Hey Everyone, Team Stonehearth has made some good progress this week on the last of our three new combat classes. At long last, here is The Archer, courtesy of Albert and Yang.
The Archer
Recap from the video:
- Archers are the ranged damage leg of Stonehearth’s new tank/dps/ranged triangle
- Promote a footman to an archer using a bow crafted by the carpenter
- As the archer levels up, their damage output, range of fire, and speed of fire all increase
- Archer arrows also have armor penetration, making them very useful against heavily armored monsters
- Archers naturally hang back from the front lines. If they do get into melee they can defend themselves, but they won’t last nearly as long as a footman or knight, so be sure to have a melee class on hand to keep the monsters’ attention off your archers
- If archers find monsters chewing on them, use the individual movement commands to train the archer and monster past a knight, so the knight’s high aggro score can draw the monster off
- In addition to getting cooler bows, archers also equip quivers of various levels. Quivers are crafted by the weaver, and add effects, like fire or poison to the archer’s arrows.
- Low level quivers offer only one effect. High level quivers offer multiple. Toggle between effects using a button on the quiver’s unit frame.
- Create a party of knight+footman+archer+cleric to see Stonehearth’s combat as we originally envisioned it: as a team effort, with each person automatically doing their part!
- Gameplay aside, the ranged combat was quite algorithmically complex to implement, and Albert is still tweaking the AI and the mathematical equations that guide the design.
- Archers must have line of sight to their enemies in order to attack. This means no shooting blindly over walls or into the air and hoping the arrow hits–but we figured that was more a army-level tactic, and we wanted Stonehearth to focus on squad-tactics.
- Archers need to be able to intelligently find line of sight to their enemies. Originally, this meant running towards their enemies, now it means sometimes shuffling in unintuitive directions to hopefully see around obstructions.
- Albert is still working on a way of making the “defend area” command work better for archers; right now they are very prone to running off of roofs in pursuit of enemies that are smart enough to slip around the corner or behind a tree.
- As a fallback, you can always use the individual movement commands to reposition archers if their AI is not up to the task of finding the opponents.
Hopefully, archers, along with knights, clerics, and the advanced footman, will be in your hands on the Steam Unstable branch soon! We really cannot wait to hear what you think of them, and how they play for you. 
Other Updates
This has been a very chaotic week around the office: we’ve gotten all sorts of new hardware, and upgrades to all of our networking equipment, internet, and more! The entire team will also be down in Los Angeles all next week, doing new hire orientation. This means that our schedule for this week and next week is altered as follows:
- Tonight’s stream will happen at the usual time, 6:00pm PST
- Tomorrow, Wednesday, the stream will happen a little late, at 10:00am, PST
- The stream on Thursday will be cancelled, as we will all be at the airport at that time
- All streams AND Desktop Tuesday next week are cancelled, as nobody will be in the office
- Streams and Desktop Tuesday will resume on Tuesday, 4/26, at the usual time. Yaaay!
- If we miraculously manage to get a stream setup while we’re away, we may do a surprise stream! But we don’t know enough at this time to schedule anything.
With any luck, we will get a build to Steam Unstable before we go, so you can bang on it and we can tweak things based on all your feedback when we return. We will miss you all while we’re away, we will check our discourse forums and the comments here whenever we can, and we already can’t wait to be back, working on more Alpha 16 surprises for everyone.
