Bardsung: Tale of the Forsaken Glade launches October 22nd on Gamefound! Follow now to get the terrifying Overseer free with your pledge.

Today we’re looking at how player feedback has shaped the new combat system, and how we’re making battles feel more story-led.

But first, it’s time we meet another of our Bardsung heroes. It’s Pathseeker!

Combat in the Forsaken Glade

By Sherwin Matthews, lead designer

With the basics explained in the previous diaries here, it’s time to move on to our next big topic—combat!

Rather than write one article that’ll bore half of you to death, I’m going to break it up into several posts, starting with how we designed the encounter system.

How it Started

One of our earliest goals for the first Bardsung game (Legend of the Ancient Forge) was to create a system which not only introduced varied, randomised enemies, but also procedurally generated combat puzzles.

We wanted combat to feel different each time, even if you were facing the same enemies as before.

We achieved this by deploying enemies via the corridor and room cards you drew, with the identities of those enemies determined by a table that changed between encounters. We layered into that a draw from the battle aspect deck, which generated randomised conditions to further modify the experience in some way.

For example, a group of hobgoblin Brigands. The first time you encounter them, they might have the Disciplined Foes condition, making them more difficult to attack and defend against unless you break their shield wall first.

The next time there’s no ganging up, but there might be a collapsing ceiling instead, forcing your party to deal with their foes (or escape!) within a certain time limit.

These changes kept heroes guessing, even when facing foes they’d seen before.

Updated Combat System (Player Feedback)

This time around, we wanted to build on that idea, and we started by looking at player feedback. We found a few areas where we could tighten the game and get it closer to our original goal.

Goal 1: Make Combat Feel BIGGER

Firstly, we wanted to make combat feel bigger.

Not by increasing the number of enemies, or how long combat took to resolve, but instead by making it physically larger—spread out across multiple tiles, with multiple battle lines for the heroes to contend with, instead of descending into close-quarters fighting across a single tile.

This prompts some important changes.

Growing Map

When a player places a room (now called a clearing) on the playing area, they also draw and add corridors (now called trails) for each portal connected to that tile. This provides additional areas for enemies to spawn.

Did You Hear That…?

A further additional spawn point is provided by the revised echo token rules.

Previously, the echo token indicated a wandering monster that followed the heroes. Those enemies are now deployed by an entirely different system, which I’ll touch on in a later update.

Now, the echo token begins on the starting tile and follows the heroes around, indicating where they’ve made noise behind them that can also attract enemies.

Complex Combat Puzzles

As well as expanding the space over which enemies appear, we’ve also deepened combat puzzles. Before, all enemies of a certain type were governed by a set behaviour.

Now, specific enemies can break away and carry out different actions, depending on where they are in relation to the heroes.

Here’s an example:

In the secondary areas, where enemies are on an adjacent tile to a hero, ranged enemies will hold position and snipe their foes. Others will lurk around the edges, waiting for the moment a hero is wounded to leap into the fray.

Enemy commanders will hold back and order their minions into the action, while shamans will summon wandering monsters to do their bidding.

Further back down the trail, some enemies might appear from the undergrowth as reinforcements, prowling after any stragglers…

Goal 2: More Meaningful Battles

Next up, we wanted to reduce the number of combats in an encounter.

With combat now larger and more deadly, the impact comes not from the number of times you find yourself facing enemies, but the degree to which these combats will challenge your heroes. (Typically between two and four per encounter.)

First, we reduced the number of combat cards in the clearing deck—a simple but effective way of reprogramming our procedural generation algorithm.

Next, we also removed both battles and challenges from trail cards (previously corridors) completely. These now exist as connective tissue between different clearings, rather than spaces where a fight might break out.

Now, combat hits harder without becoming overwhelming, and feels much more tense and meaningful.

Goal 3: More Diverse Enemies

Another step toward updating encounter design was to increase enemy diversity during battles.

Primarily, we wanted to increase the potential pool of enemies (and possible combinations of said enemies) that heroes might face per chapter, further making individual combats feel different.

First, we reduced the number of encounters where a set pattern of enemies might appear, and took a more skewed approach for some cards.

As much as they went well together, we decided to move away from the holy trinity of hobgoblin Brigands, hobgoblin Brutes, and hobgoblin Raiders — or, more precisely in our designer language: melee, elite, and ranged, and their equivalent in Forsaken Glade.

Whilst these archetypes were designed to work together and create interesting gameplay, they tended to create the same gameplay, regardless of the exact numbers of each enemy.

Instead, we created more cards with one or more of those enemy archetypes missing, so heroes might encounter a mob of melee enemies without other allies, or a pair of powerful elites backed up by a single ranged enemy.

We then sprinkled in a more diverse selection of other enemies—both in the individual fights, but also across the larger chapter, so you aren’t seeing the same enemies from node to node.

The end result is each encounter feels fresh and different, not only in terms of enemy placement and conditions, but also because combat has more storytelling and theme built-in.

One tile might have a horde of rustling stabbers that gang up on the heroes, and another a trapped wandering monster.

Some encounters will provide a more challenging combat puzzle, such as requiring you to isolate and disrupt a commander giving orders from afar!

Phew, that’s quite a lot already. I'll return soon for combat part two!

Got questions? Hit the comments below, or come hang out with us in the Steamforged Discord.

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