Musings: Alternate progression mechanics.

[x4000]

Interesting mantis suggestions by Bluddy: http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=7748

And Terraziel: http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=7750

Also mentioned so far has been that the game starts to grind once it's time to take on the overlord/lieutenants.  Partly because you're having to do a bunch of things in succession there.

CP is also a bit abstract, and we're not doing a whole lot with it.  Having there be a sort of "penalty" for doing world map missions also doesn't strike me as great.

----

Thinking about this, it seems like a more logical flow is to base this around lieutenants.  Essentially:

1. Each overlord has three lieutenants, as now.

2. Each lieutenant is staggered in power, however.  One of them is the equivalent of tier 2, the next tier 3, the next tier 4, etc.

3. Your job is to get strong enough to beat the tier 2 guy.  You can't get access to tier 3 stuff until you do so.  But you can spend as long as you like, and unlock as much tier 1-2 stuff prior to that, as you want to.

4. Now your job is to get strong enough to get the tier 3 guy, and you suddenly have access to new challenges as well as new rewards that let you get higher spells, etc.

5. Repeat with tier 4, and then again with tier 5 by the time it's the overlord's turn.


All in all, this creates a different sort of structure where you've got periodic of-your-choosing showdowns with first the lieutenants and then the overlord.  More work would need to go into the lieutenant towers in particular to make them more varied, I think, too.  With the new infestations stuff, I think we could make much smaller lieutenant towers that were a lot more dense with traps and interesting things to do, anyhow.  And they'd be on a wholly different scale (smaller) from what the overlord was.

This wouldn't be getting rid of the tier system, but it would be one way we could spread the lieutenants out and make it so that the continent only gets harder (and more rewarding) when you say so.  Versus having to choose to do secret missions over world map missions simply to avoid CP costs.

Baby steps, folks.  I don't want to reinvent the game completely right after releasing it, nor do I think it needs it, nor do we have the spells/enemy density for what is suggested in the mantis issues above at this point.  However, ditching CP and making the lieutenants more of a periodic thing rather than an "all at the end" thing could be very very good.

Thoughts?

[zebramatt]

I'm all for it! 

[Mánagarmr]

That is a far better gated experience, tbh. Not at all a bad suggestion, I'm all for testing this in a beta release and see how it flows. God Good call!


EDIT: God has nothing to do with this.

[x4000]

I'm not going to attempt anything like this until Monday at the earliest, because I don't want to get roped into a bunch of bugs over the weekend.  But I think it would be a positive step in a lot of ways, for sure.

[Bluddy]

I like this for various reasons, among them the fact that you can have just about everything make sense. The first lieutenant is holding on to something that prevents tier 2 spells etc. Make up something -- the player needs a feeling that he's being limited for a reason.

Taking away the negative incentive from doing missions is also a very big plus.

As an aside, I think there's a lot of potential in thinking of ways that the lieutenant / overlord fights play out. This can be one of the things that really makes this game last in terms of many continents, as well as provoking "oh $hit I can't believe that happened" moments. Examples:
- Lieutenant freaks out and runs away, joining the next lieutenant in his castle.
- As you enter the castle, a trap springs and you fall into a dungeon from which you have to escape before defeating the lieutenant. The game switches to having you respawn in the dungeon.
- Lieutenant get scared and joins your side. You can call on him to aid you a couple of times.
- Bosses with several forms -- you defeat one and you get the next form.
etc.

[topper]

The idea sounds really good, and would build a nicer structure into the continent progression.

One thing that occurs to me is that perhaps diluter enchants should be removed and simply allow a lower tier spell to be crafted with a higher tier spell gem. For example, if you went and beat the first lieutenant really fast and got to tier 2 in this new implementation. Once you were out of tier 1, if you had higher tier ones it would pop up "Warning, you are about to use a tier X spell gem to create a tier 1 spell" when you try to craft.

Or a similar idea would be to have spell gems be generic across all tiers. But you do not unlock the higher spell tiers until beating the lieutenant. This could lead to more people using more spell variety too, since you can get as many different spells as you want at any point in the continent. It also allows for different styles of gameplay since some players can take it slow and unlock all of the tier 1 spells before beating the lieutenant, while others can advance all the way to tier 4 before deciding to flesh out their spell choices.

I also like the tiered monster system idea, and perhaps an early implementation of this could be to have each area generate its monsters from a firepower budget like for an exo in AI war (maybe it already does this). Doing this, you could have say one tier 5 crashed landspeeder in an area, or instead you could get thirty tier 1 bats, or twenty regular bats and five tier 2 fire bats, etc. The budgets could get bigger as you beat each lieutenant. This way all of the monsters can still appear across most tiers.

[Terraziel]

My immediate question is what would be the distinction between world map missions and secret missions? rather wouldn't this just turn secret missions in to rubbish missions that give you half the reward and no tier orbs,  as the main benefit of it not increasing your CP would be removed.

[Platypus]

The one really big benefit I see to this is that I will be able to do far more missions and as such be able to experiment with the different spells much more freely, I have in the past ignored a really fun sounding spell in favor of the more well known and immediately economical option. This way I think I could use a much more varied list of spells.

My immediate question is what would be the distinction between world map missions and secret missions? rather wouldn't this just turn secret missions in to rubbish missions that give you half the reward and no tier orbs,  as the main benefit of it not increasing your CP would be removed.

Now that normal Secret Mission rooms can give Rescue Missions there is that. But yes that does raise a good question.

[x4000]

A few notes:

1. Probably we could do away with diluters, yeah.  And basically the cost on those things would be a tier orb of >= the cost, and that wouldn't matter since tier orbs would be in comparably infinite supply.

2. In terms of secret missions, the main distinction would be that they would give you alternatives to whatever was on the world map if the world map stuff wasn't seeding in the right locations or what have you.  I'd say that the rewards from the secret missions might be changed to be always arcane-ingredients-only and giving tier orbs; so then the world map becomes the only way you can get the guardian power scrolls, but the secret missions let you go to a region of a given type to get the sort of resource you need with less grinding.  Basically letting you do fewer secret missions to get the same result.

3. And yeah, this takes out the "opportunity cost" from spell unlocks.  Turns out that's just not that fun here, eh?  And given how many spell ideas are accumulating for us to start working on once we get through a batch of enemies and missions, that's a very good thing.

[topper]

My immediate question is what would be the distinction between world map missions and secret missions? rather wouldn't this just turn secret missions in to rubbish missions that give you half the reward and no tier orbs,  as the main benefit of it not increasing your CP would be removed.

A few more ideas:
--How about adding full(or partially full) enchant containers as secret mission rewards? Adding more options for ways to get things is almost always good.

--Or perhaps secret missions could supply a "wild" spell crafting or building material that could be used as a substitute for any other material? That way you have some flexibility even if your only source of some material is buried deep in the wind. Note: this could be really OP or gamebreaking.

--Or make the secret missions all be NPC rewards. But the context of the other mission types could be "I would join you, but you see there is this Umbra Vortex that I need you to fix for me first". Less grinding for NPCs sounds nice.

[x4000]

Generally speaking, I'm not looking to expand the role of the missions beyond what they already are.  As others have pointed out, there are lots of exploration parts to this game and I don't want to neglect those in favor of just focusing on missions, either.  When it comes to things like special or unusual rewards, spell scrolls, etc, those are things I'd want to build in on the exploration side of things.  To me it should be a balance between the two modes, even though I know I've been a bit mission-focused lately.

[Penumbra]

My favorite part of this is giving reason to why the continent gets stronger. It removes the old arbitrary method which just ended up feeling like a punishment instead of progress.

[Chex Warrior]

I'd say that the rewards from the secret missions might be changed to be always arcane-ingredients-only and giving tier orbs

I agree 100% with this idea.

[KDR_11k]

Perhaps some guardian powers could be made secret mission only.

[x4000]

Perhaps some guardian powers could be made secret mission only.

For ones that are a special kind of secret mission, I think that could also work nicely.  Kind of like how the rescue missions work.