep in mind that mercenary life isn't easy, so you'll have to pick your options carefully if you don't want to be trampled by your adversaries.
Status Effects
Taking down an enemy might be the simplest way to deal with them on the battlefield, but it's not always the best way. Pathbreakers: Roaming Blades includes several status effects to give the player various options. For example, Poison will decrease a unit's max action points by a certain amount for three turns, severely reducing their options on their turn. A well-placed Stun can give you some breathing room by skipping a unit's turn entirely, and Rooting an isolated unit will be especially effective on melee units.
Status effects are powerful and certainly worth using. To make sure they don't lead to problems, most of them will have the target build up an ever-increasing resistance to them the more they are used on the same target. So you'll be able to stun a unit but not stun-lock a unit, for example.
There is also a slew of positive status effects such as increasing damage, defense, or protecting from elemental damage. Some are more complex, like Invisibility or Mirror Image. A well-placed buff can open a world of options.
A unit could suffer an injury in battle as well. While status effects are usually only present during the battle and will vanish at the end, an injury is a special effect that will last for several days, although there are means of shortening that. If a unit falls in battle, they will suffer a major injury at the end of the battle. Major injuries don't wear off by themselves and will require the help of a specialized healer in town to be taken care of.
Post Battle
Once a battle is won, you'll be rewarded with experience points for participating units and some spoils, including gold, trade goods, and equipment.
After a battle, most units will need to recover their expended mana and health over time, preferably using your caravan’s infirmary for faster recovery.
For players who want to see all the details and check what happened and how they can improve their strategy next time, every fight has a log of all actions taken and the rolls that happened during the battle.
