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Hi! Thanks for your post. Our objective with LT is to make a new-straight port of the TTRPG ruleset (which we did not design), and needing to be adjacent to the objective for moving it (as well as the equal-to-your-speed limit on spaces it can move per turn) is important for game balance.

Generally, the design of the TTRPG is “Lancer is not a simulationist game” ie a lot of things that might make intuitive sense don’t work for the somewhat frustrating reason “because of game balance”. I think you’ve correctly identified the one system in the game that most breaks from that philosophy; the Cable Winch is a pile of one-off rules to have it be a quasi-roleplaying human-judgement sort of system, which makes it a big headache to implement on the computer. If anything, we may in the future be forced to prune it back/simplify it for Lancer Tactics so it doesn’t raise these sorts of questions.

Hope that makes sense!

“Manual” means it doesn’t expire naturally, as you may have discovered, so you’ll likely need to add a second trigger to clear the status yourself… which I am surprised to see we don’t already have an event for. Just added it to my to-do list.

I’m also modifying the “until start of next turn” timing to work for Shutdown like it does Exiled (e.g. fold space), which shared the same problem.

I don’t see a good alternative solution until the next monthly update drops; thanks for your patience til then.

Oops, we meant to put the link up on the main itch page once the Kickstarter work wrapped. Here’s the discord invite link, I’ll try getting the front-facing signage in place after I get back from vacation next week.

Thanks for all the kind words! I’m glad you’re having fun with the game.

Non-humanoid NHP features are on the to-do list. 👍👍

Thanks for the note! Yes, honestly COMP/CON is probably the best possible source of such a dictionary – maybe we could add a link to it from an in-game “help” button. I’ll make a note to look into it.

Oops yes the sentence is backwards here, but the behavior in-game is as you describe.

Just a heads up that we posted a new update yesterday that should have them fixed :)

Hello Eric! Thanks for reaching out; localization is still more than a year off for us, so I’ve been putting people on a list to reach out to when the time comes. Unfortunately, we’ll likely have PT-BR covered by an org that translated the core rulebook into Brazilian Portuguese.

Yes! We haven’t made any agreements with Massif to adapt their first-party modules, but we have two in the works that should be ready later this year. Generally our approach is going to be a modular “anthology-style” where you can bring a pilot through various shorter modules, to allow for easy incorporation of player-made content.

Those sitreps are currently bugged; I have a fix ready in the next update. Ty for your patience 🙏

I was able to reproduce a crash by trying to run a blank module with no Beats (created in the module editor) & nothing set up & that’ll now be fixed in the next update. How to use the module editor is still a bit of a wild west; we should really write up a guide for it.

Hi! Sorry you’re having trouble. I don’t see “Stolen wind” on the list of online modules – is it one you made yourself? I’d love to try and reproduce the crash.

That’s the indicator for “I kill with my heart” being charged, from the gunslinger talent.

IIRC you should be able to use jumpjets to get over them, or go the slow way by going through the river. I don’t recall if attacking terrain was a thing in this prototype.

Got a preview update out early, so this should now be fixed in v0.6.3

Hi! I believe that form is actually broken in the current build; it’ll be fixed in the update scheduled for next week.

Once it is fixed, there’s an “export” button in the COMP/CON pilot menu, which will bring up a panel that says “copy pilot data to clipboard”. Press that, then paste that text into that textbox in Lancer Tactics.

Yeah, Atlas is from Long Rim. From the FAQ:

Are there plans to add Kobold/Lich/Orchis/Worldkiller/other non-corebook mechs?

We’re focusing on getting everything done from the core rulebook solid before looking at expansion content. We have about a year’s worth of gameplay features in the backlog first (e.g. local multiplayer, campaign modules, mod support) that we should do before tackling adding more mechanical content.

Once that’s done with, I think adding stuff from other Lancer modules would be a very very natural progression, but we’d have to clear it with Massif & see what makes sense at that point.

But lancers wait for no dev team, and unofficial mods have already made a lot of progress in hacking in new mechs. If you’re hungry for Long Rim mechs & aren’t afraid of a little technical work getting them set up, check them out!

We have, essentially, made a player-facing visual novel engine & editor.

Downtimes are essentially text-based scenes (though there can be “dioramas” with all your mechs and pilots in a static scene as a background) where you can go through conversations, narrative sections, and do repairs and build changes.

We don’t currently have dice rolls/pilot triggers because most of their juice in tabletop comes from human flexibility and ability to make them interesting — straight percentage-based choices with shallow mechanical juice to back them up isn’t a good addition to a visual novel engine, according to my game designer eyes. Especially with such a ready save/load system available.

But there is support for player choices ticking clocks, and triggering various Twine-y narrative tracks based on persistent module state. So narrative choices and stuff happening on the combat layer can be checked and reacted to by the module creator in whatever way they’d like. I’d like to also add easy support for discrete mechanical Reserves to gain and expend, but haven’t had the opportunity yet.

NPC capability is what you already see in the combat editor, which is to say there’s limited control the mapmaker has to tell them what to do (“stay in this zone”) but the AI controlling all the different abilities is too unwieldy to give predictable personalities beyond those defined by the gear they hold.

Hi! I think it’s very unlikely we’ll ever fully include pilot mechanics in the combat layer in LT. I know the Titanfall fantasy is strong, but Lancer as-written does not support it well (ie running it RAW with a computerized OPFOR would not be a good experience) & running it at the table requires a lot of human judgement calls and flexibility from the GM, which is why we decided to not take a swing at it.

As seen in the tutorial, there’s basic support for scripted interactions with pilots which map/mod makers can utilize on a case-by-case basis, but that’s the creator taking the player experience into their own hands.

Easy fix, just updated it from 64 to 128. Logged the preview idea in our suggestions backlog.

Ah, I missed that reply! Will respond there. :)

Hi! That’s odd. Just to make sure, are you on the most recent version (0.6.1)? I believe 0.6.0 had some problems saving dossier lines but I thought it was resolved. And are you seeing problems with the base lines (“temperment” dropdown), or just custom ones?

Logged, I’ll take a look 👍

There should be a button in your action bar that switches control between the two, but on a quick test I can confirm that it’s stopped showing up. Logged as a bug to fix for the next release.

Interesting! I wouldn’t have guessed that zoom would be affected by UI scale. I’ll take a look, thanks for the note.

Strange! Well I’m glad it’s working now — let me know if you run into any more problems!

Hi – it sounds like your computer may need to run the game in Compatibility mode. Frustratingly, Godot made some updates that I’ve been unable to track down that cause problems on some video cards.

Questions/tips:

• Does the game run if you launch it from the compatibility shortcut (if you’re on PC) or when you download the compatibility .app (if you’re on mac)?
• Does it also crash if you open the map editor?
• Deleting instant_action_setup.json in your saves folder would have been another thing to possibly try, but it sounds like you already covered that.

It sounds like the game may be unable to save anything to disc for some reason. Does your user data folder path look significantly different from the one pictured? Spaces, other characters, or on a different drive from where the game is running?

Oh yikes! That’s very strange… I’m trying to think what might be going wrong. It sounds like it might not be able to save characters in the first place? If that’s what’s happening, it should show some errors in the logs after it happens. Could you send a copy of you logs to me?

1. go to the settings menu.
2. press this button to open your data folder:
3. attach all the files in logs/ to an email to olive@wick.works

I don’t think so? I’ve never heard of such a thing.

As discussed here, it may actually get more expensive once we release on Steam to cover their increased storefront cut. (That’s not to say we won’t later have sales)

But also: Steam does regional pricing and itch.io does not, so that may also affect the relative price once we get there depending on your currency.

Ah, I believe this is a very unfortunate typo in the book; from the semiofficial Lancer FAQ:

Core Bonuses Errata?

The text currently reads “These ranks can be in any combination – for example, you might have the rank I and rank II license for one mech and three different rank I licenses, equaling six in total.” This should instead read “These ranks can be in any combination – for example, you might have the rank I, rank II, and rank III license for one mech and three different rank I licenses, equaling six in total.” Each rank in a license counts once, regardless of whether it is rank I, rank II, or rank III of its respective license.

You can see it working like it does in LT in COMP/CON, as well.

It has a tutorial that introduces you to a lot of the basic mechanics (e.g. the action economy) but after that it currently dumps you into a sandbox with the rest of the mechanics e.g. character creation. My estimation is that the game as it stands is currently best suited for people:

• new to Lancer looking for an introduction to how combat works before playing with an in-person group
• who are experienced with Lancer looking for a sandbox to test out builds or get Lancing out of their system on their own
• who are down to explore the UI and learn the deeper mechanics though tooltips and experimentation

It’s in the category of “niche mechanic that would require an extremely outsized amount of work to get working RAW and also human judgement to arbitrate”, which makes it a peer to e.g. on-foot pilot combat which we’re skipping for that reason. (Cascading also falls under this umbrella but it’s cool and interesting enough that we would like to include that)

It’s low priority, but it’s possible we could end up making an extremely stripped-down version of Prepare that hedges out most of the exploits you can do with it (such as tech attacking off-turn to extend applied status durations). The rough idea I have is something that’s just “if an enemy enters this weapon’s range, skirmish at them with it”.

You’re not missing anything! Large-scale terrain changes were not something I was thinking about when building out the map system. Adding and removing blocks and setpieces isn’t currently supported by the trigger system. I’ve been thinking all day how I’d now go back and add it, but it’d be some pretty major retrofits. Most likely approach would be adding a trigger that can add/clear a certain kind of setpiece to/from specified tiles. I’ll make a note to explore that but it might be a while.

For second issue – I recently added functionality to the “emit trigger signal” event where if you feed a bunch of units into its “array” slot, it will emit that signal for each given unit. This is somewhat crude, but does allow you to then have another 1-unit trigger to respond to it and e.g. add invulnerability. There’s not a good example of it in-game yet and it hasn’t been thoroughly tested, but that’s what I’d try.

Sorry I don’t have more answers to offer beyond that atm!

Haha I also self-sniped myself by getting caught up writing the barks. It’s such a fun exercise.

The current interpolated values are: mech_name mech_frame pilot_name callsign

I’ll make a note to look into giving more flexibility & visibility into who you can refer to in the barks! I think the reason I defaulted it to only one possible unit was to not have to handle people trying to use like target_callsign in a bark type with no target information (like deploying). But that should be fixed with better viz, now that I think about it.

Glad you’re having fun :)

I’m told that that’s a footgun; while nothing RAW specifically bars it, doing so is a no-op and it should never be able to do that bonus damage. So adjusting the rules in LT to match will include a UI update that disallows doing so.

Cascades are on the todo list (no time estimation; they’ve been low priority since they’re both somewhat niche and potentially a lot of work). Shutdown/boot up will be a lot more relevant once we have cascades so I expect we’ll add them together.

We made the call pretty early on to not include the mechanics for pilots. On the RP side, they’re too open ended and narrative for a direct computer adaptation. On the battle side, they present a few key problems:

1. are honestly pretty half-baked and while can result in cool moments (we once had a pilot sacrifice themselves by jockeying the boss Ace over a pit and doing an Ahab thing) require a lot of mechanical fiddling for a niche payoff that relies a lot on human storytelling that cpus can’t do.
2. they allow for any character to for-real die in any combat (rather than ejecting safely), which makes building narratives a lot more tricky. Castigate presents a similar problem but I think we’ll solve that by having named characters say “no” if you try to put them in a spicy manticore.

Is this using the Lancer system under the hood? How true is it to tabletop Lancer, mechanically?

We’ve managed to stay extremely close to the TTRPG ruleset! You can even import characters from COMP/CON. Some of the biggest differences we’ve had to make for the sake of the adaptation are:

1. Flying is a on/off status that puts you +3 above the surface instead of free elevation control.
2. You have two “action points” instead of an explicit quick+quick/full; in practice this ends up being extremely similar to tabletop, minus some restrictions (eg you have more movement flexibility in between your attacks while Barraging).
3. We had to limit brace triggering to not prompt-spam you each time you take damage. Currently it gives you the option to brace whenever you’d otherwise be structured/stressed or if would take over half your health in one hit.
4. We’re using Kai’s NPC rebake project instead of the CRB NPCs; this was hotly debated but through the discussion we decided that it’s a dramatic improvement in experience while being a light enough touch that it doesn’t compromise tabletop compatibility.