Author Topic: Fast-Travel, Vengeful Ghosts, Strategic Overlay, Citybuilding, Bosses, Etc  (Read 17921 times)

Offline x4000

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Re: Fast-Travel, Vengeful Ghosts, Strategic Overlay, Citybuilding, Bosses, Etc
« Reply #15 on: September 12, 2011, 07:47:50 pm »
You mentioned something along the lines of an interior map editor; Is this plans for increased modding support than in Aiwar? As I've always made fairly evident, I am a big fan of modding stuff, and being able to write some custom spells or mechanics, or even just tweaking around balance values is something I would look forward too.

Yes and no.  We're not having custom spells or monsters or stat tweaks, but we are making it easy to make interior room designs, NPC dialogue, character naming components, and even other "chunk script" type logic.  We're just not that interested in making larger modding platforms, as that sort of thing is really involved and basically involves making pretty open-ended runtime code extentions needed if it's going to really support anything interesting.

However then you mentioned multiplayer servers and all.. I am interested to see if you plan on having some sort of a 'official arcen server' where us forum guys can get together and do stuff or something.

Quoting myself from the (admittedly long) article above:  "One thing that I do want to mention, though, is that initially the beta won't include any multiplayer component. We got a rough version of that working early in the project, but it's been semi-neglected as the game has grown up since we've been trying to focus on the game itself. It's definitely not ready for showtime, and we don't feel like we can hit both an awesome single-player and multiplayer experience right from day 1 beta without delaying beta for a few months. Therefore, multiplayer is just what's being delayed a few months, and we're going ahead with the beta in the meantime. This doesn't mean our commitment to the multiplayer component is slipping at all, but this is the way in which we feel we'll be able to deliver the strongest experience to everyone -- single and multi player -- in the most reasonable amount of time."

To add to that: no, we've not played any multiplayer since maybe March or so.  We got it working, tested the barebones of it, but without movement smoothing it felt pretty jerky, even though it was functional.  Then we've reinvented the game a number of times in terms of mechanics, and that's long since broken the multiplayer.  That said, the base framework of the multiplayer has been there since March or whatever, and we've been consistently and conscientiously coding to it to make sure that when we re-enable multiplayer we have to do as little re-jiggering of it as possible.  Hopefully that re-enabling process will take under a week, but then it's a matter of adding the smoothing and getting players to help us find all the MP-specific bugs that are likely, etc.

I just don't want to do that in tandem with the initial beta, or set people up for expectations of flawless multiplayer on day one.  So we're focusing on the game experience itself first, and then going after multiplayer once that's settled down.  My best guess is that we're going to see a month or two of beta before we even mess with multiplayer at all, because people will keep us so busy during that time.  But we'll just see; if things get where we want them to be faster in solo play, and/or people are really clamoring for multiplayer earlier, then we'll get to it earlier.

Additionally, and another not atypical query of mine - Are you planning any pvp setups? I would find it interesting if the strategic stuff could become dual-party, in that multiple human settlements, in a multiplayer environment, could somehow declare war or raid each other for supplies and whatnot - In a large scale multiplayer server, this could cause some very interesting things to come about.
Edit: You mentioned in another post that theres no real pvp at the moment, which is understandable given your earlier games :(

Well, in a lot of senses PVP just doesn't really make sense here yet.  It's kind of like playing... I dunno, Zelda or Castlevania or something.  What would PVP even look like?  At any rate, until we get the core experience going fully, I don't see trying to over-extend ourselves into other game modes.  But the game is inherently cooperative in a lot of respects: there are no individual character levels or EXP, for instance: EXP and levels are shared amongst all characters in the world.  That said, everything ELSE is player-specific, including loadouts, crafting supplies, etc, so some interesting PVP could probably still be made around that.

I don't see PVP as an early priority, but it is very possible to attack other players at the moment, so it's not like it's impossible.  Unlike AI War, which basically has no good chance of ever having PVP just due to its nature, AVWW is more of a complete world and I really would be surprised if we don't have some robust PVP modes during the next year.  That's going to take some player feedback, though, because it's not a mode I've ever been interested in, myself.  And again, more of the core world and game needs to be done before PVP could be appropriately layered on, I suspect.

Another note on multiplayer; If some group of people (say, 4+ of them) all go fighting some giant megaboss dude, and end up failing miserably, resulting in all of their deaths.. their only real penalty is that they now have a group of vengeful ghost things roaming around?
If the group contained upwards of 8 people, would that spawn a single large group of ghosts, or multiple small ones?

On the first question: yes, for the most part, at the moment.  That would also really depress all the NPCs, and productivity then drops.  Also, your citybuilding interface starts filling up with more graves, too.  But what you have to remember is that it's still incredibly early and we're still just trying to get even a respectable number of spells and enemies in there, things like that.  These things take time.  We kept pushing the beta back and back and back, but at some point we have to get it into player hands.  But the experience isn't remotely complete in terms of what we want to do with the game, even though it is a fun thing already.  Once we hit beta, it's going to continue to grow daily, as you've seen with AI War in the past.  All of that is to say, we'll be looking at other interesting ways to make death meaningful, and also soliciting player ideas on things of that nature.

In terms of the second question, that's a good question and not one we've addressed yet.  If it were two or one groups, most likely it would still behave the same in terms of fighting them goes, because you'd still have to fight them both simultaneously if they were on the same tile.

Have you done much multiplayer playing? (does the game even support that yet? sounds an almost silly question to ask, but for some reason I feel like i need to ask it) you dont really mention that ' on the beta multiplayer server, xyz happened '

Keith and I have put in cumulatively maybe 30 minutes, 6 months ago.  It has been non-play-ready for the last 5 months.  I don't mean that in a harsh way, but I also don't want to set player expectations wrong.

And a final question; Have you considered having the player start at, say, level 5 or so? That way, if they really wanted to encounter stuff their level, they can, but if they find it challenging they could start messing around in level <5 areas for items/levels/whatever. Additionally this could mean that if you wanted to, you could strategically order your civilization to do stuff in level 1-3 areas or whatever, without too much risk.
It wouldnt really change anything you start with or can do (incrementing all the level requirements by 5 or something). If anything, its a mere cosmetic change for the player's level, but allowing you to more accurately portray areas that should be easier to do from the start.
Not really sure how it would work with your current difficulty system, but i mean, just a random suggestion.

It is something I was thinking about yesterday, yeah.  I kind of wonder if we should be doing this, too.  Some rebalancing of when things become available would then have to be done, but it wouldn't be a huge deal.  I dunno, I'll have to talk to Keith about it some, but it's interesting.  It would certainly be the friendliest thing to new players in a lot of respects.

Games of rpg -> civ building have always been something I really seem to enjoy for some reason - i really love the rpg style of play, and also really love the rts/rtt style of play.. Quite the hybrid genre, but its absolutely awesome if done right (see: Mount and Blade), so I am definitely looking forward to trying out this beta

Thanks!  It's packaging in a lot of Keith's and my favorite things, too.  It's just such a LARGE project -- really it dwarfs AI War in every respect.  That's why it has been so challenging to even get to beta at all, and there had to be a cutoff somewhere.  We basically wanted to cut it off when we had a small but fun Metroidvania experience, with the start of all the rest of our larger systems in place.  We're basically to that point now, and then we're just going through final polish and testing and stuff to get the first experience feeling tight and good.  Then we go to beta, and actually start the long process of actually finishing the rest of the game.  The worldbuilding aspects are incredibly mature at this point, as is the general underlying engine, physics, etc, and really multiplayer is 80% implemented even though it's not in a functional state.  In terms of spells and crafting and enemies, we're at something like 5% of where I want to be for 1.0, if that, and with the macrogame/strategic aspects we're at maybe 2%.

The good news is that most of the boring back-end stuff is done now, so for the bulk of what comes from now on, it's things like polish and actual gameplay expansion.  That seems like a pretty exciting time to be starting the beta, because it means that things will get added rapidly and daily, versus core mechanics or internal code shifting around a lot.
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Offline Endymion

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Re: Fast-Travel, Vengeful Ghosts, Strategic Overlay, Citybuilding, Bosses, Etc
« Reply #16 on: September 12, 2011, 08:16:10 pm »
Usually I'm not a huge fan of being able to change the difficulty level at any time, any chance of it being limited in someway to only in settlements or when dead or with some item?
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Offline mrhanman

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Re: Fast-Travel, Vengeful Ghosts, Strategic Overlay, Citybuilding, Bosses, Etc
« Reply #17 on: September 12, 2011, 08:25:23 pm »
I noticed in one of the screenshots an NPC refers to someone (an overlord or lieutenant, I presume) called HP5-3957.  Is the name just a placeholder, or is that how they will be named (or maybe just this one was named like that)?
« Last Edit: September 12, 2011, 08:31:40 pm by mrhanman »

Offline Lancefighter

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Re: Fast-Travel, Vengeful Ghosts, Strategic Overlay, Citybuilding, Bosses, Etc
« Reply #18 on: September 12, 2011, 08:44:28 pm »
Throwing around random comments at the moment more than anything serious game design;

On modding and all; its probably reasonable not to do that sort of thing quite yet. Its a pretty huge task to write the engine for the game in the first place, and as you said with aiwar, the way you create ships is all done in the code and all, making it fairly easy for you guys to edit. Not really allowing modding means that you dont have to worry so much about the user doing something stupid and all

"Well, in a lot of senses PVP just doesn't really make sense here yet.  It's kind of like playing... I dunno, Zelda or Castlevania or something.  What would PVP even look like? "

Remember that one part, in I think in the water temple somewhere? where you had to fight a dark version of yourself.. Itd be something like that id assume. :p

on pvp, id wonder how much would change if you add a set of factions, ie, the player is usually part of the 'player' faction, but when you join multiplayer settings you could join/create factions that share levels and all as you said, each with relations (like/dislike/neutral, blahblah). And yeah, youve made your basic stance on pvp in your games kinda clear, but its still something I cant stop asking for ;)

Deaths;
So yeah, the strategic aspect of the game will be adversely effected, but not really a direct setback to the players (excepting the whole respawning business). on the ghosts, I was also kinda wondering if the ghosts would maybe go after different settlements or something, or if their grouping/numbers somehow effected how strategic combat would take place.

And its really good to hear you got all the basic stuff worked out, getting into the content parts is certainly more entertaining, especially for the players :p

Are mantis and such sections set up for the beta? You have a tech support section already, so I was wondering if you had set the others up too.
Oh yeah, and we may need a new irc channel, directing people towards #aiwar for advice is kinda silly :p
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Offline c4sc4

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Re: Fast-Travel, Vengeful Ghosts, Strategic Overlay, Citybuilding, Bosses, Etc
« Reply #19 on: September 12, 2011, 09:28:42 pm »
Thus, in most cases, after about 10 dungeons down there are no longer any platforms at all.  And when that happens, the visual look of the dungeons turns very molten and lava-like.  You won't need to wear a heatsuit like in the lava flats -- probably -- at least you don't at the moment -- but it's a lot more hostile of an environment, and there's lava instead of water, etc.

I like the idea of these areas needing the heatsuit. It would give the heatsuit another use besides lava flats. Also, it would be cool if each dungeon down you go, the heat damage would increase.

To make matters worse, there's really more to the game than just the action-adventure difficulties, anyhow.  What happens if the vengeful ghosts form a party and attack your base settlement?  This happened to Keith's wife, and they wiped her whole town and made her think she was going to have to start a whole new world.

If you do wipe out a settlement, is there a way to bring npcs to that settlement to repopulate it or is it going to be desolate forever?

Therefore, when you start a new world it will now first ask you for a Strategic Difficulty and an Action-Adventure Difficulty.  If you aren't sure what you want, you can take your best guess and then change it at any time while you're playing.  You'll never have to start a new world just because your feelings on the desired difficulty level have changed.  But splitting out this difficulty lets people have a difficult strategic experience and an easy action-adventure experience, or vice-versa, or anything in between.

I thought you didn't want players to have to choose any settings before creating a world. I'm curious to see how this setting will play out though.

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Lieutenants are special bosses that aid the overlord.  Each lieutenant has their own evil outpost, which you can invade and destroy if you wish.  If you don't choose to do this, then when you attack the evil overlord in their lair, all the nearby lieutenants will come to join them.  Yikes!

So, how close is nearby? Is there a certain number of tiles away from the Overlord's lair that if there are surviving lieutenants then they will come and help?


I noticed in one of the screenshots an NPC refers to someone (an overlord or lieutenant, I presume) called HP5-3957.  Is the name just a placeholder, or is that how they will be named (or maybe just this one was named like that)?

It's probably a skelebot, they have weird alphanumerical names.

Offline x4000

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Re: Fast-Travel, Vengeful Ghosts, Strategic Overlay, Citybuilding, Bosses, Etc
« Reply #20 on: September 12, 2011, 09:29:19 pm »
Usually I'm not a huge fan of being able to change the difficulty level at any time, any chance of it being limited in someway to only in settlements or when dead or with some item?

Possibly... only doing it in settlements is actually pretty interesting.  Good idea!

I noticed in one of the screenshots an NPC refers to someone (an overlord or lieutenant, I presume) called HP5-3957.  Is the name just a placeholder, or is that how they will be named (or maybe just this one was named like that)?

That was an overlord, I think, but it was a Skelebot Giant.  All the skelebots have names (really serial numbers) of that sort, and it's not placeholder.  However, most bosses aren't skelebots, and they have names of a different sort that are a lot more interesting.  Don't worry, they don't all follow that pattern. :)

Throwing around random comments at the moment more than anything serious game design;

On modding and all; its probably reasonable not to do that sort of thing quite yet. Its a pretty huge task to write the engine for the game in the first place, and as you said with aiwar, the way you create ships is all done in the code and all, making it fairly easy for you guys to edit. Not really allowing modding means that you dont have to worry so much about the user doing something stupid and all

It's also just not something that we really are that interested in.  AAA games get released and then abandoned, and it makes great sense to have lots of modding, etc, there.  I just can't see myself putting in a bunch of work to add modding so that other people can alter the game, though; I really love having player ideas and submissions, but I also really like being able to tie it all together and to control the quality on it, etc.  I just didn't get into game development so that I could do a bunch of work so that other people could do what I'd rather be doing, is another way to put it. ;)

"Well, in a lot of senses PVP just doesn't really make sense here yet.  It's kind of like playing... I dunno, Zelda or Castlevania or something.  What would PVP even look like? "

Remember that one part, in I think in the water temple somewhere? where you had to fight a dark version of yourself.. Itd be something like that id assume. :p

Yeah, they did shadow link at the end of Zelda 2, also.  I mean, even right from the start you will be able to fight and kill one another (depending on how the server is set up), but there just isn't really a point to it at the moment.

on pvp, id wonder how much would change if you add a set of factions, ie, the player is usually part of the 'player' faction, but when you join multiplayer settings you could join/create factions that share levels and all as you said, each with relations (like/dislike/neutral, blahblah). And yeah, youve made your basic stance on pvp in your games kinda clear, but its still something I cant stop asking for ;)

I'm not opposed to PVP at all, really; I just don't personally have much interest in it, and when it conflicts so much with the core design (as it does with AI War), it's hard to justify.  But you may recall that Tidalis has quite a bit of PVP options, because it's well suited to it.  I think that AVWW is also probably well suited to it, but we just have to get a lot more of the solo game finished before it makes sense to start tacking things like PVP on.  Doing factions is a pretty interesting idea, although having them share levels would be really a complete change of the world and I doubt we'd do that.  The Civilization Level is pretty much as central to this game as AIP is to AI War, and I don't see that changing.  I also don't think it's a bad thing if everyone has about the same general level.  Ideally, the actual loadout and equipment that players would choose would differentiate them enough to make the PVP battles interesting and varied.  That variety isn't there yet, though, so that's kind of what I mean in terms of having to put the horse before the cart; getting more of the central game there before PVP can really work.  If you share levels and the variety of spells isn't that large, then there's not much to do yet.  Spell variety has to really blossom first.


Deaths;
So yeah, the strategic aspect of the game will be adversely effected, but not really a direct setback to the players (excepting the whole respawning business). on the ghosts, I was also kinda wondering if the ghosts would maybe go after different settlements or something, or if their grouping/numbers somehow effected how strategic combat would take place.

Yeah, at the moment the ghosts go after the nearest settlement to them.  In terms of "strategic combat," there's no such thing at the moment: your group of players will have to hunt them down in adventure mode to prevent the ghosts from doing strategic damage against you.  The strategic combat is something that we have a lot of plans for, and actually a partial implementation of, but if I talk about that in advance of him completing it, Keith would kill me. ;)

And its really good to hear you got all the basic stuff worked out, getting into the content parts is certainly more entertaining, especially for the players :p

Same here!

Are mantis and such sections set up for the beta? You have a tech support section already, so I was wondering if you had set the others up too.
Oh yeah, and we may need a new irc channel, directing people towards #aiwar for advice is kinda silly :p

I haven't set up mantis yet, but I will shortly before beta.  The other irc channel is hosted by someone else, and specifically an RTS-themed place, so I don't think we'll be able to start another one of those with them.  At some point we were going to look at doing hosting of our own of IRC, for AI War and so forht, but it's definitely not a free thing to do and so it's not something I plan to address soon.
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Offline x4000

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Re: Fast-Travel, Vengeful Ghosts, Strategic Overlay, Citybuilding, Bosses, Etc
« Reply #21 on: September 12, 2011, 09:34:02 pm »
I like the idea of these areas needing the heatsuit. It would give the heatsuit another use besides lava flats. Also, it would be cool if each dungeon down you go, the heat damage would increase.

Yeah, I've been thinking that might be where I ultimately take it, although the idea of incremental increases had not occurred to me.  That would actually give a function to higher-tier heatsuits, too, if the heat was increasing beyond the default capacity of these suits.


To make matters worse, there's really more to the game than just the action-adventure difficulties, anyhow.  What happens if the vengeful ghosts form a party and attack your base settlement?  This happened to Keith's wife, and they wiped her whole town and made her think she was going to have to start a whole new world.

If you do wipe out a settlement, is there a way to bring npcs to that settlement to repopulate it or is it going to be desolate forever?

You should be able to repopulate it, but since "invite NPC" currently requires an NPC to do the inviting, that's obviously problematic.  I've been meaning to mention that to Keith, will do so now. ;)

Therefore, when you start a new world it will now first ask you for a Strategic Difficulty and an Action-Adventure Difficulty.  If you aren't sure what you want, you can take your best guess and then change it at any time while you're playing.  You'll never have to start a new world just because your feelings on the desired difficulty level have changed.  But splitting out this difficulty lets people have a difficult strategic experience and an easy action-adventure experience, or vice-versa, or anything in between.

I thought you didn't want players to have to choose any settings before creating a world. I'm curious to see how this setting will play out though.

Yes, that has very much been my goal.  But this is probably the most fundamental question we could ask, and it's hit the point where it's clear it's needed.  I have alpha testers complaining about the same enemy being laughably easy or impossibly hard, so it's pretty clear that there needs to be a skill level adjustment beyond just the region levels.  But I don't ever expect to add any more options to the start of the game: anything about how the world functions, or games-within-games, or special storylines, or whatever, would all be done through the game world itself.

Lieutenants are special bosses that aid the overlord.  Each lieutenant has their own evil outpost, which you can invade and destroy if you wish.  If you don't choose to do this, then when you attack the evil overlord in their lair, all the nearby lieutenants will come to join them.  Yikes!

So, how close is nearby? Is there a certain number of tiles away from the Overlord's lair that if there are surviving lieutenants then they will come and help?

At the moment it's any of them within 20 world tiles.  Overlords tend to be at least 45+ tiles apart, so they have a chance of actually sharing some lieutenants.
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Offline Lancefighter

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Re: Fast-Travel, Vengeful Ghosts, Strategic Overlay, Citybuilding, Bosses, Etc
« Reply #22 on: September 13, 2011, 03:40:24 am »
Honestly its not even AAA games that involve modding; The more AAA you get, the more pick up, finish, move on it gets. Look at something like Mass Effect.. that definitely has enough A's, but id hardly call it a great game to mod.
No, the ones that primarily focus on modding are the ones that are a step or two below that; Look at Egosoft - Their entire core philosophy is designed around the fact that their games are an engine for players to eventually create their own scenarios in. That they provide base content to begin with is only to provide the end user with examples of how their engine works. (i might be exaggerating slightly here)

games like

I dont think pvp conflicts with the core design of aiwar at all :( itd just be a separate gamemode, labelled 'pre-ai takeover', which would involve the humans fighting other humans. Doesnt that fit the backstory completely?

Also, tidalis is like a puzzle game >.< not exactly the epitome of player vs player engagements


And well, if theres going to be strategic movement and all, theres GOT to be strategic combat! i mean, resolving everything by tactical combat just gets tiresome after awhile..
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Offline Nalgas

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Re: Fast-Travel, Vengeful Ghosts, Strategic Overlay, Citybuilding, Bosses, Etc
« Reply #23 on: September 13, 2011, 05:09:02 am »
The strategic combat is something that we have a lot of plans for, and actually a partial implementation of, but if I talk about that in advance of him completing it, Keith would kill me. ;)

And he would do it strategically, no doubt.

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Re: Fast-Travel, Vengeful Ghosts, Strategic Overlay, Citybuilding, Bosses, Etc
« Reply #24 on: September 13, 2011, 06:53:05 am »
Yep!
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Offline Hunam

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Re: Fast-Travel, Vengeful Ghosts, Strategic Overlay, Citybuilding, Bosses, Etc
« Reply #25 on: September 13, 2011, 08:16:22 am »
I haven't been actually excited about a new game in years. I'm eagerly awaiting beta but even more interested in seeing how this will continue to develop over time. Can't wait to get my hands on it!

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Re: Fast-Travel, Vengeful Ghosts, Strategic Overlay, Citybuilding, Bosses, Etc
« Reply #26 on: September 13, 2011, 10:08:02 am »
I do like a good macro game. Stuff like the strategic aspects of X-COM and the UFO series, as well as the castle from Neverwinter Nights 2 and the fort in Fort Zombie. More games need stuff like that. Funny, but I can never get into the more complex pure citybuilding games, but smaller scale stuff within another game are inevitably my favourite part of the game.

In terms of strategic difficulty, I'm assuming that higher difficulty makes stuff like settlement buildings take longer, but are there any time-sensitive elements to provide pressure? Some disincentive to setting an NPC to constructing a building and then skipping multiple turns just so it will be finished? I'm assuming strategic units play into this, but if you personally have to deal with them, how does the advancement of settlements etc. interact with them?

Have you considered roving 'windstorms' on the strategic map that you could be caught in in the same manner as when the counter ran out in the old system? They could be unpredictable and harder to avoid both at higher difficulties and when far from a shelter.

I'm not sure about roads being built automatically, I think if they provide a benefit you should have to spend some time and/or resources to get them, so you have a decision to make as to where the most important routes should be. Or maybe they should slowly appear over time, but you can send an NPC to build them faster.

I definitely approve of the fast-travel and anti-corpse-run mechanics, they seem well thought out to avoid unnecessary annoyances.
(See, not just a nitpicking moaner!)

I also like the vengeful ghosts and the morale effects from dying. Have you thought about giving NPCs a small chance of committing suicide when their morale hits rock bottom, and then another small chance of a suicide victim spawning a vengeful ghost even if they are protected by an Illari? This would be a big incentive to keep morale high.

Speaking of which, how difficult will morale be to keep up, and how big an effect does it make? Will you regularly see civilization grind to a halt if you don't actively do good things to help the settlements, or will it be all smiles and sunshine unless you seriously mess up?

With the separation of strategic turns and adventure timeflow, will there be a limit to how much or little you can do in adventure mode per turn?

I really like the prospect of managing your NPCs on a strategic level, and I'm looking forward to seeing how that develops and expands. I'm glad the strategic and adventure difficulties are separated, I'm pretty ham-fisted in actiony-type situations, but I like having to think when it comes to strategy. I'm sure there are plenty of people right across the spectrum of action and strategic skill who will benefit from this.

Roll on the beta! I'm mostly off work for the next 3 weeks, and I'm bored silly.

Offline x4000

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Re: Fast-Travel, Vengeful Ghosts, Strategic Overlay, Citybuilding, Bosses, Etc
« Reply #27 on: September 13, 2011, 10:25:44 am »
I haven't been actually excited about a new game in years. I'm eagerly awaiting beta but even more interested in seeing how this will continue to develop over time. Can't wait to get my hands on it!

Awesome!

In terms of strategic difficulty, I'm assuming that higher difficulty makes stuff like settlement buildings take longer, but are there any time-sensitive elements to provide pressure? Some disincentive to setting an NPC to constructing a building and then skipping multiple turns just so it will be finished? I'm assuming strategic units play into this, but if you personally have to deal with them, how does the advancement of settlements etc. interact with them?

I'm honestly not yet sure what all the strategic difficulty will affect.  For one thing, it will affect whether the strategic units can raze your starting settlement, or just really plink at it.  Beyond that is something that is more in Keith's area, and I don't think he's quite there yet.  In terms of skipping multiple turns at ago, the spawning of roaming monsters will also be tied to strategic difficulty, I think, and so trying to accelerate building too much in that way comes at a cost.  The important thing to bear in mind is that this whole strategic map stuff, while it's been planned for a really long time, is something that's only been really implemented at all in the last month, and it's incredibly embryonic yet. 

A lot of the answers to specific questions really have to wait until we can try out a number of the ideas we have, playtest them ourselves, get others to playtest them, and see how it evolves.  I don't want to say too much yet because honestly this side of the game is more Keith's area of responsibility, and neither of us want to make statements that could be construed as promises of a specific mechanic working a specific way later -- we want to let this evolve, with player input, throughout the beta and see what we come out with.

Have you considered roving 'windstorms' on the strategic map that you could be caught in in the same manner as when the counter ran out in the old system? They could be unpredictable and harder to avoid both at higher difficulties and when far from a shelter.

I thought about that quite a bit, actually, but it's a bit Zelda 2.  Which I like, but others probably wouldn't as much.  And at the moment, it's not possible to do realtime game simulation on the world map in the sense of dodging things and getting hit by things.  It's well, a map, at the moment.  The challenge is making all that stuff synchronous in multiplayer, which is something we always consider; so that would be a really, really major extension to the underpinnings of the game at the moment.

I'm not sure about roads being built automatically, I think if they provide a benefit you should have to spend some time and/or resources to get them, so you have a decision to make as to where the most important routes should be. Or maybe they should slowly appear over time, but you can send an NPC to build them faster.

Well, the roads give a small benefit, but it's nothing huge.  We might make them build over time later, but I'm not sure.  In terms of letting players directly build roads on the world map: that's definitely something we never want to do, because we don't want the world map to get too built-up looking.  The auto-roads are nice and sparse.

I definitely approve of the fast-travel and anti-corpse-run mechanics, they seem well thought out to avoid unnecessary annoyances.
(See, not just a nitpicking moaner!)

Hahah, I didn't think you were a moaner, but thanks. :)

I also like the vengeful ghosts and the morale effects from dying. Have you thought about giving NPCs a small chance of committing suicide when their morale hits rock bottom, and then another small chance of a suicide victim spawning a vengeful ghost even if they are protected by an Illari? This would be a big incentive to keep morale high.

I don't know that we're going to want suicide in the game, that really changes the tone in some ways.  The morale just affects productivity at the moment, but depending on how you build up your city in citybuilding, that improves the morale of folks.  Having a job, a place to live, etc, makes them happy.  People dying depresses them for a while, but it's not a permanent effect.  This is also in a rather embryonic state.

Speaking of which, how difficult will morale be to keep up, and how big an effect does it make? Will you regularly see civilization grind to a halt if you don't actively do good things to help the settlements, or will it be all smiles and sunshine unless you seriously mess up?

Morale starts pretty low, and it increases permanently as you provide access to housing, finished goods, and other things the NPCs like.  It gets depressed temporarily when there are deaths.  For the moment, that's it.  Embryonic! ;)  It will get more complex, but I'm not yet sure in exactly what of the many ways we've been considering will turn out to be final.

With the separation of strategic turns and adventure timeflow, will there be a limit to how much or little you can do in adventure mode per turn?

No, never.  That's something we definitely want to avoid.  This is an action-adventure game first and foremost, and you can go adventuring for as long as you like and completely ignore the macrogame side for infinite time, and it will be waiting there for you where you left it when you come back.  Aside from whatever ghost armies or whatever you spawned from dying during your adventure, of course. ;)

I really like the prospect of managing your NPCs on a strategic level, and I'm looking forward to seeing how that develops and expands. I'm glad the strategic and adventure difficulties are separated, I'm pretty ham-fisted in actiony-type situations, but I like having to think when it comes to strategy. I'm sure there are plenty of people right across the spectrum of action and strategic skill who will benefit from this.

Glad you like it.  I will say that it's really not possible to avoid playing the action-adventure game at all.  There are many things that you cannot accomplish without going out as the lone hero and beating in some heads and exploring around.  The macrogame stuff exists to augment that and aid that.  You can skip the macrogame stuff if you really really want to (though it would make everything blinder and annoying, like playing AI War with no scouts), but not the other way around.  But with the difficulty levels, you can set the macrogame to be harder and the action-adventure to be cheesy easy if you want.  Or in multiplayer, later, you could be the "macrogame guy" while others go out and do the adventuring, I imagine.  Not that the macrogame stuff is yet to the point where it could keep you busy fulltime, but that's where we intend to head with it.


Roll on the beta! I'm mostly off work for the next 3 weeks, and I'm bored silly.

We're going as fast as we can!
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Offline superking

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Re: Fast-Travel, Vengeful Ghosts, Strategic Overlay, Citybuilding, Bosses, Etc
« Reply #28 on: September 13, 2011, 01:57:17 pm »
It sounds a bit like you are trivialising failure and character death...


Offline x4000

  • Chris McElligott Park, Arcen Founder and Lead Dev
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Re: Fast-Travel, Vengeful Ghosts, Strategic Overlay, Citybuilding, Bosses, Etc
« Reply #29 on: September 13, 2011, 02:12:42 pm »
It sounds a bit like you are trivialising failure and character death...

In terms of player inconvenience: yes, absoulutely. This has more or less always been our goal. We don't subscribe to the punitive school of game design (despite what ai war players might think, heh). In terms of narrative and story: we're just getting warmed up, and this move is neutral or positive in terms of making you "feel" deaths in that sense.
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