Submit your mission ideas!

[x4000]

Whew, well, that's good to hear.   And thanks for spreading the word, by the way!

[keith.lamothe]

And thanks for spreading the word, by the way!

Maybe that can be a new slogan: "Get your friends hooked on our games: It doesn't just help us, it's self-defense!"

[x4000]

 

[Penumbra]

So, question. How many IT people do I need to get hooked before they let me install Arcen games on my work computer?

(Note to all IT people reading everything I type: we have never, ever installed AI War here, for massive after hour LAN parties. Seriously, you can trust me)

[keith.lamothe]

So, question. How many IT people do I need to get hooked before they let me install Arcen games on my work computer?

It depends, how many lightbulb-changings does that involve?

[Penumbra]

So, question. How many IT people do I need to get hooked before they let me install Arcen games on my work computer?

It depends, how many lightbulb-changings does that involve?

It's at least one more than we have, since the light outside my office has been flickering for months!

[BobTheJanitor]

It's at least one more than we have, since the light outside my office has been flickering for months!

Well you have to put in a help desk ticket for that. Which will then be closed with no explanation. So when you open another one they'll come back with a message that you need to enter a ticket and stage it to another department. Then the process starts all over again. Repeat until you give up and replace the bulb yourself. 

[keith.lamothe]

Repeat until you give up and replace the bulb yourself. 

Aren't there policies against that?

[Penumbra]

Repeat until you give up and replace the bulb yourself. 

Aren't there policies against that?

Never, ever mess with the unions....

[keith.lamothe]

Repeat until you give up and replace the bulb yourself. 

Aren't there policies against that?

Never, ever mess with the unions....

Where's the Anti-Teamster Ship bonus ship type when you need it?

[Terraziel]

One shall endeavor to put this thread back on track, loosely.

Whilst reading through the various mission ideas people have posted and trying to come up with something different, something occurred to me. Which is that the goals for missions are pretty limited as it stands, by which I suppose I mean the rewards following logically from the mission.

For example, the battleground mission helping you clear the area for a wind shelter, that makes sense, I can believe that completing that objective gains me that reward.

currently, there are only 3 objectives

1) Rescue a survivor
2) Create a Wind shelter
3) Find Rare Commodities

Now, for a few of the more interesting missions that people have come up with none of these really work, and for many of them it only really makes sense for rare commodities. I mean does anyone believe that solving a puzzle helps me set up a wind shelter? except with some serious suspension of disbelief

Lets be clear this is not a criticism of the missions themselves, I simply feel we need to let missions have a wider impact. That said the only things i could come up with as additional objectives based on current gameplay are

1) Find Snowsuits\Heatsuits\Acid Immunity (I doubt anyone will complain about an easier way of getting these)
2) Find a Spell Gem
3) Unlock the Port\Docks\whatever it's called
4) Weaken Lieutenants\Overlord (This could be either through sapping enemy strength, or giving you allies, your own lieutenants)
5) Increasing a resources drop\spawn rate
6) Find an Enchant (though I must say this strikes me as a naff reward)

And that's about it, nothing else leaps to mind about what missions could actually be doing.

I think due to limitations of the game lots of the differentiation will have to be done through art, rather if we take a mission like http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=5911, then it's all in the presentation.

You set it going down rather than up and give off a grim vibe you will be descending into a prison to rescue a survivor, you set it in a mine and it's a rare commodity mission, in an ice age building and it's a high tech vault for snowsuits etc.

[x4000]

Well, having a limited set of rewards doesn't really matter too much -- in the largest sense, there are only three main kinds of rewards even possible: guardian powers, rare commodities, world-altering effects (like placing wind shelters).  And that's really more than enough variety in the broadest sense: that's like saying that in mario all you can do is run, jump, and duck.  What's important is not how many broad systems you have, but how many ways in which that is used in the specifics.

The core interplay is between guardian powers and rare commodities.  If you hope to get new spells, then rare commodities are the only reward really worth having.  Enchants won't be tied to missions in the main (some sort of ultra-rare enchants perhaps withstanding, but not likely before 1.0 because those have balance implications we haven't thought through yet).  As the variety of spells grow, the pull of those rare commodities will increase even more.

On the other hand, there are guardian powers.  These are the things that let you alter the world on your terms, versus on the terms of the random number generator.  I'm actually inclined to strike all normal missions that let you build wind shelters or do something else of that nature (rescue NPCs).  And instead make most of them revolve around things that the overlord is doing, and your thwarting him and getting either rare commodities or guardian powers.  Then through using those guardian powers, you're able to get up a wind shelter network, destroy ice pirates, or whatever.

The destruction of the ice pirates could still be a mission, but not one that would be randomly generated.  Rather it would be something that would crop up from your use of a guardian power that creates that "destroy ice pirates" mission, and then once you successfully conclude that mission the ice pirates are gone.  But what that's primarily arguing for is variety in guardian powers (and thus a mission that results from that), and not for the base number of types of mission rewards themselves.

I'm inclined to make the icons stop showing the base rare commodity, since you're likely to get three or four of them anyhow.  The point of the icons probably needs to be "here's what you have to do to win this mission" (aka, mission type), and then the rewards from that mission would either be 5 rare commodities or 3 guardian powers (or whatever it is -- same as now).

When you get to secret missions, of course, then things have a little more flexibility to do one-off rewards.  Those could include things like rescuing NPCs, and in fact I think there's a much better feel to doing that.

Anyway, hopefully that clarifies what a lot of my goals are -- what I'm asking for in this thread is more "fun things to do to complete a mission," not "broadly new things to get as a reward of a mission."  Though the latter also has some relevance, I actually see that as being the point of guardian powers.  Which is really a different topic in and of itself.  In fact...

EDIT: Updated to add this link to a guardian powers topic: http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,9853.0.html

[mrhanman]

There could be enemies that the overlord produces/trains that could be wiped of the continent if the factory/barracks is destroyed.

I volunteer Skelebot Dwarves as the first to be destroyable.

Mantis Here

[Martyn van Buren]

I personally would like wind shelter missions to be more crucial, if anything.  I could be wrong, but I have the sense now that they often spawn near the edge of your current no-wind zone, so you can make the whole continent safe without ever having to deal with a windstorm.  Personally I'd much rather you had to go into the wind to build new shelters, as it's a cool thematic element and I'd like it to be central to the game.  I don't personally care that much for overlords as the center of what you're trying to achieve in the game; I much preferred the conception of the mysterious disaster as the real villain with overlords as perhaps the biggest, but not the only problem you have to solve to make a life in the post-disaster world.

[BobTheJanitor]

Agreed on wind shelters being more critical for moving the game forwards. If anything, I'd like to see wind storms being more devastating, making it a serious risk to go into a windswept zone without major buffing. Make getting to the shelter to activate it a real challenge. Then make wind shelters always spawn in such a way that you can keep pushing forwards your available territory. But perhaps make them really hard to activate. Instead of just a standard mission that you do and then, bam, wind shelter, make it require some sort of sacrifice to power a wind shelter. Maybe it needs another rare crafting item, or a guardian power, to activate a wind shelter. Or maybe you have to leave a character there to keep it running, and transfer your glyph to a new character. The old character has to merge with the shelter in some way, thus making it impossible to come back and grab that character again... or maybe you CAN do it, but extricating the character from their place in the shelter irrevocably destroys that wind shelter and plunges the surrounding zones back into windy doom, due to some techno-fantasy babble reason. So do you bring your good character so getting to the shelter is easier, or do you bring an expendable scrub and risk dying on the way there? There's interesting game decisions for you.