Hi everyone,

We wish our developers safe travels this week as they head to AGC, and thank them for this question of the week.

This week Magunnus asked on clarification on Earthrise's Still Tree and how Abilities and Tactics work together to shape unique actions customized to player's specific gaming style. We are happy to oblige, with a disclaimer that all examples shown below, including names of skills, abilities statistics and such, are only for descriptive purposes and are no way final game design.


In Earthrise skills serve as containers for Abilities and Tactics. Each Skill contains a set of Abilities and/or Tactics and as players progress in a Skill, they unlock Abilities or Tactics. From character advancement viewpoint, Abilities and Tactics are the same - they are options that players unlock as their character accumulates knowledge and experience.

But there's huge difference between Abilities and Tactics. Abilities are actions that players can execute to achieve spectacular combat advantage, heal themselves or aid their ally. Tactics are small enhancements and modifications that are applied to Abilities and modify their effect enough to create same yet different Ability, tailored to player's needs. Players will be able to use any Tactic with any Ability as long as they are compatible - we use a complex system of types that must match on both Ability and Tactic makes sure that players are both free to experiment and yet cannot break the system. Players will be able to add several Tactics to an Ability - one copy of several Tactics or multiple copies of the same Tactics. As you see, there are many combinations.

Here's a simple Ability we will use, the same Magunnus suggested. Once again this is only for the example, people, the final design may be very different but the concepts remain the same:

Skill/Level: Athletics 5
Ability Name: Sprinting
Type: Physical, Motion
Cost: 5 Stamina per second.
Effect: For 10 seconds, the player is capable of moving at 150% Movement Speed.

Skill/Level: Coordination 3
Tactics Name: Extra Effort
Type: Motion (can only enhance Motion type Abilities)
Effect. For the Ability Duration, Movement Speed is raised by 50%. Ability Cost is raised by 5 per Second.

Skill/Level: Engineering 4
Tactics Name: Servo Support
Type: Motion (can only enhance Motion type Abilities)
Type: Ability Duration is enhanced by 3 seconds. For the Ability Duration, 5 Stamina per Second from the cost is converted to 7 Energy per Second cost.

The above examples allow a character to build several different types of Sprinting - from squeezing every last drop of effort with several Extra Effort Tactics, to a servo-operated running using several Servo Supports for characters that have enough Energy to bear the enhanced cost in exchanged to prolonged sprinting, or maybe combining both to offset the additional cost of Extra Effort with a different resource pool.

We're glad to be able to help clarify things for our community when we can, and encourage you to keep asking questions, and make your comments below. Please remember that these are examples, and as such may change before game's release.
~ m.

Cool, that's close to how I imagined that would work (and at the same time doesn't rule out what I was thinking).

So 1 little question remaining is will there be sprinting 1,2,3 and so on?  making a situation such as:

Skill/Level: Athletics 5
Ability Name: Sprinting
Type: Physical, Motion
Cost: 5 Stamina per second.
Effect: For 10 seconds, the player is capable of moving at 150% Movement Speed.
Tactic slots: 2

and

Skill/Level: Athletics 15
Ability Name: Sprinting 2 (or intermediate sprinting)
Type: Physical, Motion
Cost: 6 Stamina per second.
Effect: For 10 seconds, the player is capable of moving at 150% Movement Speed.
Tactic slots: 4

Which is 1 way I could see it happening, or is it more likely that abilities "lvl" like skills?  Same idea, but more dependent on use of that ability.

Great to get some more info on how skills will play out in the game, the complexity of it is one thing Im looking forward too.

I had to read this a little bit to really understand it.  But now I do and I like it very much.

Agreed!  It would be a very bad move and would contradict all of what they have made this game to be.

This makes me all giddy!

Awesome, thanks SO much!

So a tactic has nothing to do with a specific ability, a tactic modifies a TYPE of ability.  Extending that same example, you could even have a 'mech piloting' ability under the motion type and those same tactics could modify it.  You could have physical tactics that double up on the sprinting ability as well.  That's just...  friggin cool.

ah I see.  I have less of a problem with stacking, but I'm thinking of small % increases.  IE Extra effort would grant say 10% (instead of 50%), greatly reducing the exponential growth. At 10% stacking 4 times you hit 2.2x movement speed off the 1.5x base for sprint, with a cost of 25 stam/sec (straight addition handling of this would be 1.9x).  Assuming a reasonable limit for tactics on an ability and small % rate modifiers... eh we probably still won't agree.

I do agree that new/unique tactics running down the tree would be a lot of fun.

First off I like the way the skill tree is fleshing out! I looks very simple to understand but at the sametime there is also a complexity to it that will keep me experimenting!

Second I have to agree with Kavadas in his assesment of what was said by the op. but to each their own!