Developer question: What god powers or mythological tokens don't you use?

[Cinth]

The worst illness that could possibly befall us. All of our human units, dead. Everyone in all of our buildings except for our town centers, dead. Hopefully our gods and our mythological creatures can keep the enemy at bay long enough for us to recover...

That's the Black Death.  It's a Cataclysmic category woe.  It's supposed to be nasty.

It's not a guaranteed loss but it is hard to recover from.

Also.. Gods don't contribute to defense anymore.. that tidbid should go away.

[x4000]

Black Death was relatively tame prior to some of the later updates.  This is just a case of one feature change having unintended consequences that we then need to smooth out.  Relax!

[Cinth]

Discussion of it just split over in two places.  No one is getting the pitchforks out just yet

[x4000]

New version is out now with a revised version anyhow.

[Cinth]

Already on it 

[Teal_Blue]

Quote from: orzelek on Today at 05:34:47 PM

    BD simply shouldn't be faction specific. Kick everyone equally.

    With 30% destruction it will be in actual Fun category not "Nice towns - you don't play anymore with them".

What would you think of a random sometimes Red, sometimes Blue faction specific? So it really throws a monkey wrench into everything, with the player scrambling sometimes to try and rebuild the dying faction to keep the game going, or to have BD sometimes wipe out the whole faction (if 30% would do that) and have the game end right there.

So sometimes its a mad scramble, and sometimes its a deal breaker?

Just a noob thought, but for a noob i get quite a few of these, 

-Teal

Just pulled this over from the Alpha 9.04 thread, what ever you guys think is cool is fine with me, BD can stay Mean and Nasty and World Wrecking if you want. (Sounds cool to me)   Or a sometimes crazy comeback from almost oblivion struggle for the player, which sounds way cool too! 

Or smooth it out and make it tamer, is fine too, although to be honest, the Death or Mad Scramble sound particularly tempting to me as ideas! 

-Teal 

p.s. But if someone wants something else, that is way cool too! I don't want to rock the boat this late, just minor tweak the little details to make a very cool game greater, well... not that my ideas can do that, but maybe i can contribute, you know? 

[Mick]

I think, in general, the myth tokens are far too expensive resource-wise. Incense is such a difficult resource to get because you need a huge foundation of clay just to build the buildings, and then each one only makes it trickle in. You have to do all of this while focusing on building your military and other stuff, it can easily reach a point where you think "meh, it's easier just to ignore this whole category completely." Especially if the units and tokens can end up being more trouble than they are worth.

Fish/rice seems so weirdly placed here too, since it's not really exotic. It's a 'core' resource that only kinda slipped into being an exotic one because you got rid of the civilians. I almost think fish/rice should be a staple resource for your military in general just like wood/rock are for building out in general. As in, every military unit should require a small amount of it - so building up a giant fish/rice stockpile for myth units than becomes something you naturally head toward rather then getting 40 turns in and thinking "oh I guess I'll start building a bunch of fish/rice now". (Since buildings are no longer captured, what is the point in the distinction between them? Norse don't use horses right? Should they be given a use for them, or should you remove the ability for them to place ranches at all?)

Now, I'm not saying these exotic tokens should be super easy to make, and if we have score gating, maybe managing the buildup to make them in order to get the points is the challenge itself, when you have to deal with buildings being burned down left and right, that can be fun! I'm really speaking from a slightly older version perspective where I felt no motivation to use this category of tokens because it simply wasn't necessary to do well.

Of course, I've never used traders (I always reset my profile because I hate seeing the large number of unfinished games), so maybe that changes the game quite a bit in this regard. I kinda wish we didn't have profile unlocking and you just went with an AI-war type of selection of units (simple/normal/complex). I don't think the game-grinding is very fitting in a game where you can select how easy/difficult you want it to be. It might just encourage players to play on an easier difficulty than they might find actually to be fun just to unlock things (and then get kinda burned out doing that).

[x4000]

All righty, I'm sold:

* The pottery costs for seers have been reduced from 25 to 10.

* The amount of incense produced per turn from seers has been increased from .75 to 2.

* Rice and fish are gone from the game:
** The fishery and the rice field have been removed from being able to be placed from the sidebar.
** The top row of the resources section has been combined down into the row below: so that's wood and rock down in the rest of the raw resources line now.
** The diplomats now cost bread where previously they cost rice or fish.
** The rice and fish costs for the mythological creatures have been completely removed.
** Rice and fish no longer show up in the resource sidebar or in the tooltip on town centers.

[Mick]

Ohhh those fishery tiles were so beautiful, I hate seeing them completely gone.

[x4000]

Yeah, the woman who did them is super talented.  That was one of the reasons I didn't want to remove them, as well as having more space pressure on each town.  And now the space pressure is already high from other factors, like the scorched earth mechanics, so that's a bit obsolete.

As much as I liked them, they added complexity without much gain for now, and that's not worth the aesthetics.  I might try to bring those back in some other form later, as extended finished goods or something (like venison and ale).  Josh actually suggested we remove them last week, but I was reluctant.  In the end he was right.

[Misery]

This all sounds like a good change to me.   Particularly since mythological units are usually the only way to "focus" on specific areas (if there's another way to do it, I havent found it).... like if I get a bandit town that spawns way back behind everything, to the point where normal units are ignoring it, the only solution is often "more Ice Giants!!!" (or whatever), so it's pretty darn irritating to not be able to use them simply because I dont have twenty zillion fish yet.

As for the seers, hmmm, not too sure about that one just yet, though with diamond now being much tougher to deal with that might balance out a bit more.

[Cinth]

If we wanted to keep the tile graphics, we could put the Fishery with the lake tiles and Rice with the marshes.  It would be a bit of an easter egg for us testers

When you figured out how to repurpose them as the resource tiles, then pull them back.

[PokerChen]

Opinion: Leave the fish and rice out of the game until you find a good mechanic that justifies unique resources. (e.g. when resource theft becomes more common) The fishery did look very good.

[x4000]

Opinion: Leave the fish and rice out of the game until you find a good mechanic that justifies unique resources. (e.g. when resource theft becomes more common) The fishery did look very good.

Yep, that's the plan.

[Misery]

Ok, a myth token that suddenly occurred to me that I dont think I've used even once:  Labyrinth.

I cant see the use for this.  It sounds like you'd have to have a ton of minotaurs around for this to really have a large effect, and you wouldnt want to use it if it's going to have a SMALL effect, because it'd then summon a bunch of evil ones that then go berserk.  Much, much too situational.   And you cant even use minotaurs right away!  They have to be unlocked first!


The Greek in general often seem like they dont have as many options in the myth stuffs, and with a few too many "passive" effects (like Palladium or Cornucopia).