Fix The Anachronisms (Mission)

[x4000]

True, if you're coming at them on a later tier, that's more punishing.  If you're finding them as secret missions, you can't retry -- but on the world map you can.

[Donfish]

The clockwork probes, incidentally, only ever come from one time period: the industrial revolution.  Amoebas and espers and bats are the main ones that come from a variety of time periods.

Now I'm confused . I'd swear I just saw clockworks, in fact I just checked and took a screenshot, had a clockwork probe in Ice Age Woods  Ice Age (9th M), so this is what I was basing my choices on. I know I saw Skelebot Snipers and Dwarfs in multiple ages too. I can post the screenie on Mantis if needed.

Thanks x4000

[BobTheJanitor]

Now I'm confused . I'd swear I just saw clockworks, in fact I just checked and took a screenshot, had a clockwork probe in Ice Age Woods  Ice Age (9th M), so this is what I was basing my choices on. I know I saw Skelebot Snipers and Dwarfs in multiple ages too. I can post the screenie on Mantis if needed.

As your civilization progress increases, the monsters will wander further and further outside of their standard zones. So if you're on tier 3 or 4 or 5 everything starts to get pretty homogenized.

Actually I'm starting to feel like this effect may be a bit too pronounced. Especially since (at least for my play style) you end up spending the bulk of your time at tier 5 powering up to fight the overlord. I don't get much of a feeling that any monsters belong in any specifica zone, but more that everything goes everywhere.

[Terraziel]

Actually I'm starting to feel like this effect may be a bit too pronounced. Especially since (at least for my play style) you end up spending the bulk of your time at tier 5 powering up to fight the overlord. I don't get much of a feeling that any monsters belong in any specifica zone, but more that everything goes everywhere.

I have to say that migration is something I feel should be cut down once more types enemies are in, whilst on one hand it does add needed variation, it also adds a feeling of homogeneity to the regions, I find I enjoy the low tiers of the continent most because the regions "feel" different.

On an incidental note, I don't think i have let a continent get to tier 5 in ages, simply because once I have all my tier 5 spells i just go straight for the lieutenants\overlord

[Donfish]

Yeah that's kind of the thing,  I never really got a feel for what lives where before they all started mixing up hence the confusion on the anachronism missions. Now that I can take this into account and other hints on this thread I should be able to solve one.

[LintMan]

I just played one of these missions for the first time and was quite confused:

- I had no clue that I wasn't supposed to kill the "non-anachronisms".  There were a bunch of background water towers I could destroy and thought I was looking for stuff like that in addition to the out of place monsters I was supposed to track down.    (More explicit directions would be very helpful for future noobs.)

- Right after I started the mission I saw the "Fix 10 anachronisms" message at the top of the screen, but it very quickly went away and I was left going around the cave killing all the monsters and destroying the water towers, but I never saw the count again, or any other messages.  Finally, the cave was cleared out, but nothing happened, and I had no clue what was supposed to happen until I came on this forum and read this thread.

Apparently, I must have killed a non-anachronism monster right at the start, but it never gave me the "defeat!" message, so I just kept on clearing out the entire cave.

Anyway, after reading this thread, I realized what happened and hoped to restart the mission as x4000 mentioned, so I exited the cave, warped out of the mission, and the mission building was gone.  This was definitely a world map mission, but I only got the one (failed) chance at it.

[KDR_11k]

If world map missions are supposed to stay in place after you fail them then they're bugged, a failed world map mission disappears. You earlier mentioned that they stay in place if abandoned, I haven't tried that but failed missions definitely disappear.

BTW, I failed my last anachronism mission by blasting a lightning esper in the ice age...

[x4000]

* Updated the monster migration logic to not mix the monsters quite so heavily as it was previously tending to do:
** Old logic: As the tier goes up, monsters migrate further afield.  At Tier 2 those rhinos in a grasslands region can show up in a neighboring junkyard, at Tier 2 they can show up in an abandoned town two squares away, and so on.
** New logic: After continent tier 3, monsters migrate further afield.  At Tier 3 those rhinos in a grasslands region can show up in a neighboring junkyard, at Tier 4 they can show up in an abandoned town two squares away, and so on.


The mission descriptions are there, by the way, LintMan.  But it's really far too obscure and needs to be made more clear (I think that's already in mantis).

And in terms of the missions not being retry-able, I'll have to fix that, KDR_11k.  I think someone else mentioned that wasn't working right.

[Terraziel]

And in terms of the missions not being retry-able, I'll have to fix that, KDR_11k.  I think someone else mentioned that wasn't working right.

I think we need to be clear on the difference between failing and abandoning the mission.

As it stands, If you fail (ie the DEFEAT message pops up) a world map mission, either through your base being destroyed or whatever then the mission vanishes from the world map
If you just abandon the mission half way through you can just try again.

Is that how it is supposed to work? because that is the way it does work in my experience.

[LintMan]

The mission descriptions are there, by the way, LintMan.  But it's really far too obscure and needs to be made more clear (I think that's already in mantis).

Yes, sorry - I later discovered you can get the desciptions by hovering over the mission type - I didn't know that at the time and thought the 1 liner was all you got. 

[x4000]

And in terms of the missions not being retry-able, I'll have to fix that, KDR_11k.  I think someone else mentioned that wasn't working right.

I think we need to be clear on the difference between failing and abandoning the mission.

As it stands, If you fail (ie the DEFEAT message pops up) a world map mission, either through your base being destroyed or whatever then the mission vanishes from the world map
If you just abandon the mission half way through you can just try again.

Is that how it is supposed to work? because that is the way it does work in my experience.

Good to know that's what it's doing.  We're going to be changing that next release, though, because I feel like that's counter-productive.  Some of that logic was from before missions expired, and some of that was just in response to an exploit that is not worth hassling the players this much about.

The mission descriptions are there, by the way, LintMan.  But it's really far too obscure and needs to be made more clear (I think that's already in mantis).

Yes, sorry - I later discovered you can get the desciptions by hovering over the mission type - I didn't know that at the time and thought the 1 liner was all you got.

It's nothing to apologize for, surely!  And you're not the first person to mention it, as I noted; it's definitely a pretty key interface clarity problem, and so I'm really glad to have people bring it up.