These last few sprints, I have taken to focus on adding a new piece type, the Ranged Enemy. This ranged enemy has twice the range of the melee piece, significantly higher damage, but much lower fire rate and health. They are essentially glass cannons that sit in the background while the melee piece fight in the middle, sniping them from the sidelines.
Where the melee enemy is the more intensive barbarian of the two pieces...
The ranged enemy is both visually and mechanically different so players can see them as alternative threats to build their formations around.
Another feature that has been updated is pawn tracking. Now, rather than moving towards the last known location of a piece, piece live search for others. This is considerably better for gameplay as it is clearer to see what piece a pawn is moving towards and why. To do this, I had to rewrite the MoveTo task from Unreal's base. The original movement task was based on the vector of the target and did not update until that target was reached. My new move to blueprint uses Unreal's AI Move To function, with values live input from the behavior tree. Primarily, the target to move to isn't a location, but rather the actor itself. This leads to a more accurate movement system similar to other games in the genre.
