One thing I just noticed, on this:
Having your position corrected (from being stuck) no longer causes falling damage, and sliding into tight spaces while ducking no longer causes you to get teleported to a valid position when you stand up.
In theory, a character without the miniature spell could duck through a crack leading to a lower area, and then be stuck.
In theory, a character without the miniature spell could duck through a crack leading to a lower area, and then be stuck.
That's not just "in theory"... exactly that just happened to me! I was messing around in a destroyed room, slipped down a crack, and then realized I had no way back out. I thought I was stuck for good until it occurred to me that I could get out by turning into a bat. Still, if I hadn't had those turn-into-a-bat scrolls, yeah, that would have pretty much been the end of that character.
I thought about this, and my thought is: yes, your character just died. If you jump down into an lava pool and can't get out in time, you've also just died. There are ways to prevent both from being a death sentence:
1. Carry bat scrolls or miniature with you when you're going around in tiny spaces (even miniature alone makes it possible to get stuck in a deep and narrow hole, so bat scrolls are certainly prized).
2. Carry wooden crates with you when you're near lava, so that you can ride those out.
Environ has just had a cataclysm and is a really dangerous place, right? That was the thing I liked least about the old warp mechanics, is that they were kind of a get out of jail free card. We put the abandon character button on the menu for a reason.
But in all seriousness, there's always been a bit of a rougelike influence to this game, and the old warp mechanics were covering a lot of that up. Not that I want to go over the top with this -- the well-prepared character is perfectly safe from small holes, as Jalen Wanderer demonstrated, but the ill-prepared character might die in an oubliette. Seems about right to me!
Just to clarify in the patch notes it states more chunks are now seeded in surface dungeons does this mean more chunks in a region? I'm confused as to what you mean when you say surface dungeon as I wouldn't class the overworld region chunks as dungeons.
Yes, the surface of the region. Interiors, undergrounds, and surfaces are all noted as "dungeons" in this game. Hence the dungeon map, etc.
First, the existence of a 10-upgrade cap seems juxtaposed with the potential longevity of characters: once you reach your 10, all further upgrade stones are completely useless for that character. Sure, they'll come in handy if you ever lose your character but there's no exciting choice there.
This is why so much work went into the glyph transfers scroll this past release. Also, the likelihood of most characters surviving to even their 10-upgrade cap is not very high. The expectation is that most characters will die well before that, and if you have one that lasts longer, then lucky for you.
Second, the fact that each path becomes exponentially more expensive (coupled with the 10-upgrade limit) seems to encourage generalist characters. By far the quickest way to power up your character will be to focus on mana and attack, with a few in health. Specialisation's payoffs don't become any more attractive as you upgrade but do become more expensive, so beyond a certain point you're either discouraging specialisation; or conversely penalising certain playstyles.
That's only partly true. The actual base stats of a character tend to be highly specialized. So if you choose one that is highly specialized already, but then add on some cheap upgrades to them before that stat gets too expensive, you suddenly have a powerhouse in that stat. And your choice is then to keep stacking there, making a really expensive and rare character, or to tempt you into just getting the cheaper things elsewhere.
In other words, the lower-price secondary lines are the candy that will rot your teeth. But coupled with the inevitability of death, they are potentially attractive versus blowing so many stones on a single character who might die soon anyhow.
I'd be in favour of making the upgrade cost curves of each path start at the same base (and maybe make health upgrades increase life by 50% or 75% rather than 100% for balance?) and encourage generalists as now for, say, three levels, but then inflate further upgrades in other paths relative to your specialisation.
I see where you're coming from, but I don't agree. We're intentionally encouraging the players into non-optimal choices here. That sounds counter-intuitive, but we do it a lot (with the players' blessing) in AI War, too. "Candy tech" is just that. A little bit is great, but too much wastes resources that would be better spent elsewhere. If there aren't individual lines of exponential increases, then there's no tension: everyone just stacks all their points into their favorite stat. It would be stupid in most cases to do anything other than stack one stat or another. Instead, there's a tension between what you should be doing and what the game makes it easy for you to do.
There's then lesser need for hard '10-upgrades-only' style caps, since once you get to 10 your costs are going to be pretty high to keep going in any one field, let alone trying to level all three. And it keeps interesting choices around for a lot longer, potentially.
The need for this is absolute, and is twofold. First of all, it keeps there from being runaway progress in any one stat (or in stats in general). And secondly, it keeps death at the forefront: if you have 20 upgrades into a character, at great expense, you'd be petrified of losing that character. Even 10 upgrades is pushing it a little, but I like that. As it is, you're penalized less for death because you have less far to fall.
And if you're so good that you're not dying, then you're instead heavily incentivized to upgrade multiple characters and have backups. Don't like having lots of stones hanging around when you hit upgrade 10? No problem! Glyph transplant to someone else of interest in your town, and start upgrading them. In the View Settlement Residents screen, you can see everyone's stats, and even how many upgrades they have had. Precisely to make this easy to do.
The only flaw I can see with that is that you might tie yourself into a single character specialisation with no escape short of having your character killed and starting over. Perhaps a really expensive Guardian Ability might then allow you to trade your stats back into stones so you can try a different path (and maybe the conversion is very inefficient, so you end up level 2 in all stats and only have 128 stones to show for it, or something).
Which reminds me, actually: I think simply renaming the "Abandon Character" button to "Retire Character" or similar would go a long way to alleviating guilt from having to strand a character for whatever reason.
You're forgetting about glyph transplant scrolls. Abandoning a character is killing them in the wild -- feel guilty.
If you want a new character to play with, then rescue some NPCs until you have someone promising, then just transfer the glyph to them in your town.
I've actually had some thoughts about a retirement function for a while, but right now I can't really see what you'd gain from it. Originally I had thought that you could get a bit of a happiness and/or morale boost, but since those aren't in anymore, that path won't work. Perhaps, after building a special building, you could have a retinue of characters? You retire one, and that one gets put into stasis, and you start anew with a fresh slate. You could then switch back and forth between the characters while in the settlement (or any settlement that has constructed that specific building).
I know you can kindof do this by using the glyph transfer spell, but that would require an available NPC that you actually want to play as, as well as a glyph transfer scroll, and it'd be trickier to move the characters between settlements.
Now you gain the ability to have multiple upgraded characters in a single settlement, which is pretty handy. And it incentivizes you to rescue lots of NPCs and build up your town more. That's more difficult right now (due to no secret missions) than it will be soon, I might add.
