Making Wind Shelters Meaningful

[OobleckTheGreen]

Something feels "off" about the way Wind Shelters are implemented. Travel to a prospective wind shelter site and you'll inevitably need to travel thru several chunks of enemy-held territory to reach the chunk containing the wind shelter site. Not only are there no enemies in that chunk, it's pre-populated with people, which leaves me thinking "I just traveled through enemies 15 levels higher than myself only to find these lazy @#$%ers wandering idly about the wind shelter site waiting for me to stand in the appropriate location and press my E-key."

The game's title suggests that wind shelters are supposed to have some profound meaning in this world. But if all they are is a short travel grind and a keypress, then their significance is rather diminished in my mind. Worse, I can have a settler see to it for a trivial investment of resources. Why send a settler to do something the settlers already at the wind shelter should have done themselves?

The obvious (though perhaps boring) solution is to remove the settlers until the wind shelter has been built, and replace them with boss monsters which need to be battled before the shelter can be built. Another idea might be to have the wind shelters require some building resources that aren't trivial to find, or to add a number of items which must be crafted from said resources and brought to the wind shelter site for construction. Maybe a tiered construction/improvement system like the one used for settlement building upgrades? Perhaps all of the above?

[keith.lamothe]

Wind shelters used to have challenges associated with them.  There used to also be a potential wind shelter site on about every 4th tile.  There also used to be a rule that if you moved 4 tiles without landing on a wind shelter you'd get sucked into a windstorm.

All those things changed.  For one, the challenge was just annoying when you had to build soooo many shelters.

So we'd like to add challenge back to wind shelter construction now that there's waaaaay fewer shelters.  But right now all we could do in the short term is ye olde "group of named bosses in the region that you have to kill before the strategic/manual option becomes available", and I'm guessing y'all would prefer a bit more variety than that.  There's variety coming for the other locations that use that mechanic right now, too, it's just not the first priority right now.

[eRe4s3r]

you could include a "supply" mechanic that decays and only refills if you visit a city or wind-shelter, and wind shelters need to be supplied via cities to even have supplies and exist for longer than say, 2 turns.

Currently i find wind-shelters to be rather useless, as even the windstorms aren't exactly dangerous or something i'd even want to avoid, because they look pretty damn cool ,p And if you are in a cave or building windstorms really don't matter - though i assume the regen things are active per-region they are so minuscule (and weird, why would robots regenerate in a windstorm faster than without one? ;P)...

I hope the "sim" part of rebuilding civilization gets developed as well, because just a player challenge isn't really challenging my sim rebuilding, its actually fairly and hilariously easy to get dozens of people and there isn't even a reason why you would want more than 1 city. It just means twice the raid-monsters (and a lot more micro-management..)

Actually, i find this to be far more important than anything else, AI War has a reason to play, its that you can never predict the challenge. That every start is different, every situation a different one and gameplay is always different.

I find that imo, AVWW needs a very strong open sim and story aspect. Because unlike in AI War, the macro start situation is always the same, terrain might be different and spells might be changing, but that only changes graphics and stats, not gameplay like the different AI's do.

Anyhow, i don't mean to be negative or anything, just thinking loud

[OobleckTheGreen]

Wind shelters used to have challenges associated with them.  There used to also be a potential wind shelter site on about every 4th tile.  There also used to be a rule that if you moved 4 tiles without landing on a wind shelter you'd get sucked into a windstorm.

All those things changed.  For one, the challenge was just annoying when you had to build soooo many shelters.

So we'd like to add challenge back to wind shelter construction now that there's waaaaay fewer shelters.  But right now all we could do in the short term is ye olde "group of named bosses in the region that you have to kill before the strategic/manual option becomes available", and I'm guessing y'all would prefer a bit more variety than that.  There's variety coming for the other locations that use that mechanic right now, too, it's just not the first priority right now.

I'm definitely NOT a proponent of moving backwards in this particular case. I never saw the game as you describe it (with too many wind shelters), but it sounds more painful than fun. I think what I'm trying to communicate is that the wind shelters feel purposeless at the moment. To me, the wind shelters FEEL like they should somehow be very meaningful to the very core of the game (considering the name) and the fact they can be interconnected makes them appear to have a profound (perhaps future) purpose.

If you examine the amount of effort that goes into exploration/mining of a specific gemstone/dust (for a health scroll, perhaps), the effort involved in taking over a wind shelter feels trivial in comparison.

[BobTheJanitor]

Well I know that if I am looking for a tile of some certain level to find a specific tier of gem, and the only ones I can find don't have nearby wind shelter coverage, that's usually a problem. So they are important for that reason at least. And for a little XP bump when you set one up. But in general they are something you only notice when you lack them.

[Martyn van Buren]

I definitely agree that this is a problem, but I really don't think it wants a punitive solution ---- if it's just about sinking resources or time into building them, I think it'll feel like a rather arbitrary hoop you have to jump through to get access to a region, and overlap pretty strongly with the pylon/vortex mechanic.  I think the problem is that they don't really have much meaning; they act as simple gates to being able to function in a region, but they don't affect the wider world.  I have a lot of faith in Chris and Keith and I strongly suspect this is a function of the game still being in early beta, and that they'll become more central as we start to see more story/setting mechanics like the memory crystals coming in.  But I really don't think what the game needs now is another cost to get to areas you're interested in going to.

[keith.lamothe]

I have a lot of faith in Chris and Keith and I strongly suspect this is a function of the game still being in early beta, and that they'll become more central as we start to see more story/setting mechanics like the memory crystals coming in.

I do appreciate the faith, and we do have plans where the shelters (and the roads) will be more important, but this feedback is also helpful.  In general they really are just shelters and it doesn't seem odd to me that all they do is give you a place of... well, shelter, from which to operate in a local area.

But I really don't think what the game needs now is another cost to get to areas you're interested in going to.

Not a literal cost, probably, no.  But an interesting challenge being associated with some of them seems like a good idea.  There's kind of a fine balance in game design between "punitive" and "trivial": if it's a big pain then it's... well, a big pain.  But if there's literally no challenge to it all and all you have to spend is some wall-clock time getting to a particular spot and pushing a particular button, then why not just have it start in the post-button-pushed state?  We want to avoid spending y'all's actual time on something that doesn't require skill or at least somewhat careful thought.  At the same time if it's a challenge you wind up not enjoying (or not enjoying having to do so often, etc) that can be worse.

[OobleckTheGreen]

But if there's literally no challenge to it all and all you have to spend is some wall-clock time getting to a particular spot and pushing a particular button, then why not just have it start in the post-button-pushed state?

That about sums up what I was trying to say.

At present, I avoid having my settlers do the dirty work, since this is reasonably expensive in terms of resources. So I turn into bat form and fly from region to region, turning on the wind shelters. Level has almost no meaning at this point, as I can quite easily turn on any and all visible shelters, regardless of the area's level. This has the added benefit of giving me 197XP a pop, even from areas I would have no chance beating a boss in.

Overall, I think AVWW is developing into a fascinating game. There are elements of side-scrolling platformer, RTS, and RPG (plus a few more, I imagine) all rolled up into one package. There's also the potential for one heck of a story to develop from a player's world, a sort of Dwarf Fortress-style history, and I think developing and telling that story in a way that glues the game elements together will strengthen the RPG element and give the world more "personality."

[zebramatt]

Maybe it should simply be impossible to fly about in windy regions!