I was thinking of some handy way to give the player more freedom in his character positioning and overall map control. Until now, it was mandatory to place physically weak characters ( Mages, archers, ... ) somewhere sound and save - behond allies, most of the time.
Placing someone in front of someone else is not really good character interaction and does not give much options at all, so I implemented shields.
(animation is still crude, sorry! :D )
Shields are another learnable 'tactic' in Zirkonia ( Tactics define the characters behaviour on enemy turns: for example, 'aggressive' will lead to counterattacks and 'defensive' will reduce the overall damage taken).
A character will protect his 2 sideway fields from any damage, even long range archery. But just from the front: characters on protected fields can still be damaged from behind or the sides.
For now, enemies can still pass through protected fields: They do not stop movement at all. Maybe in the future?
Each attack against the shield character will exhaust his pool of focus points ( points used for skills and passive actions on enemy turns), rendering this tactic useless at 0. Still. I'm not really happy with this, as this does indeed implicates that you have to break through shields with raw force all the time. Not fun, I think.
For now, I'm going back to character artworks!
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