Siege units - what are they good for?

[PokerChen]

* Inhabited forests, dead forests, lakes, and mountains can no longer directly be placed by players.

Did you just invalidate the primary purpose of my Drawven Invasion cataclysm event?!

[x4000]

I haven't had a chance to get to looking at the catacylsm suggestions yet, so I have no idea.  But I'm looking forward to getting into those as soon as I finish with god tokens and the tutorial.

[madcow]

I hope you're in a good mood when you read that thread

[x4000]

Uh... uh oh.  What do you mean by that?

[madcow]

We don't want you getting -too- mean of ideas!

[Misery]

Whoa.... why the lakes and mountains?

A good chunk of the time, those are the ones that are actually useful, particularly depending on the map.   That marsh one for instance, in my game I *do* have mountains in spots that allow for interesting choke points or things like that, which dont actually make it much EASIER, but still allow for a little strategy, and also keep the map from being just..... really darn flat (and boring), which it otherwise is.   The remaining land tiles are a little too similar to each other (either flat, flat and defensive, or flat and slow you down, with the hill being the one that gives the only buff, to ranged units).   I think the lack of lakes/mountains wouldnt be an issue if there was more diversity there, like, other tiles to replace them in there.


As for the smite thing, hmm.... I didn't really see it as "correcting mistakes" most of the time when using it, it's mostly just another strategic tool.    There are times when it seems very necessary to essentially shut off the flow of units from a city (and this is likely to become MUCH more prevalent with the upgrade.  You cannot simply smite the path away, so..... yeah, that's what I was using it for before.  It means that a city isnt always *totally* static;  even when built fully, you can still make changes to them to suit your strategy, and there IS the fact that doing this *always* requires 2 actions in the end, one to smite, and one to replace the building.   Do too much of this, and it ends up hurting you because of that.

EDIT:  Not to mention, that this was also the only way to change what units come out of where.  Like, say, if I want to JUST produce, I dunno, arsonists (for some reason), I could smite buildings to shut off the others, but not that one.   This was useful.   But in order to focus NOW, you'd have to..... build a whole city just for that.  Or wreck the hell out of that one and re-place the buildings in different ways (which seems a little extreme.... it wouldnt be that bad of an idea NOW, but with cataclysms, well.... yeah)

[PokerChen]

 As for the first two, I would actually have preferred that the two special maps Sherwood and Murdoch are only 70%~90% covered *and* and less actual spawning forests, but the individual tiles be adjusted up heavily to compensate.  These map types I find to be somewhat too monotonous in feel and actual tactics. :/   Aside from that 99% forest is practically the same as 99% plains with all units at -50% damage.

 As for lakes and mountains, I would have hoped to keep them, at 2 actions per cast. I ran out of things to do in my last game after flooding the world with food and materials, and resorted to randomly decorating the landscape with lakes and mountains to entertain myself while checking for the bugs on mantis...

[x4000]

We don't want you getting -too- mean of ideas!

Hahaha.

Whoa.... why the lakes and mountains?

A good chunk of the time, those are the ones that are actually useful, particularly depending on the map.   That marsh one for instance, in my game I *do* have mountains in spots that allow for interesting choke points or things like that, which dont actually make it much EASIER, but still allow for a little strategy, and also keep the map from being just..... really darn flat (and boring), which it otherwise is.   The remaining land tiles are a little too similar to each other (either flat, flat and defensive, or flat and slow you down, with the hill being the one that gives the only buff, to ranged units).   I think the lack of lakes/mountains wouldnt be an issue if there was more diversity there, like, other tiles to replace them in there.

Well, that's kind of the point.  A big problem with games being samey is how much players are able to affect the map buildup.  Using mountains costs you almost nothing in terms of creating choke points -- no resources, one action point, no opportunity cost in your towns.  This emphasizes towers more, and makes it so that choke points are harder to set up.  You can of course still create them, but now it's harder.

The other land tile types are intended to be not super useful, but still somewhat useful.  Why do you think they are free as well as only one action point?   They are intended to make it so that you can widen areas and avoid bottlenecks, or to provide extra paths to things you want.  Hence the removal of the blockades specifically, as that was kind of the opposite intent.  In other words, it just gave the player a bit too much control over mapgen and made it so that the player could create ideal map conditions every game rather than having to think about the map that they are actually having build up around them.  Not very interesting long term, right?

As for the smite thing, hmm.... I didn't really see it as "correcting mistakes" most of the time when using it, it's mostly just another strategic tool.    There are times when it seems very necessary to essentially shut off the flow of units from a city (and this is likely to become MUCH more prevalent with the upgrade.  You cannot simply smite the path away, so..... yeah, that's what I was using it for before.  It means that a city isnt always *totally* static;  even when built fully, you can still make changes to them to suit your strategy, and there IS the fact that doing this *always* requires 2 actions in the end, one to smite, and one to replace the building.   Do too much of this, and it ends up hurting you because of that.

Again, that's just too much power for the Hard difficulty in the main, in my opinion.  I hadn't really thought about using these for shutting of unit flow when I was thinking about smite for whatever reason.  Once someone has graduated to Hard mode, I think that the games are short enough that it's not unreasonable to require a certain amount of pre-planning for things to go well.  And with the size of the cities being a bit larger than I am super comfortable with, this also encourages players to leave some of those slots open in order to hedge their bets for later.  It also gives more purpose to siege units, so that you can get the siege units to go in there and shut down production if you really want.

For an Easy game in this game, I think it should be something where you don't have to think ahead, can freely experiment and have fun, and the risk of loss is there if you make too many mistakes, but it's not more than a midcore game in general.  A little harder than average, perhaps, but not dire.  On Moderate, it should ramp up significantly, but still allow you to backpedal when needed.  On Hard, this is really for people who know just what they're doing and if they don't pre-plan they die.

THAT said, I think that what may be needed is an Expert difficulty group that serves as this last, whereas Hard is another gradation in between moderate and Expert.  So the smite thing would be on Expert only, and maybe I could make the lack of mountains and lakes removal only apply to Hard and Expert.

[x4000]

So, revised:

* Inhabited forests and dead forests can no longer directly be placed by players.
** This removes a source of player confusion since those only really work when they exist in large volume (as on certain map types).

* A new Expert set of difficulty levels has been added.

* On Expert difficulty levels, the ability to smite buildings has now been removed.

* Lakes and mountains can no longer directly be placed by players on Hard and up difficulty levels.
** This puts the players a bit more at the mercy of the RNG.

[PokerChen]

Thanks for allowing Creators the power to decorate their domains with lovely Neuschwanstein-esque scenery...

[x4000]

You bet.

[Misery]

Hmm, ok, I can see what you mean about using the Siege units for what I was using Smite on buildings for.... yeah, I think that does make sense.


Other thoughts:

As for the land tile thing, hmm....   currently, the maps really DO seem kinda monotonous, as Zharmad said.   One nice change might be to increase the randomness of what the RNG brings up.   Like that swamp map..... I've already got enough bloody swamps, why is nearly every tile that pops up MORE SWAMPS?    If the RNG were to spice things up at times with mountains/lakes of it's own.... THAT would be more interesting (and you've always got Smite for if it drops mountains/lakes in a really bad place).

Though, the more "basic" land tiles, hmmm..... I like the IDEA of using land tiles in general to shape the battlefield differently and such, the problem is that with the 4 rather-normal ones, this seems to really have very little effect at all.   Back to the marsh map again.... most of the combat on that map is going to happen in that central island, and this is likely to be the case with many maps.  There's little you can change here with the 4 normal tiles;  the best you can do is widen it, and most of the time this is pretty pointless.   This mostly leaves those tiles (for me, almost exclusively Plains types) as existing to reach out to new spots for cities to build, and connecting them with basic bridges.

Also as was mentioned, there CAN be moments where there's not all that much to do;  if there's not enough "low level" options to do that ARENT placing buildings, there'll be times when the player just randomly slaps blank tiles around or something, simply because there's no other actions to be taken.   Mythological and god actions are always there of course, but you're not going to be using them crazy often, right?   Currently, when NOT using those, I feel like there's not quite enough going on that isnt just building up new cities.  Placing buildings and such is fine and all, but multiple turns of JUST that would get a little uninteresting.  Not to mention, the mid-level and higher things tend to be heavy cost/risk, so if you're in a situation where for whatever reason you simply cant use those, not having enough lower options could be a problem.



EDIT:  Argh!  Multiple ninjas!   Bloody browser, when I tell you to POST, dont sit there thinking about it for 8 minutes!   Bah, technology!

[x4000]

I think that most of the discussion here about downtime and uptime is really not productive until after we see cataclysms in action.

In terms of maps, the theming of them is something I like the way it is.  But I will add a "perfectly random" map type for you, sure.

[Misery]

I think that most of the discussion here about downtime and uptime is really not productive until after we see cataclysms in action.

In terms of maps, the theming of them is something I like the way it is.  But I will add a "perfectly random" map type for you, sure.

That's true too. 


Gah.   I'm not very patient when I have to wait.   Definitely anxious to see these cataclysms in action.   The more I hear about them, the better (and crazier!) they sound.

[x4000]

New:

* Added a new map type: Plateau of Circumstance
** A land of chaos and unpredictability.  All tile types have equal chance of popping up as the land continues to build itself, which means that every game plays out differently... and crazily.  Note that statistical clustering will sometimes make it seems like there are patterns or weighting where there is none.  This is an illusion!