Full Invasion: Osiris - "The Next Stop" news

It's been almost a year since Full Invasion: Osiris released, and it feels like it's gone by in a flash. The community playing Osiris remains active to this day, and we've had a lot of support coming our way over the months. We'd like to thank each and every one of you for your help so far. Without the community we have we wouldn't still be running this mod.

After we worked on several smaller patches in the first months after Osiris released, real life issues took hold of both Borridian and me, forcing us to put development of Osiris on the backburner. In this time, however, we've had the opportunity to think about the main issues that the mod has right now which are holding it back. There are several parts of Osiris that receive very vocal criticism, and though part of our community stands by the current design, we agree that there are areas where Osiris can be improved significantly. Some parts of the criticism we cannot address, as we either fundamentally disagree that another option would be better, or Warband makes it impossible for us to make such changes, but some other parts we want to address in the next big patch that we are working on. I would like to go over a few of these in this post, to tell you all what we've been working on, and how we aim to improve the mod with them.

Recruit classes and the cost of death

One of the features of Osiris that has slightly missed its mark from the very first version of the mod was the addition of Recruit classes. Recruit classes were intended as the first classes for players to pick up that were cheaper than Soldier classes, but had worse gear and slightly worse stats to compensate. Thought Recruits were used quite a lot in the early months of Osiris' lifetime, once players got more proficient at the mod, playing as a soldier class without any armour became the standard, and people had little reason to pick Recruit classes any more.

Somewhat related to this, an issue that especially newer players struggle with is the cost of death. Disregarding the time it takes to respawn (I'll get to that in a bit), dying sets you back several thousand gold if you do so at an inopportune moment, making saving up for better classes a tough struggle.

To tackle both of these issues in one go, we've decided to implement the following changes in Osiris 1.1:

• All gear available to Recruit classes will have its cost halved (gear that is available both to Recruit classes and other classes only get the discount if a Recruit buys them).
• When dying as a Recruit class, all gold invested in the class' equipment is refunded. Gold spent on random boxes and quivers remains lost.

Ranged weapon gold gain

Full Invasion: Osiris has its items split into two categories when it comes to gaining gold: melee items and ranged items. Hitting a bot with a melee weapon gives you 45 gold, killing a bot with a melee weapon gives you 120, and hitting or killing a bot with a ranged weapon gives you 100 gold. In theory this sounds about right; we gave ranged weapons more gold on hit to ensure that players would be able to easily pay the cost of refilling their quivers and keep up with melee players in the meantime. The issue with this system is that some weapons have a dramatically higher rate of fire than others, causing those weapons to gain gold a lot faster than the slower ones. Players using crossbows or firearms (outside of shotguns) were left in the dust, unable to keep up with players using faster weapons.

One option we would have liked to use was to check how much damage a hit did, and base the gold gain on that. However, due to limitations in Warband, we can only see the damage a weapon does before the armour of the bot you hit gets taken into account. This would cause bots with high armour values to give out a lot more gold than they should. This option was therefore not a possibility.

Though we like how the current system makes it fairly easy to know in advance how much money you will get, we chose to further differentiate between weapon types in order to make sure ranged weapons had a more even gold gain, which should help incentivise the use of weapons that before were slow to gain gold.

• The mod now differentiates between melee weapons, bows, crossbows, firearms, fast throwing weapons, slow throwing weapons, shotguns, and magic weapons.
• The gold gain for melee weapons, bows, slow throwing weapons (throwing weapons with a speed rating under 100), and magic weapons is unchanged.
• Crossbows now give 200 gold per hit or kill.
• Firearms (except for shotguns) now give 300 gold per hit or kill.
• Fast throwing weapons (with a speed rating of 100 or higher, mostly daggers) now give 70 gold per hit or kill.
• Shotguns now give 80 gold per hit (this is per pellet, so if most pellets of a shotgun hit, it will still give more gold than a standard firearm).

Respawn times

Another major gripe that people have with the mod is the time it takes to respawn after you die, especially in the late game. Since the final waves of the game can take over 20 minutes per wave to finish, that means that sometimes players have to wait for over half an hour before they can respawn. That is not fun for anyone involved.
Most of the feedback we have received on this issue have called for the respawn system to change so that players spawn at the end of every wave, rather than two waves after they die. This is something we are very hesitant to change, however, since it would mean the game has to be balanced around the fact that waves are supposed to kill every player in a single wave. The current system relies more on grinding the players down by killing a bunch of players one wave, then sending a lot of bots at the remaining players the next wave.

We currently only have two (related) tentative changes planned to address the time it takes to respawn, since from what we have seen, the absurdly long respawn times are most out of hand during the final waves. If we find out this is still not enough, we have several other plans to help address this issue.

• The amount of bots that spawn per wave now maxes out at wave 24. This means that the amount of groups that spawns no longer increases every wave after that, cutting out about 5 groups on average per late-game wave.
• Reduced the size of several late-game boss waves to match the new amount of bots in the surrounding waves.

Quality of life changes

There are several small issues in Osiris that, over the course of its life, add up to become quite an annoyance to our playerbase. In response to some of these issues we're adding some quality of life changes that should help smooth out the experience:

• A new kind of poll has been added that teleports one random bot back to its spawnpoint. This poll has a timer of 10 seconds to make sure it's speedy, and doesn't have a cooldown, so it can be used right after the previous poll has gone through. This should help get rid of bots that are stuck in an inaccessible part of the map without needing the help of a server admin.
• An option has been added to the Escape menu that allows you to "refresh" your character, essentially killing it on the spot and immediately respawning it. This feature can only be used during the setup phase of a wave to prevent abuse. This feature can be used to get rid of the "My character can't switch weapons or swing his weapon" bug, remove arrows that are stuck in your body, and more. There are a few things to keep in mind with this feature:
  • Due to how hero ability cooldowns work, you can only use this feature if your ability is not currently on a cooldown.
  • If you have weapons with ammo on you, 300 gold is taken as a refill cost. A further 100 gold is taken per shield that you have on you, as a repair cost.
  • If you use this feature while sitting on a horse that you cannot normally spawn with, you will respawn without that horse.

Though we have a lot more changes in the works (including some additions to existing factions), these are the major ones we wanted to talk about today. Most of all, we would like to hear what you think of these changes. We have had a lot of discussion with the community about these issues, and this is the first time that we detail our plans to tackle these issues. Also, none of these changes are set in stone. If we find out (perhaps with persuasion of the community) that some of these changes are too much or not enough, we now still have the time to address them.

As always, you can find us on our Discord server, where the community will likely be discussing these proposed changes. If you like the mod, please consider supporting us on Patreon, so we can continue to pay for the servers we run.