![]() ![]() Raiders, Archers, Shield-Bangers and Warriors are the four base classes of Factions, with the prestige classes offering variations on a theme with extra abilities and higher stats. Said tactical depth is improved further by the way the various classes attack and buff/debuff those Armour and Strength stats. It also provokes some painful decisions: do you hit their Strength now and reduce their subsequent attack ability by a little, or do you further ruin their armour so that another character can possibly one-shot them down to almost nothing later on? Both choices have their advantages (and disadvantages), and precisely which one you choose will be determined by the specific situation on the battlefield at the time, which is always a good sign of tactical depth. Armour is a temporary barrier that will go down eventually, but it will protect your troops during the first few turns of combat and moves things away from a situation where the person who strikes the first blow wins because the other guy can’t hit back any more. It’s somewhat flawed when implemented as part of a free-to-play multiplayer game (again, more on this later) with a human being controlling each side of the battle, but the basic concept is easy to understand while having a lot of tactical possibility. A character with one Strength is basically a dead man walking they might be able to use Willpower – a limited bonus stat used to boost movement range and power up attacks – to help out by whittling down armour (attacks on armour always hit), but they’ll have such a massive penalty to their ability to target strength it’s probably best to hope your opponent takes pity on you and puts them out of their misery. It takes two or three attacks to reduce armour to the point where serious Strength damage will start to bleed through to the character it is protecting, but if this happens you have a serious problem because it can only take one attack focused fully on Strength to render somebody more-or-less useless for the rest of the battle. Games start with each side carefully jockeying for position, attempting to focus fire somebody’s armour down whilst trying to avoid the same being done to them. It’s this Armour/Strength dichotomy which is the beating heart of Factions’ tactical combat. ![]() All characters – even Archers – start out with reasonably high Armour scores, so before you can do serious damage to somebody’s Strength stat you have to wear down their Armour first by attacking it directly. If a character with eleven Strength attempts to make a Strength attack on a character with nine Armour, the armour value is subtracted from the attack value and the attack will only end up doing two points of damage. The only thing preventing Strength loss is the Armour stat, which functions as a buffer to soak up Strength damage. When one of your fighters gets hit for five damage, they also lose five attack power and are that much weaker in subsequent combat. Factions pleases me immensely by taking a leaf out of Darklands’ book and adopting a combat system where health and attack power have been combined into a single Strength stat. Sounds simple enough.Įxcept it isn’t simple. First person to kill all of the enemy fighters wins. You take this squad and you enter the matchmaking system, which will automatically find an opponent for you to slug it out with over a small battlefield composed of square tiles. There are two of the horned giant-types - a Shield-Banger and a Warrior - two Archers, one Raider, and another Raider who has been upgraded into one of Factions’ prestige classes, the Thrasher. When you first load it up Factions shows you a gorgeous animated intro (more on this later), rushes you through a tutorial teaching the fundamental concepts of the game, and then dumps you into the menu masquerading as a city screen with a low level squad of six fighters. While I’m waiting for it, though, I figured I’d dip my toe into Factions now that it’s out of beta to see if this much-vaunted tactical combat is all it’s cracked up to be. ![]() The release of Chapter One of Banner Saga proper has been set (rather optimistically, in my opinion) for this summer, so it’s not going to be arriving for quite some time. For those who don’t know, Factions is the free-to-play multiplayer component to the Banner Saga that Stoic developed first to make sure their combat system for single-player Banner Saga worked properly. Banner Saga: Factions had a soft release to Kickstarter backers on Monday. ![]()
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