Skyward Collapse Alpha 0.815 (Alpha Round 2 Starts Now!)

[Misery]

Excellent "more interesting, but not impossibly harder" was definitely what I was hoping for. There are some hard-rated woes in here for sure, but not a ton of them. Adding more of those will make the higher difficulties harder, but I had hoped this would make the lower difficulties nontrivial to master but not insane if that makes sense. Easy is supposed to be midcore.

Excellent notes on the mythological and god tokens. I'll have to put in a cooldown system for them in general, as I think that's very much warranted. Also their costs need adjustment, as you say.

Defensive towers might need to stop granting extra health to other buildings. I think that's what makes them seem invincible.

Spies and inside job sound easier than I expected, so I'll have to make those get harder based on the difficulty. Ie, more guys popping up than one when you go above easy.

For upheaval and flood, sounds like those might need to be limited to easy and medium, though its hard to say for sure.

As costs go, I dont think everything needs timers on them.... they simply need to cost more in some cases.   Pan's goat for instance... it costs 2 moonstone if I recall, and moonstone is a bit easier to get than sunstone, and I had like 8 or 10 when I used that.  Heimdall's horn costs 5 sunstone, and THAT was a pain to get;  I had to specifically set up more moon/sun structures than I'd wanted because I needed more production to hit 5 sunstone in time to use it.   

Stuff like Norns and whatever, they HAVE a cost, it's just that it's kind of a low one.   And Jewelery costs on pretty much everything that uses it is generally much, much too low.   2 or 3 Jewelery is trivial when having just 5 diamonds means that you have 60 or so of it.  I feel like if I only have 5 of something like that, I should be having to make some tough choices on what I want to use it for, and if I really need more, extra citybuilding should be done.   But currently 5 or 6 of that lasts forever.


If easy is supposed to be midcore, then Medium could probably do with being a bit harder.   Though, I still need more time to really test it, I only had time to get about halfway through a game before I had to stop for now.   I'll give alot more feedback about it on Sunday.

[Mick]

I should point out that in my Medium game I did not use a single god token, and I only placed one myth token for Norse (that one that prevents counter attacks), and I didn't really NEED it, it was just a convenient way to give them a small edge quickly against an annoying bandit.

Incense costs for Norse myth units stills seems too high to me.

[keith.lamothe]

@Misery: FYI, my current laptop that I can use for development and most of the games I like to play cost less than $500 about a year and a half ago.  I call it the craptop because the specs aren't all that great but honestly it gets the "mobile" and "can do most of the things I want to do with a computer" job done.  Though I'm not sure I'd vouch for the safety of a sometimes-slow computer owned by you

[x4000]

@Mick: I think that Hard is more the equivalent of AI War 7, honestly.  But we'll see.

There are some major changes about to come this morning that should shake up the balance heavily.

[Misery]

@Misery: FYI, my current laptop that I can use for development and most of the games I like to play cost less than $500 about a year and a half ago.  I call it the craptop because the specs aren't all that great but honestly it gets the "mobile" and "can do most of the things I want to do with a computer" job done.  Though I'm not sure I'd vouch for the safety of a sometimes-slow computer owned by you

Yeah, I wouldnt vouch for it either.



Now about that balance stuff....

I do think it's probably going to take alot more testing to really get a handle on just where the difficulty is.   There's definitely a big element of randomness with this game, and all of the different parts of it can combine to create totally different situations.   My current game has, so far, been decently challenging as far as keeping the balance, having one point where it tipped enough in one direction to put a couple of cities in danger (even if they ended up taking no real damage).   I'm not sure that I HAD to use that horn to solve the issue, but based on what was going on, anything else looked to have alot of added risk. 

Yet, next time through on that same map with the same settings could end up being much easier, simply due to what the RNG and the AI decide to do.  I expect the difficulty could vary by quite a bit based on that stuff.

This sounds like the sort of thing that might end up being quite difficult to properly balance, though.... you cant really expect perfect balance in any game that uses alot of random elements, so that's worth keeping in mind too.

But yeah, I do think Medium should probably be a good bit harder based on what I've seen.   At least, so far.

[Mick]

The thing is, having a city be "in danger" is a far cry from "actually having a city flip" and even THAT is far removed from "having one side lose EVERY city".

I've never had a city flip, so I don't know if it causes enough of a snowball to make things actually be a problem.

I think for my next game, I'll restrict one faction to a single town and go nuts with the other just to see how much trouble that causes for myself.

[x4000]

Seriously, wait for about another hour, hour and a half.  The difficulty is about to skyrocket.  Or at least the cheesy strategies that make the game overly easy are all about to disappear, I think.

Then let's talk again about difficulty and how things feel.

[Mick]

Oh it will be many hours before I can play today anyway, so that won't be a problem.

[x4000]

Not a worry, I just meant that the discussion here is about to become fairly obsolete, since most of the complaints you guys have already had in this thread are things that I agreed with and thus am changing... heavily.

[Mick]

I look forward to trying them. I really do want this game to be awesome.

[x4000]

Me too, and I appreciate it.

[Pepisolo]

Just working my way through the tutorial -- seems great so far. Should hopefully pass the Chemical_Art test. A little error on the Fish part which I'll post on Mantis. Also, my Windows security software just popped up asking me to allow any connections to collapse. Not sure what that was about..?

[Mick]

Also, my Windows security software just popped up asking me to allow any connections to collapse. Not sure what that was about..?

It's all part of Arcen's backup plan to sell your CPU as part of a botnet if Skyward Collapse doesn't sell as well as hoped.

[x4000]

As with AI War, when you start a game session it now opens the host for game connections in case you want to have multiplayer people join.  But I'm not finalized on having that work that way, because it will probably alarm people.  I need to make some toggles in the game for turning that on and off.

[Pepisolo]

Also, my Windows security software just popped up asking me to allow any connections to collapse. Not sure what that was about..?

It's all part of Arcen's backup plan to sell your CPU as part of a botnet if Skyward Collapse doesn't sell as well as hoped.

Gotta have a plan B, I guess. 

Oh, that tutorial error is already reported on Mantis.