Skyward Collapse 1.800 Beta "Civilian Reversal" Released!

[x4000]

Original: http://arcengames.blogspot.com/2013/08/skyward-collapse-1800-beta-civilian.html

If you've not yet read about the general changes in the 1.4 beta line, now is a good time to do so. It's expected that we'll stay in beta for the new features until we release the 2.0 version of the game in late August, alongside the new Nihon no Mura expansion.  A lot is different in the base game since 1.4, so we want to make sure and give this time to mature before we put this out to everyone.

This one is another biggie that chews almost all the entire remaining items from the the list of implemented features so far for the new expansion.  Basically all that is left feature-wise is the new Woes, and then everything else for this expansion is just balance and tweaking.  Which is good, because the expansion launches a week from today!

Hamlet Stuff
The big big new thing here is the new Hamlet Idyll game mode.  I think it's really fun and interesting, because it's just focused on the hamlets and nothing else.  It's pretty much a puzzle game more than anything else, which amuses me.

The hamlets in general were overly simplistic in the prior 1.600 version of the game; players were reporting really enjoying it, and that's great, but it didn't stand up to repeated plays much.  Now the hamlet functionality both in the Idyll game mode and in the main game mode have been expanded such that they have more strategic depth without just getting complex for the sake of complexity.

Specifically the way we handled that was:
- Having the queue of upcoming tiles you can use both be larger, not auto-shift out the first item in itself, and have a much larger points disparity between slots.
- Tweak a few of the specific tiles to make for better balance.
- And most of all, add in Civilian tokens that get created and removed by specific tiles, and which block further tile placement.

Those things really help to make it so that the hamlet mode isn't just an in-the-moment thing where you just put the best tile in the best slot; but rather it's an over-time thing where you have to think about how your actions will really affect the future the longer you go.  Your queue gets stale and you have to do something with that.  You're filling up parts of your town with civilians, and you need to wipe them out with a slum.  And so on.

I thought that the hamlet mode was fun yesterday, but the more I played it the more bored I was of it.  These slight revisions really keep me mentally engaged through the whole session with them, though; and it makes hitting the culture goals exciting and tense in a way that it wasn't before.

Culture Actions / Large Towns
These are the other big big big things from this version.  (And no, I'm not intentionally trying to sound like Effie Trinket, heh.)

The most boring of these is still useful in the extreme: Super Smite lets you destroy any tile, no questions asked, for 500 culture.  Kill a god, kill a bandit stronghold, whatever.  There's a good chance that this is way undervalued at just 500 culture.

Very exciting are the new Large Towns, which cost you 1000 culture and give you double the construction space in a single town.  The uses for that are pretty immense.

Also very exciting is a new Reverse Time ability, which costs as whopping 4000 culture and rolls back the clock by 10 turns.  Worried you might not hit a score goal?  Just wanting more score in general?  Here you go!

Also very cool is the last of the culture actions, Stop Woe.  This also costs 4000 culture, and it immediately wipes out both the Current and Next woes, and puts a weak Upheaval woe in the queue for 15 turns out.  This lets you dodge some woes that you don't want to have hit you, AND have a nice woe-free period.

Of course, if you are doing any of those things, you are likely not doing other of those things.  You can't have it all, and if you're focusing on culture you're also foregoing a few other things based on your action point expenditures.  I think we can all agree that the culture is worth it, but what I'm most pleased about is how there is a good opportunity cost here that does not make anything an obviously-do-this situation.


More to come soon.  Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the  in-game updater itself, if you already have any version of the game.  When you  launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time.

[YoukaiCountry]

Tried starting a new game, and I can't seem to place buildings appropriately. I can't place them next to the town center, and I can place them a bit outside of the town boundary.

I can file a formal bug report with a save if you can't reproduce.
Seems to be doing it every game I start.

[x4000]

Sorry about that, fixed it now!  Will put out 1.801 very shortly.

[YoukaiCountry]

Awesome, thanks for the quick fix! I'm really excited to try the new features.

[x4000]

My pleasure!  And 1.801 is out now with that fix.

[LaughingThesaurus]

Not as if I can offer much feedback since I don't have access to this content. What if the super smite was actually affected in cost by what's on the tile? I can see some extremely powerful uses of it, such as just completely deleting a god... but also somewhat weaker uses, like deleting a tile on a critical location that happened to contain some weak mook. Find a decent place for the base cost, and add more on top of that for particularly powerful things, such as myths or bandit keeps (if they can be s. smited), and gods should probably get the biggest 'cost bonus'. Mouse over the tile with a s. smite ready, and it could display the culture cost. Something like that.

[x4000]

It could be, I suppose -- but that does get rather complex and I'm not sure it's really warranted.  Presumably this should be expensive enough that you don't use this casually anyhow.  And if you're not using it casually, then it ought to be fine I'd think.

[Pepisolo]

Just a quick bit of not very helpful feedback, but just had a quick go of Idyll mode. Without any understanding of what I was doing I tried just clicking around the high numbers in order attempt to spam my way to victory -- I'm glad to say I lost the game. I did manage to score 5000 out of 8000 by doing this, though. I guess I'll have to put some thought in at least!

Really too early to make any more comments on the hamlet thing other than it seems a bit overwhelming. Has there been any more tutorial stuff added regarding it that might be worth replaying?

The art for the hamlets looks really nice. The artwork for this whole game is really quite good I'd say, especially when you zoom in. I haven't found much time to test lately, although I do plan to get a bit of feedback in before the official release.

Definitely looks like a lot of content for your money, though.

[Misery]

Ahaaaa, so the Hamlet mechanics werent entirely in yet.  Interesting indeed.   The mechanic was already pretty damn neat to start with, too.  AKA, this sounds like a great patch.  A whole new mode, too.  I gotta say, you guys definitely do expansions the RIGHT way, none of that 20 dollar DLC that gets you some hats and color changes kinda crap! 

Decent chance I'll be suggesting cost changes for more stuff here, heh.   But this is sounding pretty great overall.   The large towns thing is interesting.... kinda like getting a second town without having to use a Town Center and deal with it's requirements.

Oh, and that very abruptly reminds me of something:   The town center placement view.   It gets VERY VERY LAGGY as you go further and further into the game.  I'd completely forgotten about that until just now.

Detailed feedback later!

[blastpop]

"Also very exciting is a new Reverse Time ability, which costs as whopping 4000 culture and rolls back the clock by 10 turns.  Worried you might not hit a score goal?  Just wanting more score in general?  Here you go!"

Unless I miss something why can't someone reload an earlier save? This change could be most effective if you could only load from your latest save point. Now if you could put another hook in there to make this a real grabber (such as the ability to cancel an upcoming woe)?

[LaughingThesaurus]

I think the idea of reversing time simply moves the turn number back. If that's what it actually does, it basically just gives you 10 extra turns with the current world state to gain more points.
My idea of charging more based on what unit you're deleting is just in case people do particularly abuse it against gods or cities or something.

[Misery]

"Also very exciting is a new Reverse Time ability, which costs as whopping 4000 culture and rolls back the clock by 10 turns.  Worried you might not hit a score goal?  Just wanting more score in general?  Here you go!"

Unless I miss something why can't someone reload an earlier save? This change could be most effective if you could only load from your latest save point. Now if you could put another hook in there to make this a real grabber (such as the ability to cancel an upcoming woe)?

In addition to what LaughingThesaurus said, a reason to use the time ability instead of reloading a save is that reloading a save will also set your score back to what it was at that earlier point; wheras using the time thing will allow you to go back in turn count but KEEP the score, losing only the required culture cost.



Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaanyway.


Hamlets!

So, I tried out the Idyll mode.   This seems like a pretty great addition so far and I found it very engaging.   The replacement mechanic does indeed work here.  I'm thinking though that there's alot of number tweaking to be done yet and it might be tough to figure out just what to tweak and why. The random generation and shape of the area keeps this interesting from one game to the next.

I played 3 full games of that, on Hard mode each time.   didn't win any of them.  The first two I got to maybe around 5000-ish. The third time I got pretty close, about 7500, however that score boost came entirely because I was able to get a ring of 6 nobles around a center point, and was then able to just keep replacing that center tile, over and over and over again, with banks or temples or whatever.   I notice with nobles that it seems to never be a good idea to replace them with anything once they've been dropped.  Nothing else generated even close to the amount of points that the noble ring did.  Banks in particular seem  to only be at all useful if placed in such a ring;  they're good for nothing else as they pretty much need nobles in order to give points at all, and they dont really provide other tiles with bonuses once they're placed.   And the Mayor tile is so rare that I never saw one.

The civilian tokens actually may as well have not existed; they got in the way of me placing something exactly once for about 2 turns in all of that time played.  Never had to use the civilian replacement mechanic at all, and indeed doing so would often have meant a negative score penalty.   But I think these civilian guys could do with staying on the board for quite a bit longer, which would make them matter much more.  Perhaps a score bonus could also be given for each removal that a tile causes?

I also found that I pretty much HAVE to use only the 4th and 5th tiles in the list in order to manage to accomplish anything;  using the lower ones seems futile and often just doesnt help much.
Since the 5th tile is so incredibly important it's actually pretty hard to use lower tiles to set up for placing one of the large ones, because the large ones you're setting up for will then become pretty much worthless.   You end up setting up for tiles that may or may not actually appear sometime soon in the 5th slot.  I often would think "Ok, I've got this thing in the 5th slot now, but it's not so great in any position.... but maybe if I use one of the 3 or lower tiles to put in this spot here first, I can then place that tile from the 4th slot and maybe it'll actually be higher!", which seems like it's an intended sort of strategy to consider in this mode, but not once was this actually the case.  Each time I tried such a tactic, it turned out that I'd just get LESS points than if I'd just used that turn to drop the 5th tile somewhere else.


So, those are early impressions of this mode.  I'm thinking it needs tons more testing and tweaking yet before it'll be fully ready.  Though it's also gonna be pretty important to get feedback from some of the others;  it's possible I may be doing something wrong here, but I cannot think of what that could possibly be.

[Fluffiest]

Iiiiii got my name mentioned in patch notes! *happydance*

...In other news, I still suck at this game.

[nas1m]

Iiiiii got my name mentioned in patch notes! *happydance*

...In other news, I still suck at this game.

I still remember how that felt when it happened the first time .
Enjoy!

[Fluffiest]

So, I have been doing some poking, and have found a little pile of minor bugs and things that are not necessarily bugs, but are bothering me. Note I only have the demo version at the moment.

Niggle: If Adamantine can only be used once, why does it have "must wait eight turns between uses" as a restriction?

BUG: All the basic resource production buildings have a display bug. When you select them from the build menu, the listed production quantity is HALF the quantity listed when they're actually present on the map. For example, from the build menu the pig farm says "produces 2 pigs per turn", while a pig farm on the map says "produces 4 pigs per turn". I assume this is because the build menu is displaying the Hard+ difficulty production rates while the buildings themselves are displaying the correct ones for the difficulty level.

Question: Unit production can happen even when you don't have enough resources. For example, I have three archery ranges about to produce Lithovoloi, costing 24 mutton each. I have 36 mutton available and only one sheep farm. Lo and behold, when I click next turn I get three Lithovoloi. I don't actually consider this a problem, and it might well be intentional, but I felt I ought to point it out.

Niggle: Many of the resource drops seem borderline useless. See below:

• Logs drop, produces 2 logs per turn for 5 turns, at the cost of two AP. Woodcutter, produces 3 logs per turn forever at the cost of 1 AP, one tile, and 2 logs. I see no reason to ever place a logs drop unless you are completely out of logs.
• Rock drop, produces 5 stone per turn for 5 turns, at the cost of two AP. Rock quarry, produces 4 rock per turn forever at the cost of 1 AP, one tile, and 3 logs. Fractionally better value, but I only see this being used if you've run out of building spaces and need to build a new town centre to expand.
• Pig drop, produces 4 pigs per turn for 5 turns, at the cost of two AP. Pig farm, produces the same 4 pigs per turn forever at the cost of 1 AP, one tile, 2 lumber and 1 wheat.
• Sheep drop, produces 3 sheep per turn for 5 turns, at the cost of two AP. Sheep farm, produces the same 3 sheep per turn forever at the cost of 1 AP, one tile, 2 lumber (1 log) and 1 wheat.
• Wheat drop, produces 4 wheat per turn for 5 turns, at the cost of two AP. Wheat farm, produces 9 wheat per turn forever at the cost of 1 AP, one tile, and only 2 lumber (1 log). You'd be mad to ever place a wheat drop.
• Iron drop, produces 10 iron per turn for 5 turns, at the cost of two AP. Iron mine, produces the same 10 per turn forever at the cost of 1 AP, one tile, and 8 cut stone (an irksome 24 stone). Might be worth it occasionally, given 8 cut stone is six turns work for a rock quarry.
• Clay drop, produces 10 clay per turn for 5 turns, at the cost of two AP. Clay pit, produces 7 clay per turn forever at the cost of 1 AP, one tile, and 4 lumber (2 log).
• Horse drop, produces an inexplicable half a horse per turn for 5 turns, at the cost of two AP. Ranch, produces one whole horse per turn forever at the cost of 1 AP, one tile, and 4 lumber (2 logs). Again, this drop is madness.

Are these meant to be useful in the course of a normal game, or are they the kind of thing you only ever use if you've got no resources and lots of spare AP? Or is the fact that they don't use a tile far more useful than I'm giving it credit for?

BUG: You can launch Hamlet Idyll mode in the demo, but can't place anything.

BUG: You can play Sandbox mode in the demo just fine, even though it says you shouldn't be able to. Not that I'm complaining.

Niggle: Ullr's bow and Skadi's bow do the same thing. Not technically a problem, as such, but it would be nice if they were different.

BUG: The description of Hippo-Toxte says that they always start as bandits. This isn't true of the ones that spawn from Athena's owl.

BUG: Action display in Sandbox mode is bugged. You can carry over 900 actions, but no matter how many you have saved up, the actions display reads "9 actions" at the start of each turn. If you take an action and then undo it, though, the number goes up. This is a TINY issue, though.

Request: Can ctrl-z be the default shortcut for Undo, for consistency with other Windows programs?

BUG: Hades is not in the game

In other Valtiel-has-favourite-mythic-creatures news, Fenrir is a god-killing horror so vast that his upper jaw rakes the sky while his lower jaw gouges into the earth. 30x attack against bandits is certainly useful but somehow doesn't seem awe-inspring enough. Ignore this, though, it's just me being fussy about my favourite monsters.