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

[x4000]

Wow, no release yesterday?  And it was a work day?  What sort of craziness is that, right?

Well, hold on to your hats: http://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=Skyward_Collapse_-_Pre-Beta_Release_Notes#Alpha_0.815

Both the new tutorial and the Woes are in place now.

Woes
Not all of the woes, naturally -- this is just a starting point, although I think it's a good one.  There are 28 woes in all at the moment, although that number is a bit inflated in some more practical ways.  Here's the breakdown of them:

4 Catastrophic Woes: These are Really Bad things that happen to you at the start of the Age of Monsters.  More ideas for these are certainly appreciated, as these are quite fun.

16 Types of General Woes: These are Woes that strike you normally, although the variance comes in with your chosen difficulty and current round and other factors.  Some of these types have sub-types, which is where the number 28 comes from rather than it being 20.  Those sub-types actually do provide a lot of variety, but still they have the same basic idea so I don't fully count them as unique.

0 God-specific Woes: These are things for round 3 that are really, really dangerous and which require you to use some of the crazier god powers that you might not otherwise use.  They'll be tied to certain gods and will only come into play when the related gods are in play.  I haven't started on these yet, and they may prove to be unneeded if the general woes can wreak enough havoc to encourage god token use anyhow.  Something more open-ended is always better, and in any case there will be lots more woes either way you cut it.

Thus far I've gotten through a small portion of the list of ideas that I had for woes, and like the first three posts out of three pages of ideas for woes from players.  There's a lot more planned, in other words, and they'll come swiftly and soon.  So don't be shy about adding further ideas into the woes thread!

IMPORTANT: Don't feel beholden to go test each and every last Woe in sandbox mode!  That means you, Cinth.   You're welcome to if you want, but I should tell you that Josh and I have already been through all of them.  Mainly Josh.  I was implementing them, and he was following behind and testing them, and that worked out great. 

What we haven't done is sat down and actually played through a game with the woes in there, I mean actually played not just tested bits and pieces.  Why?  We just finished the woes, and are pushing them out as soon as we can manage.  So these are hot off the presses, basically.  Finding any issues with how they integrate with or affect regular gameplay is of much higher interest to me than trying to test the correctness of individual ones, is what I'm saying.

New Tutorial
Certainly if there is anything unclear, do let us know.  We're starting our next round of the alpha tonight, now that we have both this and the woes in place, so that we can get fresh perspectives and find out if anything is still lacking.

Multiplayer
Thanks to Keith, this has actually jumped ahead in completion status quite a bit.  There is more to do, but hopefully just a day or two of work left on this for me.

Possible New Difficulties
I've been thinking that we may need two more difficulties: one single difficulty that is basically "Easy Minus The Woes."  And another that is just brutal to you on the other end of the spectrum (basically this game's Difficulty 10 from AI War).  We'll see on the last, Expert 4 might already be that to be honest.

Heading For Previews
At some point we have to figure out when we're going to do preview builds for the press.  Multiplayer isn't a factor, so it comes down to general polish, the woes, and the tutorial.  In theory we could do that tomorow night, or we could wait and do it Monday morning.  You can tell which I prefer (Monday), though there are some benefits to doing it sooner than later so long as the specific people we share with understand that bits and pieces are still unfinished. 

The question with that becomes if you feel like it's preview-able and fun, from the perspective of a player.  It seems like the majority opinion has been "we think this is quite fun, but the woes are what's really going to make it interesting now that I know the basics."  If that's the case and the woes that we already have do bring it to the next level, then we might well be ready for some select press previews come tomorrow night, or at any rate sooner than Monday.  I'll be really interested in your opinions, kindly stated please.

Cheers!

[Cinth]

IMPORTANT: Don't feel beholden to go test each and every last Woe in sandbox mode!  That means you, Cinth.   You're welcome to if you want, but I should tell you that Josh and I have already been through all of them.  Mainly Josh.  I was implementing them, and he was following behind and testing them, and that worked out great. 

What we haven't done is sat down and actually played through a game with the woes in there, I mean actually played not just tested bits and pieces.  Why?  We just finished the woes, and are pushing them out as soon as we can manage.  So these are hot off the presses, basically.  Finding any issues with how they integrate with or affect regular gameplay is of much higher interest to me than trying to test the correctness of individual ones, is what I'm saying.

Wow... getting called out.. dunno whether that's a good thing or a bad thing   For the record, I haven't played with the sandbox mode at all.  Everything I've done has been under normal play conditions.

[madcow]

Man, awesome I really want to test it out! Unfortunately I'm traveling for work and while able to post in forums, not sure about playtime Hopefully some time this weekend!

[Mick]

Alright, I was able to get about 45 turns in on a Normal-4 game. These are my quick observations and feelings.

* Woes certainly seem to make things more interesting, but not necessarily more difficult. The ones I had (and I might have misremembed a few and the order they came in...):
   ** Armsmen Revolt for Norse - basically just delayed my military a tiny bit so I stacked up resources.
   ** Upheavel - pretty cool, but blocked my factions from each other making things pretty easy for a bit. I noticed that the AI of units gets weird if the factions are blocked from one another, melee units will just decide to sit on their butts instead of wandering over to a bandit. I fixed this by smiting a path out, but it might not be obvious to people why their units are acting so dumb)
    ** Something about spies - made some Norse appear in the Greek town. Caused about as much trouble as a bandit popping up does.
    ** Serial Killer - Hard to really tell what it was doing since I run turns fairly quickly. So it may have been culling units. I don't know which causes it to end, just at timer? Or is there a military unit that has to die in order to make the serial killer thing end (basically one unit is designated as the killer?) If I wasn't watching the woe thing at the top I probably wouldn't have been able to tell anything was happening at all)
    ** Collapse - Opened things back up
    ** The Edge Of Civilization - Was pretty easy to deal with. I just stacked up resources and made sure both sides had 9 turns available. Quickly ended turn a lot cause I didn't see much point in building. I ended up with my starter towns on both sides surviving.
   ** Human Vanity - Didn't actually happen yet, it's the next one coming when I stopped playing. Not really afraid of it because it sounds like it's pretty much going to effectively tar all the units down and make things even more stable.

* When minor gods come out, faction conflict basically becomes a non issue. They destroy anything from the other team that comes nearby. So even though one army would greatly outnumber the other, it would smash against the other god and swing things back. It's like a MOBA game where the gods are towers and there are no heroes on the battlefield.

* I played very fast and loose, so I wasn't exactly thinking out each turn. I basically just built what was required for whatever military I decided to build (which was more or less arbitrary), and then threw down resources I was lowest in.

* No building anywhere was ever killed. I'm really wondering if buildings just have way too much health in general. Of course, I wasn't making any siege units, so that's a pretty big factor (but why would I?), but a general problem seems to be that units never focus on a particular building. Even bandit siege units were not much of a hassle because they'd spread their damage out among all the buildings they could see.

Anyways, that's my feedback for tonight. I'll try more tomorrow. Cheers.

[keith.lamothe]

For the record, I haven't played with the sandbox mode at all.  Everything I've done has been under normal play conditions.

With you, play conditions are never normal

[Cinth]

For the record, I haven't played with the sandbox mode at all.  Everything I've done has been under normal play conditions.

With you, play conditions are never normal

That's just for AI War.  I'm doing all the alpha stuff on a laptop which doesn't have the impressive specs of my desktop.

You guys go poke all the fun you want... I'll go chill with the Roman pantheon

[Professor Paul1290]

Well, I just had my first mishap with a Woe, though I suppose playing on the highest medium with the fewest turns between woes them was really asking for it.

I got "Edge of Civilization" and lost a town on both sides.

Unfortunately, on the Norse side the only "town" that survived was a town center with NOTHING AROUND IT!!! 

There were bandits and the Norse were about to get killed off due to being just one building and "Fury of the Gods" was up next. I had Skadi on the Norse side so I did the only thing I could think of at the time to salvage the situation:
http://i.imgur.com/a5hDb7h.jpg

"NONE SHALL PASS!!!"

[Misery]

Well these sound bloody awesome.   I guess I know which game I'm doing for most of tonight!


Unfortunately I only have tonight to test this, and then I'm off to a convention for 3 nights, so there wont be more feedback from me till Sunday.

But I'll give at least some initial feedback here after a bit of time with it.   I'm probably going to start right on the middle difficulty, and see how that ends up before moving onto Hard mode after a number of games (probably do that bit on Sunday, then).


It occurs to me that I REALLY need to get a damn laptop.  I"ve been avoiding it for so long, because the things are kinda annoying, but things like this keep happening with games updating and new games coming out like right before I go somewhere, and argh. 

Which means you guys are (again) causing me to further consider the idea of tossing some $1500 at a laptop. 

[Cinth]

I wouldn't put $1500 into a laptop (no matter what the specs where). You should be able to find one that would suit your needs for around half of that.

[Misery]

I wouldn't put $1500 into a laptop (no matter what the specs where). You should be able to find one that would suit your needs for around half of that.

Maybe, but I'm not very patient about these sorts of things, when it comes to researching them.  And from what I can tell, laptops are always pricier compared to desktop PCs;  to get one that is similar in power to my actual PC would cost.... alot.   I think my main PC cost about $1700 to have built. 

About 1500 is (to me) a fair price and wont really dent my funds in any case.  It could indeed turn out to be a different and perhaps lesser cost than what I'm estimating, I kinda just pulled that number out of thin air.

And I figure, since I HAVENT been spending money on consoles recently.... since they're getting stale IMHO, while the PC continues to get all sorts of great stuff (like this game for instance!), it's not a bad thing to be a bit spendy on the PC side. 

Really, I cant even remember when I last bought a console game (that wasnt an import), come to think of it....  Too many brown-n-bloom FPS games or cutscene-tastic RPGs and stuff, argh!   But that's a whole other topic.   I can say though, I'm very glad I got into indie gaming, now.

[Cinth]

I go all out building desktops. 

For laptops, I look at what I want to do.  I don't play high end games on my laptop.  I never intended this piece to be bleeding edge.  What I wanted was something to play most games reasonably.  So I figured out what I needed out of the laptop, then bought one that fit those needs.  I gave 900 for mine (my desktop cost me more than 4x as much).  750 is a good starting place for decent laptops, but I wouldn't drop more than a grand on one.

I still play consoles and am waiting on a few releases.  Not much else out there that suits me though. 

[PokerChen]

I figure as long as you get a laptop with a reasonable second-line nvidia/ati graphics card, things will go okay. Nvidia if you ever do linux on it.

= = =

@Chris, some first feedbacks:

I think, and don't go off on a limb on this just yet, that two Greek mythological tokens can use a small cool-down or more varied resource requirements after being placed. I'm going through the game on hard-4, which gives me a reliable source of woes from every category.
 - The quintessential problem is actually Palladium, which protects all buildings including the resource it needs from destruction. This seems to make Greeks all but invincible except against woes like Edge of Civilisation. You can have Norsemen running over all their towns killing every greek soldier that pop, but go nothing against buildings.
 - Compared to that, constant resource tokens are less of an OP issue.

EDIT: Speaking of which, I'd like to invite suggestions on possible un-loseable strategies in the current stage of balancing. This is mantised, so we can think about post-release patching.

EDIT2: On the Greek tokens, I pin this down to the fact that the GReek tokens require only 1 resource. Cornucopia requires only 2 tiles but cannot be reasonably increased to 10 horse+ due to conflict with barracks cavalry, and Palladium requires 5 tiles. In contrast, due to requiring two resources Brokkr requires 5+ tiles, or Norns requires 12+ tiles with accompanying Woe problems (town conversion via presence of Seer).

[Misery]

I figure as long as you get a laptop with a reasonable second-line nvidia/ati graphics card, things will go okay. Nvidia if you ever do linux on it.

= = =

@Chris, some first feedbacks:

I think, and don't go off on a limb on this just yet, that two Greek mythological tokens can use a small cool-down or more varied resource requirements after being placed. I'm going through the game on hard-4, which gives me a reliable source of woes from every category.
 - The quintessential problem is actually Palladium, which protects all buildings including the resource it needs from destruction. This seems to make Greeks all but invincible except against woes like Edge of Civilisation. You can have Norsemen running over all their towns killing every greek soldier that pop, but go nothing against buildings.
 - Compared to that, constant resource tokens are less of an OP issue.

EDIT: Speaking of which, I'd like to invite suggestions on possible un-loseable strategies in the current stage of balancing. This is mantised, so we can think about post-release patching.

EDIT2: On the Greek tokens, I pin this down to the fact that the GReek tokens require only 1 resource. Cornucopia requires only 2 tiles but cannot be reasonably increased to 10 horse+ due to conflict with barracks cavalry, and Palladium requires 5 tiles. In contrast, due to requiring two resources Brokkr requires 5+ tiles, or Norns requires 12+ tiles with accompanying Woe problems (town conversion via presence of Seer).

There are very definitely alot of really wonky balance issues right now, specifically in relation to mythological units and tokens, and god tokens.   Norns, Palladium, Cornucopia, and Brokkr are all excellent examples of things that need a heavier cost.   Some god tokens also seem like they're really rather off (such as Pan's goat, which can be spammed a bit for crazy resource gain), giving too much easy-to-use helpful effects for nowhere near enough cost.  Also, diamonds/jewelery.... Diamonds are appropriately hard to get, but, this doesnt matter when you get like a zillion Jewelery count from like 4 or 5 of them, and when things requiring jewelery then need only like 3 or so.


Now, some initial feedback on this update.


I'm thinking that you're on the right track with the "woes" system here..... these seem to have pretty much done just what I was hoping they'd do, which was to create loopy situations that force the use of things I otherwise would not use, and tactics I wouldnt otherwise think of.   I've had to change my building strategy up quite a bit, as well as what I do with things like Smite and the Unit Up thing, and I've had to use numerous mythological effects as well, some of the strong ones even.   I've also had to use Heimdall's horn in my current game, which required some preparation and thinking with the situation that was going on, and I only just got it off before the blue guys managed to smash up the front parts of the 2 red front-line cities.

These are definitely not so predictable, too.  Currently the blue guys are the ones that have been hit the hardest by the woes, with numerous ones targeting just them;  yet because of other situations that occurred.... including my own mistakes.... and also because of Pan's sudden presence, they ended up being much stronger to the point of starting to totally overrun the reds.  Totally undid my plans, as I'd been beefing them up before that because I thought the reds were going to get too strong.   And this is on the forest map, so there's also random units popping up fairly frequently for both sides.


In other words, it's gotten very interesting very fast.   Even the supposedly weaker/easier events are not as simple as they initially seem. 


As for the difficulty of these events, I've still managed to pretty much completely protect all cities for the time being;  only one building has actually gotten knocked out so far, though a good number of them have taken heavy damage.   But things havent gotten messed up enough yet for any of the cities to be in danger of falling.   

That's all on Medium 2 by the way.   Or was it 3?   One of those.

All in all, this is pretty great so far.   Cant wait to see how this expands.   Though I wont have a chance to mess with it again till Sunday.

[x4000]

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.

[Mick]

I know it's hard to compare because they are quite different games, but is "Normal" is Skyward supposed to be easier/same as 7/7 in AI-War in terms of general difficulty?

I can still lose in a spectacularly embarrassing manner in AI-War on 7/7, but Normal 4 Skyward doesn't seem to cause me to sweat or really have to think about what I'm doing.

Granted, I need to play it a lot more to really judge (and I will), but I'd just like to calibrate my expectations so I know what kind of feedback to give.

For all I know, I could have some sort of instinctual Skyward Collapse talent and I could just be a weird data point. My experience with the game doesn't always seem to match up the other feedback I see.