It's like in Dwarf Fortress: Part of the challenge of the game is that you cant directly control anyone, and have to rely on the AI of each dwarf, and their various whims and interests and emotions and yada yada yada. BUT. This, in and of itself, is actually NOT enough to provide the player with difficulty/challenge/tough situations.
Admittedly, it's been a long time since I played DF -- used to play in the 2D days -- but DF surely does rely mostly on randomness of the game world. Yeah, you can choose a different starting location and equipment, but that's about it as I recall. There isn't a double layer (Edicts and VPs) of things that you need to do in order to win, or in order to strong-arm the player into unbalancing the game so that it can then become fun.
"It HAS to go alongside other things. If you just sit there and dont actually do much, sure, the AI will do SOME things that are a bit loopy and require your attention, but not that many. "
This may apply to this game, and how it currently plays, but not DF, I don't think. If you sit there, your dwarves will die, if you try to get them to thrive, fun and chaos always follows. In an ideal world this game would be similar I think.
I think the main problem with Skyward Collapse is that it's just not unpredictable enough. Last game finished I spammed through it in about 45 minutes, doing the odd tweak here or there. The VP or scoreboard system would help with this, of course, as Misery points out, but it would still feel a bit artificial -- the strong-arm tactics of the VP system especially.
This game would be so much better if more random stuff happened so that you naturally had to make those hard decisions on whether to play one of your more powerful tokens or go for some more high risk strategies. For example, let's say that one of the villagers accidentally (oops) summoned a Minotaur -- yes, silly idea, but it's late -- then you'd have to force the blue side to hastily prepare some kind of defence, potentially unbalancing things in the long run. Or some kind of rebel uprising breaks out etc. Lots more random events like this keeping you on your toes.
The more I think about it, the more I think that this game is deeply flawed at the moment, and that using the VP or Scoreboard system in order to force those unbalances needed in order to make the game fun highlights that.
For this game to succeed it needs be fun without a VP system or a scoreboard or even Edicts, I think. At the moment, I just don't think it is that much fun -- yes, I know it's an early alpha, but we can't automatically assume that it'll get a lot better, especially if, as I think, the current gameplay is fundamentally flawed.
When comparing this with something like DF though, keep in mind one important difference: DF is a pure sandbox game. There's plenty of challenge there, but it's the same sort of challenge you might find in something like Minecraft. Skyward Collapse is, to me, alot closer to a 4x strategy game, in terms of it's concepts. You DO have victory conditions you must meet, but tons and tons of ways of getting there, and while there's some randomness in that type of game (usually lots of it), and a bit of sandboxy openness, it's not a true sandbox; the game WILL beat you down completely into a losing state if you dont use proper strategy to overcome the situations that appear before you.
And yeah, DF does indeed rely alot on the randomness, but.... my description of the difficulty still stands. Sure, dorfs cant manage themselves too well and will die without any interaction..... obviously, the player must do SOME stuff. But what's needed for very basic, simple survival (and nothing else) is best described as "tweaking". There's not much complicated about it, and the really crazy situations simply wont happen until you start venturing out into other tasks, and expanding the fort and reaching for various goals that you decide on.
It really is very much the same here. Simply maintaining the basic balance as it is right now, without an "incentive" system like the VPs, is very, very easy, and not particularly exciting or fun, since there's pretty much just the tweaking, and not much strategy. The strategy appears when the balance is thrown off and the loopy situations occur..... just like in DF. But just like with DF, it's up to the player to make it possible for these events to happen.
I understand your comments about it being too predictable, but I have to disagree with it: It's only too predictable if the basic maintaining/tweaking is all you do. Once you start getting into the crazier situations.... there's actually ALOT of randomness and unpredictable loopy stuff. You've got the constantly expanding landmass, which may have done things like create chokepoints or fields that may suddenly become important upon a situation starting up.... you've got the constant presence and possibility of the definitely dangerous bandits, who can cause some serious damage in the right situations (such as when the balance has tilted), and on top of all of that.... you've got the AI. Think of how alot of situations in DF arise: If all of the dorfs ALWAYS obeyed every single command you gave them, that game would actually be pretty easy all of the time. But they dont. You have to constantly deal with the very unpredictable AI. Give a command, and they might do it.... or they might not. They might even go and do the OPPOSITE. Or do something you didn't for a moment expect. This game is exactly the same. You cant predict just what your wacky AI dudes are going to do, as illustrated in my example situation. I placed that sigil thing, whatever it was called, and I was *certain* that the red guys were going to grab it. It was why I chose that particular spot, because I figured, there's no way in hell they WONT grab this. ....but the AI had other ideas, and things went horribly wrong, in exactly the same way that it happens in DF. That, right there, was where the total randomness and unpredictability kicked in. BUT. It wont have much chance to create big effects if the player isnt DOING much to give it that chance. The more the balance is tilted between the two sides, the more the AI can cause it's own hilarious brand of chaos, and much like DF, this to me is where part of the fun of the game is. As Cyprene said above me, it's all about watching things go out of control..... and then you, the player, applying strategy and tactics to try to recover from the mess.
Now, that being said, I wouldnt at all mind seeing a bit more of the random events and such, as you suggest. There's alot of ideas that might work there beyond just the bandits and the landscape. I dont think things like that should be huge catastrophic events..... instead, more like the bandits are; not super dangerous by themselves, but instead they reach their potential when they are around during an already-going-crazy situation, with the capability to make it muuuuuuch worse. That sort of thing, I like that.
I DO also though really want to see the option for randomized starting maps; that's not to say that static maps arent good too, but this game is PERFECT for random ones. And a map editor, too, that'd be awesome.
I liked the score system.
I actually liked the fact that it was kind of opaque.
Without Score, it is difficult to tell how you are doing beyond "greek units are 3\4 the way to the norse side and holding there." I liked being able to see that the Greeks were way higher scored than the Norse, and could try to tip the battle balance towards the greek town, in order to boost the Norse score.
Aye. I think there needs to be some more "info displays" in it's place. Like, show me a constant count of how many buildings, normal units, and mythological units each side has. Not only is it neat to see, but that info is the sort of thing that's helpful to know in ANY situation. There really does need to be more things like that displayed constantly. There's PLENTY of screen space, really.... lets make use of it! A constant tally of total resources would be super, also. And maybe have it so that if you click on a town center, it displays a quick list of all of the buildings connected to it (which is much easier to read than having to stare at all of the buildings themselves).
