Strange weekend and updates.

So cat sitting is done. A little late in posting this because of some things that went on though. Between hot weather, randomly going to family dinners while still being an hour round trip, phone tag, and the usual weekend plans not much done as I thought. Either way progress is progress.

I have put in the ground work for the Edge abilities. Edge abilities use "edge points" or whatever I decide to name them later. You gain edge points by taking dice out of the pool rolled at the start of each round. From there you go about as normal distributing points to initiative, action, and defense. I have two currently in the list, armor breaker and "spirited attack" but only have armor breaker currently working.

Had a long list of debug problems that popped up and while stupid were not easily solved. Mostly my fault do to me putting down a lot of code without setting up something to test it, so a few mistakes compound and become somewhat  harder to find. Anyways a bit about the idea of the edge system.

The edge system is yet more tactical choices in battle. The thought is that if used properly it can let a well thought out battle plan take down a powerful foe or allow a character to lose less resources through battles.I don't quite want this to be a "spam your largest move" system but still have some major effect in game. So the edge points starts out empty at the start of every battle, filling up the pool is risky as it takes away from the rest of your pools. In fact you could fill up your Edge points quickly if you leave yourself vulnerable which adds to strategy and risk vs reward thinking. Currently on the idea list are punishes abilities and general pool manipulation abilities. Punishes abilities punish the opponent for choices in defense or attack, so if you think you have the foes strategy down you can tear it apart. Though since this isn't a player only system with a little AI I could possibly keep a player on their toes if they try to abuse certain aspects. The other is pool manipulation, at first blush I have two ideas for it.

The first like Weapons of the Gods idea of floating the dice into the pool seems natural, though it may be a little too powerful with no restriction so I'm thinking more on that. After that is modifying the enemies pools. The one I'm currently working on is removing one die from the enemies defense pool of a value equal or less to half of the edge spent to use it. The idea being that a large storage of edge could leave an opponent defenseless for a turn but may be too unfeasible to do it correctly. As these pools use 10 sided dice to guarantee you remove a die from the pool you have to bet 20, if you knew exactly how much the AI puts in their pools you would have to bet 20 per die. No refunds of any sort if you only remove 1s from their pool.

Armor break is currently a type of "punishment" move. If the enemy is using the block defense choice it'll give a better chance for extra successes for the attacker and make it harder for extra successes. Currently costs 5 edge, meaning you have to remove a 5 or higher dice from your pool for the edge pool to use it. This may be making it too powerful. As it stands I've seen it take out the opponent in one good hit more than once. With a little planing I can do it on turn two which isn't something I wanted. It's part of the fact that successes translate to extra damage but it's also because of how cheap it is. There is nearly no risk unless you roll a pool with no die individually being above a 3. So some more work needs to be done.

Though as it stands the attack tags I'm using are working well. Currently when an edge move is selected it appends it's tag to the end of the users attack_tag list then the attack method takes care of searching for them in the right spots for their effects. At the end it empties the list so there is no chance of accidental repeats. I mention this as I have in the past used libraries or regular variables to check to see if they were set, and each individual one had to be zeroed out through a method. I'm unsure if it's faster that way or not right now but due to the fact this isn't a simulation any inefficiency will be negligible hopefully. Either way I should keep an eye on it.