The base game mechanics of Warhammer 40,000: Battlesector are based on a tried and tested system. Units use their modified weapon accuracy to try to hit the enemy. On hit, damage is dealt based upon the modified weapon damage, with a chance that this can be a Crit (with increased damage) or a Graze (with decreased damage).
All of these calculations are based upon Integers (whole numbers), which produces clarity for all involved (it’s essentially like rolling a lot of real-world D100 dice). However, as Battlesector has grown and evolved over the last 5 years, we’ve added more units and more factions, and each of those has stretched and tested our game mechanics in new ways.
There are a few standout challenges that we’ve come across when developing and designing the game recently and a few have proven hard to overcome within the current game mechanics.
An example of this might be something like an Assault Cannon, a high rate of fire, relatively low damage and low armour piercing weapon. This is a weapon that must fire a lot of shots in order for it to feel correct, so in order to balance its performance against other weapons, it requires a low damage value. Typically, in Battlesector, that’s 3-4 Damage per shot.
Our issues arise when this unit is buffed or debuffed, changing the damage of the weapon attacks. If you lose 10% efficiency due to, say, firing AP3 vs Armour 4, then the weapon drops to 2-3 damage per shot. This is because we always round debuffs down (to ensure that there is an impact). But here we see that a single point of armour difference moves the average damage from 3.5 to 2.5, a 28% damage reduction!
There are other under-the-hood issues caused by this finite level of mathematics as well, more than we want to go into here.
To address this, as part of our October update, we are moving Battlesector’s combat maths to include a single decimal place. So rather than 3-4 damage per shot, the above Assault Cannon will now be dealing an unmodified 3.0-4.0 damage per shot. Running the same above example, a 10% efficiency loss would reduce the weapon damage to 2.7-3.6. Moving the average damage from 3.5 to 3.15, a 10% reduction (as you would correctly expect)!
This is not just an exercise in accountancy though. This chance produces significant balance updates to a lot of weaponry in the game, even without us touching any raw numbers!
As such, another important element of the October update will be a holistic look at some of our weapon categories (especially weapons with high attack counts, like assault cannons, flamers or even more prosaic weapons that are in units that have a large number of models).
Additionally, whilst we’ve been digging into the numbers here, there will be some general game balance changes for some factions. For example, the recently released Black Legion and Ultramarines are doing a bit too well in the multiplayer scene right now, and will need a little reining in.
Also, on the other side of the coin, the Tyranids have been left relatively untouched as they are the main antagonist of the base campaign and we haven’t wanted to shift the game balance too much. But given that we have just made a significant change with what we’ve discussed above, now has turned out to be a good time to take a look at them and give them a bit of a glow up of their own.
We’ll have more to share soon, including more info about when our October update is landing and what exactly is in it and also more information on what we’ve hinted at in our Roadmap.
As always, please keep in touch on the forums and in our Discord.
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