Robocraft 2 Weapon Class Damage Systems
Yesterday we gave details on how the blocks in Robots in Robocraft 2 are held together by welded connections which have health and when these connections lose health the connected blocks break apart. In that article, we spoke about how different weapon classes will reduce this health in different ways, and since our first playable of the building and testing will release very soon we thought we’d share some information on how the Laser and Plasma weapon classes apply their damage within that first playable.
Laser Class Weapons
The laser class weapons are the simplest. It’s really straightforward with Lasers. The block they hit directly will cause a specific amount of damage (aka health reduction) to all the connections of that block.
E.g. if you have a lot of blocks connected to one large scaled block, and a laser shoots that larger block enough to destroy all its connections, everything attached to that block will fall off.
NB: Like in Robocraft 1 Lasers are more of a precision weapon but we’ve balanced their accuracy so they’re better at close-range than Plasma. Accuracy drops off quickly if you go to max DPS, but you can still pulse fire to have good accuracy at range.
Plasma Class Weapons
Plasma Class is simple too, but more of an area-of-effect weapon. A spherical area of effect is cast at the point you hit. All connections within the sphere will lose health with those that are closer to the centre losing more than those at the edge.
NB: Plasma are great at stripping loads of smaller blocks or key functional parts that are placed too near to the point of impact. They have a slow fire rate and projectile velocity is fairly slow and affected by gravity so landing the Plasma on your target can be tricky and require skill.
Collision Damage
When your Robot collides with another Robot the collision point also creates a spherical area of effect. The size of the sphere and the amount of damage caused is based on the measured physical forces between the two objects. Two heavy Robots hitting each other can produce huge impulse forces whereas two lighter Robots hitting each other will produce less force. Of course speed of impact and how ‘head-on’ you hit each other play a big role also.
NB: We plan to have a friendly fire system preventing allies from damaging each other via weapons or collisions.
Other Weapon Classes
In future, we plan to have a variety of weapon classes that can cause damage to connections in different ways (e.g. path-finding for weak spots akin to Robocraft 1’s damage routing system). We also plan to make use of the server-side physics in weaponry and the structural integrity for physics weapons like Halflife-style gravity weapons etc.