Skyward Collapse 1.004 "Rise of the Valkyrie" Released!

[chemical_art]

As someone else said, if you have already met your score and just aim to stall, nothing is stopping you from having the winning side start mass smiting tiles while the loser focuses on more builds / smiting.

Completely isolating via mountains hurts scores a ton. If it is possible to rack up tons of points while.being isolated those things should be nerfed, not the mountains themselves.

[Finndibaenn]

3. The bandit keeps are now immune to mythologicals (!!!), but the health of said keeps have also been reduced by half.

Even considering the points already raised regarding difficulty of having regular units targeting bandits, aren't the Norse siege units at a huge disadvantage here ? Both Greek Siege are vey powerfull against buildings, whereas Norse ones are pretty weak.

This is going to make games much more difficult for sure

[Teal_Blue]

Here's a question... would making it so that you couldn't place Mountains or Lakes adjacent to Mountains or Lakes prevent cheesy tactics?

I support Pepisolo's idea, but would suggest testing it, because i'm really a noob at the game and like the idea of keeping mountains and lakes, just not cheese-able mountains and lakes.    Also, and this is only a newbie opinion, but might there be a way to get incense lowered, for perhaps the easiest difficulty? Not all of them, and certainly not even through middle difficulty, but easiest and easy might make opening mythologicals easier for newbies like me starting out, but prevent abuse by the more accomplished players on medium or hard or higher difficulties?

-Teal

[Teal_Blue]

I'm thinking that the removal of them from the placement menu was a good idea overall.

As an anti-cheese move it definitely was a good idea. I just think that there might be a better way to prevent this cheese than to excise mountain and lake placement from all but sandbox mode. Not being able to put down mountains or lakes just doesn't feel very Creator-y. Disallowing mountains or lakes from being placed adjacent to each other seems like it might at the very least be an idea worthy of discussion, although from what you say it seems like even with this rule in effect the cheese factor might still be there.

If being able to place them, just not right next to each other relieves a percent, say 30 or 40 or 50% of the cheese? I don't know what it would do, but it seems to me that some percent in there makes it worthwhile, even if it doesn't stop all of the cheese.

-Teal

[Mánagarmr]

It doesn't prevent your from simply smiting a 1 wide passage and placing a mountain on it.

[Teal_Blue]

My comment were more along the lines that rather then the game trying to compensate.for the edge strategies, they simply are being eliminated.
 First it was mountains. Pursuing a full on chokepoint strategy hinders points a lot. The whole point of score gating was to discourage, but not prevent, this.  There have been plenty of ideas purposed to prevent full on isolation of towns. Instead, they have just been eliminated. This is not good enough, but in a game where you are supposed to be creator it just feels...wrong.

Now that bandit keeps are immune to anything but sieges, that just sounds annoying. They.have been buffed plenty enough with their higher firepower. Myths are meant to be your rapid response force. They arent after these changes good against buildings anyway...and what if they hide.by a bamdit keep killing thee spawns, but cant attack the keep itself?

I agree with chemical_art, that a way of getting around difficulties, and cheese 'rather' than simply eliminating those parts of the game make for a less interesting game overall. That isn't the point of the game, it is to make decisions hard to choose and cost me something for my decisions, instead of walling off things that i can do.

 I know it isn't easy, but using quick and cut tactics to solve things isn't the optimal way to go about it. And would prefer to see some of the parts of the game that have been cut out, put back in and other solutions to cheese found.

Perhaps it isn't 'preventing cheese' that is so important. If someone does that, they know what they are doing. If they don't like winning easily, then they need to find another way of approaching the problem, yes? But taking things away, to make the game 'un-cheeseable' will only push the casuals out, because they won't be able to play up to the hard-core players level, which are the players that are skating cheese and blaming the game for it.

I dis-agree.

Anyway, this is my opinion, but i would also say it is a casual players opinion, please don't kill the game for us in an attempt to stop behavior by the really accomplished players.

If you have to put these things in for hard, or hardest, or cruel, or impossible levels then that sounds acceptable to me, because that is 'where' those offenses are coming from, isn't it?

-Teal

[Teal_Blue]

Oops, should have said any love for Nas1m's idea...

I agree!! 

[Bluddy]

I have to join the chorus disagreeing with this change. The basic problem is that mythological creatures are so much more effective than troops, that there's no reason for regular troops if you can avoid them:

1. Troops require a very complex supply chain per town. As soon as a town gets damaged, its ability to create troops is severely hampered. On the other hand, mythologicals draw on your global supplies and can therefore survive town destruction better.   
2. Since mythologicals are much more powerful, they can destroy town buildings quickly, causing troop production to be hampered.
3. Mythological creatures are supposed to be chaotic, but in reality they're much more disciplined, since you can drop them down next to the target, while you can only hope that regular troops will head towards the target you want them to destroy.

The higher cost of mythologicals is not enough of a factor. Minotaurs, for example, aren't that expensive in the first place, and they're still insanely powerful. Other mythologicals rely on incense, which requires only one building type to produce (globally).

Here are some suggestions:
1. To make regular troops more useful, and especially to enable a partially destroyed town to fight back, allow a barracks/archery to use resources from other towns when local ones aren't available. The downside is that twice the number of resources would be needed when using imported resources.

2. Mythological creatures could have a support cost every X turns (except creatures granted by effects like the labyrinth). This makes them much more of a burden. I was thinking of them having a per-turn cost, but that removes them as an option when one side is losing and you just get enough incense to get an minotaur to save the other side. But if that minotaur requires another 10 incense in 4 turns, it becomes much more of a burden. Failure to pay up would cause the minotaur to join the side of the bandits ie. to rebel. 

3. An alternative to number 2 is to make mythologicals just as dependent on a complex, local supply chain as regular troops. Perhaps mythologicals should only be ploppable within a certain radius of an existing town. They would then depend on the local supply chain, which would be similar to 1 above ie. local town supplies at regular rates, and imported supplies at a doubled price.

[nas1m]

3. The bandit keeps are now immune to mythologicals (!!!), but the health of said keeps have also been reduced by half.

Even considering the points already raised regarding difficulty of having regular units targeting bandits, aren't the Norse siege units at a huge disadvantage here ? Both Greek Siege are vey powerfull against buildings, whereas Norse ones are pretty weak.

This is going to make games much more difficult for sure

This occurred to me as well. My Norse Siege Units really have trouble to dispose of bandit keeps on their own. This might be related to my low profile level, though, i.e. there might be stronger Siege Units that I have not yet unlocked...

[FooBarTheLittle]

This whole discussion inspired me to make this (reeeaaaly basic) table http://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=Greek_vs_Norse.
Having some experienced hands on the wiki would be awesome (jup I'm a f*** post-release dude ^^; ask tigersfan for a wiki acc if you havn't got one already)

@Smite vs. mountains:
Simte is much more "powerful" as mountains, thus I would limit it's use to buildings. Smite a building should actually convert convert the building into a field-tile (or whatever, main point: not a blocking tile).
I like the idea of land-tiles not being a 1 AP, since not every land-tile is evenly strong.

@Myths:
I think letting myths not attack keeps at all is a little bit gross. Maybe a solution in between would be better (e.g. myth aren't as effective against keeps as other buildings, because they're built from atheists  )

[Misery]

Thing is, you can circumvent not being able to place mountains. You can still just smite stuff to make holes. Those are just as efficient.

Actually, the reason why I didn't think Smite was a problem was simple:  Every time I've tried it in my testing games, the strategy of "smite until something is isolated" goes horribly wrong as the game simply loves to place more tiles there at the worst possible time.   Hell, I nearly lost a game once because of that, and it only took ONE turn of the wrong tiles being there to undo my plans.


There is one major thing I would change about Smite though;  not the cost or anything, but instead make it only work if it DOESNT cause any of the tiles that are 1 tile away from the tile it's smiting to be cut off from paths to the rest of the map.   There really shouldnt be any bits of the map floating off on their own anyway, unless something like the Midgard Serpent causes it.   This, actually, I think might be an important change.   Smite should be able to allow you to do different things with the map itself, funnelling units around, but.... yeah, it should NOT allow you to actually cut off even a small part of it, because that's the exact point when Smite goes all cheesy.

EDIT:  The more I think about this particular thing.... not letting Smite cut ANYTHING off (AKA, testing the pathing of the 8 tiles around the smited tile to make sure that each one can reach all the TCs), the more important I think this is.   And why not simply have the mountains and lakes do the same thing?  The player could then use chokepoints with all 3 options if they really wanted to (and lakes/mountains could still be removed on Hard or higher), but they wouldnt be allowed to simply cut off any bits of land entirely.   Chokepoints are a fine strategy and not cheesy, by my view (and they CAN go horribly wrong, as I've found out!), but yeah, outright cutting off access to tiles COMPLETELY is not at all a good thing, and is the core of the cheese tactics.





And as for the 4-mountain thing, it works like this:   Drop a town center.   Put 4 mountains around it.   ......done.  You now have a pretty much invincible "town" that can keep you in the game.


You know, an idea occurs to me.... why not simply just disallow ALL of these things.... mountains, smiting, lakes..... within a certain radius of a town?  With the exception of the 3-AP building smite, of course.   Could make it so that it you cannot do these 3 things if they're only 5 tiles (or less) away from any town center.

AND you could then make it so mountians/whatever cant be placed adjacent.  Or something like that.

Frankly, I cant actually imagine a USE for mountians at this point, but it'd keep them there, for those that want them for whatever reason.   I dont think I've ever found even one use for the things that is NOT a cheese tactic, to be honest.   Wheras I use smite all the time without actually causing units to not be able to attack things  (but then I'm also not actually cutting parts of the landscape off when I use that for anything, aside from games during the beta where I did that to test what would happen).


Though I'm still all for simply leaving them out.   The discussions here is getting into the realm of making LOTS of changes, or changing other aspects of the game "because mountains", which strikes me as a bad idea.   

And if lower-level players need the things.... the original idea of simply having them available on medium or less seemed fine to me (and I dont use the things regardless, myself).   I'd rather just have that happen, instead of going through bunches of OTHER changes, which can then lead to MORE problems, which can lead to MORE changes, all because of a tile that seems to have few viable (non-cheese) uses ANYWAY.  Just leave the accursed thing in on the lower difficulties and be done with it, I say.


Not to mention.... I'd be against too many changes to the basics now that the game has released anyway.   Tends to not go over well with players that werent in the beta and also those who arent often on the forums here (and thus wont see WHY they happen, they'll just suddenly see features pulled/altered for no reason).   The change of removing mountains/lakes from even easy/medium was likely not a good idea from that standpoint.

[Misery]

Also, on the note of the last thing I said in my above post.... about the idea of changing the game too much, too fast, right after release being a bad idea, a quick quote that I just saw on the Steam forums:

I get that it's part of Arcen's style of development to push out patches in rapid succession and they seem to handle that remarkably well. It's just that Skyward Collapse is in such an early phase of its life that the 'fluctuations' from patch to patch are kind of drastic. For example here's Chris posting "hey guys, I just completely changed/significantly updated all these powerful abilities!" at 9 AM on May 23rd. Under 6 hours later there's a press release telling us that the game has been released. You think some game balance issues might have 'slipped through the cracks in testing' into the release version?

Quick responses are good for obvious bugs and such, but with game balance issues they can often feel like knee-jerk reactions that solve one issue while introducing three new ones. I'd say some kind of careful, cautious, thought-through responses would be better there.

And it can be bit disheartening for a new player, who has just learned how the game works, to come back to the game next day and find out that it has shifted away from under his feet and that he has to relearn half the stuff he learned the night before. Maybe he goes "screw this, I'm going back to Panzer General, at least I know SSI won't be updating it anymore".

And he's right on this one, I think (to a point).

I do think that the bandit immunity thing needs to be put back to how it was before for lots of reasons (which I've already explained), or at the very least let us target bandit keeps with Commandment, but yeah.... I'm thinking, at least for easy/medium, put the bloody mountains in there.   But do the adjacent rule, give them a high cost, whatever.   I remember one of the big problems, and the central reason why the mountain thing changed in the first place, was because LPs of the game seemed to almost always be involving the "block things with mountains" tactics..... and this isnt interesting at all (and sure doesnt encourage viewers to then buy the game, because a super-simple strategy is stopping damn near everything!).


But yeah.... too many changes too fast that cause too much re-learning is probably not a good idea, particularly with this game being complex as it is.   The response to the game as a whole has been pretty darn good, BUT, alot of players at the same time still have difficulty learning it.    So it's important to be careful with these changes.

[Teal_Blue]

I agree with Misery's post above, and think its a wise idea to go slow. I think the mountains should have stayed, but i would be willing to take that much slower to make sure its the best decision for the game and the players, who as Misery pointed out might get lost in the shuffle of mechanics changing.

In fact, even more than game mechanics, not losing players might be the best focus. Perhaps not eliminating cheese, or adding new features, but just making sure that things stay 'as close as they were before' as possible.

I do think Mountains could be lowered, where they don't block everything, perhaps just melee units, but archery and mythologicals can go through mountains, might make the 'cheese' factor of invincibility of mountains go away, or go enough away to make it no longer cheese-able.

Well... thats my two cents, but really, probably best to move slow and not change the game too much, and see how things proceed with some more long range thinking.

Just an opinion,

-Teal

[chemical_art]

"And it can be bit disheartening for a new player, who has just learned how the game works, to come back to the game next day and find out that it has shifted away from under his feet and that he has to relearn half the stuff he learned the night before. Maybe he goes "screw this, I'm going back to Panzer General, at least I know SSI won't be updating it anymore"."

Repeated this, for this actually describes me right now. Things are simply going to  quickly and being feel haphazard.

This is coming from someone who grew up in the 4.x era of AI Wars, and thought it was fun.

If these were beta patches, I'd be more game, but they aren't. Game changing effects are being done in response to a half dozen responses, and while cool in alphas/ beta, is not good for releases.

[Misery]

"And it can be bit disheartening for a new player, who has just learned how the game works, to come back to the game next day and find out that it has shifted away from under his feet and that he has to relearn half the stuff he learned the night before. Maybe he goes "screw this, I'm going back to Panzer General, at least I know SSI won't be updating it anymore"."


Repeated this, for this actually describes me right now. Things are simply going to  quickly and being feel haphazard.

This is coming from someone who grew up in the 4.x era of AI Wars, and thought it was fun.

If these were beta patches, I'd be more game, but they aren't. Game changing effects are being done in response to a half dozen responses, and while cool in alphas/ beta, is not good for releases.

Yep.


And I think it's an easy thing for the experienced players.... and even the devs.... to forget.



To be totally honest here, the game as a whole has come out REALLY darn good so far.  And I think the balance.... er.... imbalance..... er.... well you know what I mean.... is really good right now, as units and abilities go.   The change to the myth unit attack bonuses for instance?   Really liking that.  It was always the idea that the Norse myth guys were stronger than the Greek ones, and this is now the case.... but the Greek ones have very definitely not stopped being useful.   And I'm finding myself using a larger variety of those guys as well, wheras early on I was often using just Ice Giants and Chimeras.   Same with the human units, I have my favorites but there are many of them that fit with my overall playstyle, and I dont find any to be super over-powered or underpowered/useless.

The same goes with alot of the non-unit stuff.  Oh, I think some of the god tokens are problems *cough* Pan's goat *cough*, and there's some issues still with scoring (but not NEARLY as many as before, that whole aspect is coming along nicely), but for the most part everything from tokens to direct actions to land placement is pretty great, and in most cases very versatile.


And having too much of this suddenly change and warp all at once.... yeah.  Wouldnt see that as a good thing.   Particularly too many changes to mechanics themselves.   Like the bandit immunity-from-myth thing.   A bit TOO much of a change that does force some re-learning that I'm thinking is unnecessary here, after that last balance change to the myth units (since the problem was only happening BECAUSE the myth unit stats were a bit screwy).


Cheese tactics, they need to be stopped, yes.   I gave a good reason for why in the other thread (dont feel like repeating it here). BUT.  Lets at least be careful about it.   Dont get me wrong.... I like the rapid-fire approach that Arcen as a whole uses, and I've seen that done by other indie devs as well.... it's often a good thing.   But going too fast here might throw some players off pretty badly.