Alternate/Bonus method for clearing wind from a region

[khadgar]

Instead of (or perhaps in addition to) tweaking how wind shelters are dropped to fix them being a bottleneck to progression, why not add another method for removing wind? Hear me out for a second.

Why not allow the player to remove wind from a single tile on the border of the wind by completing some small task? I would suggest something simple, like reaching the last chunk within a world map region, or perhaps killing a one of the surface bosses in the windstorm chunk. To avoid allowing the player to simply make a corridor of clear skies, this ability could be capped out at only a 1 or 2 tile radius boost to an existing windshelter, or throw in the caveat that to clear the wind in this manner, the tile in question must already be surrounded on at least 2 other sides by clear skies (or both options).

To show how this would impact wind shelter balance, take a look at these two images.

Two Additional Tile Radius - The purple border is the current windshelter radius. The orange border is the absolute maximum distance that the player could extend the clear skies to, tile by tile, if they wished to do so.
Minesweeper Method - The purple border is the current windshelter radius. The green circles are acceptable tiles to be cleared, due to having adjacent clear skies. The Red X are unacceptable tiles to be cleared, due to not having enough clear sky adjacency.

What do you all think? Would this help to reduce the bottleneck on obtaining windshelters? Is it a good solution?

[doubtful]

I really like this idea personally, and I think with some reasonable limits placed on it that it could be a well-received balance to the current "difficulty" (it's not that difficult) of finding wind shelters.

But I think this would better serve the game not as a balancing factor--which could simply be implemented as a tweak to probabilities in a patch--but as a feature to add some variety to our overall world map strategy.

Some form of time limit could be applied to affected time shards such that the effect would wear off quickly (POSSIBLY even in the middle of an expedition if you lingered too long!). Perhaps you could only be allowed to overextend a wind shelter's shell of protection to 1 or 2 tiles in the allowable regions you outlined, such that each wind shelter would only cover an addition tile or two. By which I do mean a tile or two, not an additional radius of 1 or 2, to clarify.

This might be just enough to give you that extra reach to save spending an additional wind shelter just to get to something that was SLIGHTLY out of reach.

However it were implemented, I like this idea. Giving us more tactical choices to handle a given problem on the world map adds some needed variety to the overall world-map-strategy side of things.  And I do think this would be a more interesting way of handling the current "bottleneck"--which, again, is really not that bad, but could still stand to be addressed.

On a sort of related note--at the risk of hijacking this thread :X--I'd like to see stormy areas possibly become a bit more hazardous/interesting again, but with an added reason to visit them to make them more interesting. :Db I sort of miss the old "beefed up enemy tier" approach, and currently wind shelter missions are a bit boring for all their (ever so slightly) increased danger/PITA factor. ^_^

[Misery]

I agree with this as well.   I've had lots of times where there's ONE specific tile I really want/need to get to that's at the edge of the storm, and I have to drop an entire shelter down JUST to get there.

With all of the new buildings both in secret mission rewards AND in the shop getting shelters isnt as easy as it used to be (though, that's probably a good thing, I thought they were TOO easy to get before).

This could be a nice thing, if the method of doing it is right.


I also agree with what Doubtful said about the windstorms.   Seeing more content related to these wouldnt be a bad idea.   They're a huge part of the game, but you only directly interact with them during a shelter mission.

[khadgar]

Making the ability temporary would be pretty neat, in some regards. It would alleviate a lot of the concerns about balance, because whatever you ended up doing would eventually revert to normal. It would give you time to go just grab that ONE THING you wanted out of a certain windy region, before the wind returned and the thing was now virtually inaccessible to you once again. However, at this point in time, there isn't usually any one thing you would really need from a region that you couldn't get more easily somewhere else. But, if there ever were...

[Blahness]

Making the ability temporary would be pretty neat, in some regards. It would alleviate a lot of the concerns about balance, because whatever you ended up doing would eventually revert to normal. It would give you time to go just grab that ONE THING you wanted out of a certain windy region, before the wind returned and the thing was now virtually inaccessible to you once again. However, at this point in time, there isn't usually any one thing you would really need from a region that you couldn't get more easily somewhere else. But, if there ever were...

A lieutenant or overlord lair one square out might be a good example.