itch.io

I’m told that that’s a footgun; while nothing RAW specifically bars it, doing so is a no-op and it should never be able to do that bonus damage. So adjusting the rules in LT to match will include a UI update that disallows doing so.

Cascades are on the todo list (no time estimation; they’ve been low priority since they’re both somewhat niche and potentially a lot of work). Shutdown/boot up will be a lot more relevant once we have cascades so I expect we’ll add them together.

We made the call pretty early on to not include the mechanics for pilots. On the RP side, they’re too open ended and narrative for a direct computer adaptation. On the battle side, they present a few key problems:

1. are honestly pretty half-baked and while can result in cool moments (we once had a pilot sacrifice themselves by jockeying the boss Ace over a pit and doing an Ahab thing) require a lot of mechanical fiddling for a niche payoff that relies a lot on human storytelling that cpus can’t do.
2. they allow for any character to for-real die in any combat (rather than ejecting safely), which makes building narratives a lot more tricky. Castigate presents a similar problem but I think we’ll solve that by having named characters say “no” if you try to put them in a spicy manticore.

Is this using the Lancer system under the hood? How true is it to tabletop Lancer, mechanically?

We’ve managed to stay extremely close to the TTRPG ruleset! You can even import characters from COMP/CON. Some of the biggest differences we’ve had to make for the sake of the adaptation are:

1. Flying is a on/off status that puts you +3 above the surface instead of free elevation control.
2. You have two “action points” instead of an explicit quick+quick/full; in practice this ends up being extremely similar to tabletop, minus some restrictions (eg you have more movement flexibility in between your attacks while Barraging).
3. We had to limit brace triggering to not prompt-spam you each time you take damage. Currently it gives you the option to brace whenever you’d otherwise be structured/stressed or if would take over half your health in one hit.
4. We’re using Kai’s NPC rebake project instead of the CRB NPCs; this was hotly debated but through the discussion we decided that it’s a dramatic improvement in experience while being a light enough touch that it doesn’t compromise tabletop compatibility.

Are there plans to add Kobold/Lich/Orchis/Worldkiller/other non-corebook mechs?

We’re focusing on getting everything done from the core rulebook solid before looking at expansion content. We have about a year’s worth of gameplay features in the backlog first (e.g. local multiplayer, campaign modules, mod support) that we should do before tackling adding more mechanical content.

Once that’s done with, I think adding stuff from other Lancer modules would be a very very natural progression, but we’d have to clear it with Massif & see what makes sense at that point.

But lancers wait for no dev team, and unofficial mods have already made a lot of progress in hacking in new mechs. If you’re hungry for Long Rim mechs & aren’t afraid of a little technical work getting them set up, check them out!

Will I get a Steam key (eventually, once it launches on Steam) if I buy it now here on itch?

Short answer is yes.

Long answer: Steam takes 30%, while we’re currently paying itch 15% (it’s a PWYW scale). When we go live on Steam, we may increase the price there to cover that. It would be nice to be able to keep itch’s price lower, but my current understanding is that if you’re selling the game for less than it is on Steam on a different storefront, you’re not supposed to provide Steam keys.

Our options, then:

1. Increase the price on itch to match, and say “thank you” for the extra tip from people who get it there. Provide Steam keys as normal.
2. Keep the price low on itch and “grandfather in” everyone who’s already bought it on itch before it was available on Steam, but not provide more going forward.
3. Keep the price low on itch but have a second tier where if you pay a little more (matching the Steam price) you unlock a Steam key. I haven’t seen anyone do this before and I’ve been advised to not play too many games with schemes like this because you wanna stay on Steam’s good side, but who knows how much of that is hearsay.

But whatever we end up doing, we’ll make sure that people don’t have to buy it twice and are able to get it on Steam if they bought it on itch first.

Are you adding multiplayer? This would make a sick VTT!

For the early access/initial release, we’ve only scoped for local multiplayer + controller support. We’d absolutely love to do remote multiplayer, but since there are already virtual tabletop solutions for Lancer & we want to make sure that we don’t overextend ourselves, we haven’t prioritized it. It’s possible we’ll follow a Stardew Valley-esque pattern where they spent a year after launch retrofitting the game to be multiplayer, but being able to do that depends on how well said launch goes.

As a developer, I’m paranoid (perhaps too much) about being sure to never promise anything I’m not positive we can actually do with the resources we currently have. It means I have to say “no, sorry, I’d love that too but reaching for it right now would threaten the rest of the project” a lot, but IMO that’s better than biting off too much to chew and not being able to land it.

Isn’t Lancer played on hexes?

I know, I know, alas! We knew we’d never hear the end of this; it was a production decision early on to limit scope. Art assets + line of sight calculations get significantly harder in hexland & swinging for hexes would have meant we’d have to cut something else (e.g. the portrait maker, the map or module editors, etc). Hexes were, unfortunately, the most acceptable casualty in keeping scope low enough to deliver the rest of the game.

Fun fact though: Lancer was originally designed to be played on a square grid, and is still technically grid-agnostic. You can see artifacts left from that history in systems like the Black Witch’s perimeter command plate’s “2x2 space”.

Sooo throughout the process of making LT I’ve been regularly finding things that I have just been wrong about rules-wise. I’ve been under the impression that it’s the second attack you make from a mount that can’t do the bonus damage, regardless of its size. I now understand that it’s the aux weapon that shouldn’t do bonus damage, even if it’s used first. Logged and will be fixed, thanks for the report 👍

Yes, correct.

I need to add this as an FAQ on the page – short answer is yes!

Long answer: Steam takes 30%, while we’re currently paying itch 15% (it’s a PWYW scale). When we go live on Steam, we may increase the price there to cover that. It would be nice to be able to keep itch’s price lower, but my current understanding is that if you’re selling the game for less than it is on Steam on a different storefront, you’re not supposed to provide Steam keys.

Our options, then:

1. Increase the price on itch to match, and say “thank you” for the extra tip from people who get it there. Provide Steam keys as normal.
2. Keep the price low on itch and “grandfather in” everyone who’s already bought it on itch before it was available on Steam, but not provide more going forward.
3. Keep the price low on itch but have a second tier where if you pay a little more (matching the Steam price) you unlock a Steam key. I haven’t seen anyone do this before and I’ve been advised to not play too many games with schemes like this because you wanna stay on Steam’s good side, but who knows how much of that is hearsay.

But whatever we end up doing, we’ll make sure that people don’t have to buy it twice and are able to get it on Steam if they bought it on itch first.

:) :) ty! Everything has started to feel very real.

The best way would be to make a custom OpFor and add a pilot there – that way you have full control of everything about them.

We have a “good ideas we don’t want to lose” ticket sitting in the backlog along the lines of your idea – getting both a pilot portrait and bark lines from backers as an additional survey – but so far haven’t had the time to put it together and can’t say for sure we ever will. It was a significant time sink to even just scan all the callsigns to vet them (removing direct references to politicians/other IP), so barks would be a significant job to do the same. Even though I suppose it’s likely we’d get way fewer submissions…

🙏 thanks for your patience

Following up, I found the issue: there’s a “can fire ordnance” flag that gets set and unset at the start of a unit’s turn that prevents firing ordnance-tagged weapons outside of it. I’ve modified things so more generally ordnance actions triggered as rxns skips this check, which also fixes a kludge I implemented that let Sniper’s Moving Target fire its ordnance rifle off-turn.

Yikes, that sounds like a pretty serious error. Thank you for reporting. I’ll take a look.

I wasn’t able to repro reactive weave + armor lock conflicting; they both triggered in this quick test. If you find another situation where they have problems / don’t trigger / trigger at strange times, could you submit a bug report through the form?

I’m also not able to repro the Shock Wreathe issue. I’m not seeing it available for overwatch attacks (unless it’s on your turn & you have the spare quick, which gets used), and I’m not able to make a second quick action attack on turns where I use it (though followup aux attacks still go through, as intended). If you keep seeing it on future builds, please submit a bug report through the ingame link with a save.

Hey there! I’m also having trouble reproducing the Athena bug. From my reading, it’s a blast 3 area so centering it next to a ledge that’s larger than that won’t catch tiles that are further away elevation-wise. Could you post a screenshot here next time you run into a situation that seems wrong to you?

No, the bug is still in the backlog. This was supposed to be a fun little bonus rather than core functionality, so other fixes have taken priority.

All good! :)

Hi! Thanks for the questions.

Rxns: the sequence you describe should definitely be possible in-game. If you run into a scenario where it’s not, could you submit a bug report with a save through the google form in the main menu?

Thinking about it — we could probably do more to telegraph what rxns will potentially trigger on a given attack in that percentage preview window. I’ll make a note to try out some designs for that.

Re: rebake, this has been a subject of pretty intense debate back and forth. Here’s the initial round-up of the discussion, and here’s a later bsky conversation where someone had a similar question about a toggle.

The TLDR is that it’s not realistic for us to implement the NPCs twice, but that we expect it to be an early major mod once we support mods (alongside other people implementing more of the rebake’s optional rules).

This is something I only recently learned – by the book drones are considered characters, not objects/deployables. Confusing considering the fact that you deploy them.

Yes, I accidentally left the “dev mode” enabled for this last Linux build 😅 enjoy the inadvertent backstage preview

I’ll log the stacking issue – theoretically they should both trigger.

The idea has been raised before but I’m reluctant to add a slider specifically for brace to avoid having to add specialized UI and manage tracking its data, if there are other design solutions that might solve things. It’s a possibility though.

Sick, I’ve just unchecked unique for the stake. Lmk after the next build if you run into any bugs with multistake life :)

Hey, turns out there was a small bug with DW’s Harelquin Cloak after all! It was applying at the start of combat in addition to at the start of turns. Only mattered for pre-placed Dusk Wings, though.

100%. I love itch.io as a platform and am somewhat resentful of Steam’s corporate monopoly so I’m very motivated to keep the versions at parity. The decision to host player content on mod.io instead of Steam workshop was borne of a similar impulse.

Plus, as noted below, we’ll be sure to make Steam keys available to anyone who got a copy here pre-Steam.

Thanks for catching these! Lancer is a sprawling game so the only way I can know to fix this stuff is through player reports. Logged; I’ll take a look after I finish out the NPC classes.

For that last one – I’ve not seen the Dusk Wing do that in my testing; could you submit a save game where you see that happening? Either through the google form or by emailing me with an attachment at olive@wick.works. Instructions for finding your save are found in that google form link.

We’ll get you a Steam key – not sure yet if it’ll be through the same Backerkit channel that we distributed itch keys, or here through itch & linked to that key. But you’ll get one for sure!

My current understanding is that if you’re selling the game for less than it is on Steam on a different storefront, you’re not supposed to provide Steam keys. I really like the idea of being able to pay less to skip getting a key – I just haven’t every seen anyone do it or talk about it.

I have been advised to not play too many games with schemes like that because you want to stay on Steam’s good side, but who knows how much of that is hearsay.

Another possible option if we want to keep the price low here is “grandfather in” everyone who’s already bought it on itch before it was available on Steam, but not provide more going forward. I think it is an important priority to make sure people don’t have to buy it twice if they got it early, whatever form that ends up taking.

Ah! I see — great, noted.

Yellow

Yep! Refining the available colors is high on our priority list.

Block Palettes

Not very final. We haven’t made updates to them in over a year, and I’ve also been vexed by the lack of options and a lot of their visuals. Fully custom ones (outside of, someday, mods) are fairly unlikely since there’s a surprising amount of tech complexity behind them (e.g. getting them to “bleed” into surrounding blocks). I do hope to be able to somehow allow custom color tinting someday, however.

Bracing

These are great thoughts & notes – I think I agree with everything you say here, and have had concerns along similar lines about the brace family of systems. We’ve added additional brace triggers in for the nelson’s armor (so you can brace against grapples) so it might be possible to give the Nap something similar. I’ll make a note to look at it when I finish the NPCs and come back around to polish up the PC systems.

I am actually one of the few Napolean Fans! After my last campaign, despite my best efforts, it became my favorite mech. I documented my journey here. So I’m motivated to help make it as good as it can be in LT.

Sick! I have someone helping me collect the Unspeakable Form reports into logged cards, so I’m going to trust that they’ll get into the bug pipeline that way. Like I said, Mule Harness & Cable Winch are two of the most implemenation-vexing abilities in the game, so thank you for stress testing them!

For the flight size thing, I believe that’s how it should work, from the core book:

I believe that the reason you can’t owerwatch with vorpals is because they have the rules text:

Gain the SNICKER-SNACK reaction, which is the only way you can attack with this weapon.

So if they’re able to overwatch normally, when you don’t have Stabilizer Mods on them, that’s actually a bug. Is that what you’re seeing?

Investigations from yesterday revealed that the music slider literally only affects the title music track, despite all music being in the same bus and ostensibly controlled as a group. I regret working with fmod every time I touch it. So: bug is logged, but I’ve hit a roadblock with it & have asked for help.

Thanks for the report, logged. I think I’ve heard other people having this issue but have never been able to repro. I’ll investigate further.

Yeah! We’ve been aiming for about a 1/month update schedule.

The MULE harness & other unit-attachment abilities is definitely a weakness in the engine – are there any bugs in particular that you’ve seen that I could add to the buglog?

This is the perfect place to ask questions!

Hm… I don’t think there’s currently a way in the editor to grant a temporary teleportation movement type, but now that you say it, there definitely should be. I’ll add it to the list for the next update.

Sick ty for the report!

I don’t have a strong preference for keeping posts condensed here or splitting them up; dealer’s choice. I make individual tickets for each issue over in trello either way.