With a Squeeze of the Trigger

All physical conflict in Ward Thirteen revolves around ranged combat, with a  focus on tactics, strategy, and resource management. All battles are battles of attrition, and it’s not uncommon for a battle to take place over 3-5 smaller fights. While most games force you into a situation where the only way to leave combat is to either kill, or die, we constructed combat around the idea that not every fight has a definite end.

Types of Firearms

While your skills, abilities, equipment, ammunition, and attachments play a large role in your combat niche, arguably it all boils down to what you’re currently holding. Firearms come in four flavors: Pistols, Shotguns, Rifles, and Automatics. Pistols are the most balanced weapons, with average rates of fire, accuracy, caliber, and medium range. Rifles boast incredibly high accuracy, high critical chance, low rates of fire, and focus on longer ranges. Automatics are great for suppressive fire, utilizing much higher rates of fire, and lower calibers. Finally, shotguns are close range weapons that deal incredibly high amounts of damage, with a slow rate of fire, however are nearly incapable of scoring a critical hit.

Reloading

As mentioned before, Ammunition plays a large role in the combat effectiveness of your current weapon. Each weapon has a specific magazine that it uses, and are be filled with any caliber ammunition it can accept. When reloading, you drop your empty mag into your inventory, and use the first full magazine of the same ammo type you’re using. In addition, you can force a full reload by holding the reload key. This action takes much longer than a tactical reload, and places ammunition one round at a time into your current magazine.

Pimp My Rifle

Weapons have three types of attachments: Front, Rail, and Body. Each weapon can have 2 attachments, but only one of each type. Attachments do have a few limitations, such as that Pistols can only have a single attachment, and Shotguns cannot equip sights. Any bonuses granted by sights are negated while in motion, and return after 2 seconds of standing still. This system allows you to tweak your weapons to fit your perfect role. A LMG with a Bi-pod and a Recoil Pad can lay down some serious cover fire. Likewise, you can alter a weapon to fill a role not initially intended; such as taking a Long Range rifle, installing a Lighter Bolt, and adding a Reflex Sight, quickly converting it into a medium range carbine.