Skyward Collapse Alpha 0.902

[x4000]

New one!  http://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=Skyward_Collapse_-_Pre-Beta_Release_Notes#Alpha_0.902

Well, I don't have a whole lot to say that the release notes don't already say.  Basically, the situation was this:

1. To my despair, I hear from one of our more advanced players (Mick) that the game peters out and winds up not being very deep past a week or so of play, because he's figured out a way to game the system pretty hard.

2. To make matters worse, this was actually apparent to Keith within a matter of hours of first playtesting it.  It would have been to others (including I'm sure Mick) sooner, had the game not been evolving so much before now.  There was always the promise of woes as a concept, etc.  Versus Keith came to it cold the first time after all that was in place.

3. Woes are awesome, and it's generally agreed that they're a really positive thing for the game.  They bring variety and all sorts of twists and turns.  And I want to add a goodly number more this coming week.  But as to the core problem Mick was reporting, and that Keith picked up on... well, no amount of woes were going to help that.

4. Basic three problems were that you could avoid building siege units, and that you could sequester towns, and that buildings basically didn't die from much other than woes.  All of those have now been addressed with this update:
- You must build siege units because otherwise you have no hope of fighting off the new Bandit Keeps that spawn instead of individual bandits.
- You can't hide towns away from the front lines or they succumb to social decay and go bandit on you.
- Resource buildings have less health now, and the siege bonuses against buildings are way up in general.

At this point, my concerns are mostly:
a) Is the social decay too harsh on the higher difficulties.
b) I'm hoping the tutorial itself isn't too hard to win for new players now.
c) Uh... that's all I can think of. 

I'm sure players will find more things, naturally, but I think this is a pretty giant leap in the right direction when it comes to the depth of advanced play.  And for more casual play, I don't think this increases the complexity TOO much, although it definitely does some.  Hey, there's always sandbox mode if you just want to play around with no pressure.

Enjoy!

[Cinth]

Well... about the towns..  I was able to build 4 towns wide with the 6 tile limit. Now I'm able to fit 3 comfortably.  To get more towns in (with the 8 tile limit), I have to build backwards.  That has evolved for me to build backwards 2 by 2 formation of towns.  If I want to go big, I have to go backwards. 

Something else that is going to play a role in this is that marauders (and high movement units) cross the starting map in one turn.  My Greeks usually don't get to the Norse towns until around turn 15.

[Mick]

Unfortunately, I don't have time tonight to try this, but I'll take a stab at it early tomorrow.

It sounds like I'm going to have to completely change how I play. 

[Pepisolo]

Kind of know what you're trying with Social Decay -- quite dislike the current implementation, though. The name could be better, too.

Instead, how about giving towns 3 possible states: let's say restless/contented/militant (names subject to change). All towns would start as contented. The restless state would occur after prolonged periods of little warfare with neighbours and would incur a random **possibility** that the town could turn to the bandits side, not an instant rebellion. Militant would occur after periods of warfare with your neighbours and would be a notch in the scale above contented. For example, if a militant town then went on a period of pacifism they would slide down the scale to contented. Further lack of warfare would then result in a slip down to restless and the potential consequences.

This is pretty similar to the current system, almost a rebranding really, but I think it would be more natural than towns having 68% Social Decay. Plus, with the presence of that third militant state the player gets a bit of a reward for their recent warfare incitements in the form of a buffer. This buffer will allow the player to more easily divert their attention away from those areas that have recently been battling and not worry about sudden gaps of inactivity. It really puts the focus of worrying about anarchic rebellions clearly on those towns that are being sequestered away from the action.

Wish it wasn't so late, so I could tidy this post up a bit, but you get the gist. Oh good work. Bandit towns seem good, and I like it when new units pop down on the playback with a nice "bong" sound.

[sojourner]

Is it against the family friendly nature of these forums to point out the awesomeness  your sound effect idea? Seriously though, I like the three states, but possibly 4 would serve even better? A jump from "reckless" to "anarchist" or whatever, that would cause instant bandithood.

[keith.lamothe]

FYI, Chris, the town-behind-town-behind-town cheese is still possible with this.  I couldn't keep it going on Expert 4 because I couldn't keep enough wood and stone resources going while still having a stone mason to build the next town hall at one point.  But on Expert 1 it was completely trivial; attached save on turn 89 of 90 (so just click end turn twice, then skip the replays to win) if you want to look at the "build order" but basically it's:

setup: wood, stone, 5x marsh, town hall, stone mason
turn 1: stone
turn 2: skip
turn 3: skip
turn 4: 5x marsh, town hall, wood, stone, marsh
turn n: skip
turn n+1: skip
turn n+2: 4x marsh, if no mason then mason at previous town, town hall, wood, stone, marsh (2x marsh if built no mason built this turn)
(repeat last three steps until end of game, though obviously the exact timing of marsh vs non-marsh varies; can also just use field or whatever for the land tiles)

All being built in a straight line out behind the first town away from the opposing side, though the 2nd mason and onward generally have to be built to one side of the line at the previous town.

Those early cycles you may need to pay some modicum of attention to whether to do two wood or two stone on a new town to avoid bottoming out on one or the other, but after a few cycles you've got enough that 1 of each per town is fine.

I saw some interesting woes go by: black death, one that made a bunch of tiles disappear, earthquake, one that apparently teleported a bunch of norse to the greek side and captured a greek town (interrupted the cycle of social decay briefly until it decayed itself), etc.  None required any deviation from the above.

Social Decay can stop theoretically stop this, as it does in Expert 4 but not in Expert 1 due to lower magnitude.  On Expert 1 it actually makes the "strategy" much less time-consuming: all but about the last 3 towns have decayed, so the "beginning of new turn, center on town belonging to this faction" logic actually brought me near the end of the "arm" of the faction I was building for.  Saved me a ton of time   Except for that bit with the norse teleport.  Those turns took longer because on red's turn I had to scroll from deep-blue-side to the end of red-side (with shift held, thankfully).  Game took 50 minutes in total.

[PokerChen]

A couple of armchair comments in view of .902...

Town-leapfrogging cheese:
- make the map finite in directions?
- up towncenter cost by 5 stone?
- marsh tile-cost 2?
- placement of a tile requires one neighbour to have 2+ neighbours itself? (hard counter long spindly islands by doubling action cost)

Unrest/social decay:
- travel time between neighbouring towns can be more than 4 turns on complex map types.
- If a red army is victoriously sweeping across the battlefield, risk auto-lose because there are no blue units around red towns and not genocide. IMO that's not quite a desired lose condition, but oh well.

Different way to cheat:
- does there exist a way to safely seed a blue town in the middle of red clumps? Would have been trivial if players could place mountains/lakes.

- Could someone please try filling the map with many red/blue human melee units, using Norse/Norse, with the following sequence:  Red. Yggdrasil,
 blue Yggdrasil, both Eldrihmnir (skip red if red too many), repeat. You should statistically fulfill social unrest criteria + unit number balancing, and units could be too busy fighting each other to actually destroy towns.

[YoukaiCountry]

Just had a game go totally south when blue got hit with the Serial Killer woe, and red got swamped in social decay due to not having many blue units around.
I like the idea of it, but I'm not so sure about the new feel the current way it's implemented is giving things... I feel like I'm spending too much time trying to convince units to hover around this town and that, instead of letting them do their own things and working on balance.

Maybe something less harsh when decay hits 100, like production of resources/units shutting down until it lowers a bit?

[orzelek]

Ok I've read this... and I don't think it will work.

Enemies 3 tiles from town center?
City will be dead before anything ranged gets that close - ergo only melee units needed.
But.. bandits and their fortress needs you to have siege units. So add to that any siege unit that has short range.
Anything else... is only inhibiting your goal of getting your units next to enemy towns.

Compared to this social decay previous Crime mechanic was very favorable.

Atm I don't really see what is the goal of game?
In first iteration (one with crime and score) there were 2 main things for me:
- need to keep balance of military producers on both sides so that crime won't eat you up
- score to judge how "well" you did in that conflict

I understand that game without crime can be heavily cheesed - there is nothing really to force you to produce units. But forcing enemy units close to your towns seems very strange way of enforcing that. I don't see how it would work - I need to force enemies next to my city center and yet figure out something so they won't destroy it. And there is no way to protect the city from that enemies. And you force production of ranged sieges with bandits that can destroy the city without closing to it to distance required to be "useful" in terms of preventing social decay.
What is the intended purpose for cities in the game? Atm I have no idea. Only few potential ideas how to cheese the system come to mind since it seems that I will need to cheese it to play.

PS.
It's possible that this game is simply not for me. But I had much more fun with first alpha than now.

[Mick]

I'd like if Social Decay felt more like AIP. As it goes up, things get worse and worse for your stability. Right now, it is basically binary. A town at 80% social decay is no different than one at 10%. And flipping completely over just seems a bit much to me.

It's the same way I felt about crime. It's fun to have a town fight against units, it's not fun to fight against a number. What's even worse is you have to play in a weird way to work against that number, and that number no becomes the sole focus of the game!

I kinda feel like the game went from"fun gameplay but the challenge needs to be way greater" to "this game is challenging, but in a really unfun way." It feels like more of a puzzle game than a strategy one right now.

On another note, in the current iteration, social decay pretty much IS the game, and the tutorial basically mentions it as a footnote.

I hate to say it, but I think you have the worst of two worlds now. I think it's much less fun strategically, and I think the newbies are going to be confused and put off.

And really, I hate hate hate being this negative and critical. I know you are up against a wall here with the deadline, but these are my honest impressions. The game needs to be fun to play.

[Pepisolo]

Maybe the simplest and most integrated thing to do would be just to tie in Woes to this in some way. Give towns a hidden "social decay" counter and if it reaches full then a Woe could specifically target this town (or towns). Something like "Without military conflict, the people in TownName have become soft  paving the way for banditry to sweep over the town". This gives the player however many turns then to prepare their defences or potentially face losing the town to a bandit spawn and their other towns potentially becoming pincered as a result.

[madcow]

Not able to play unfortunately, but catch up on the patch notes. The system for social decay really doesn't sound well implemented.  I'm not sure what I could suggest to have an AIP-like feel to it, but this current one doesn't seem particularly.

I would maybe suggest just having the unrest naturally go up on each side (as a universal number), and killing units/destroying buildings/etc brings it down, with the caveat that there's diminishing returns if it occurs all in the same village. Obviously this could use refinement (don't want just disposable villages destroyed back and forth to keep the value down) and is just something I'm throwing out. But I'm really not caring for the idea of the current unrest system.

[keith.lamothe]

Town-leapfrogging cheese:
- make the map finite in directions?

If finite enough might help, but I could easily have turned corners, etc.  So it would have to be a very finite area.

- up towncenter cost by 5 stone?

Would still have worked fine on Expert 1.

I think if each town center cost 5 more than the previous, that would potentially shut it down.

- marsh tile-cost 2?

Fields would have done just as well, really.

- placement of a tile requires one neighbour to have 2+ neighbours itself? (hard counter long spindly islands by doubling action cost)

That would help, though it would make it impossible to build on an island cut off by whatever woe it was that does that.  Not sure if that's a big deal.

[x4000]

@Keith: you're way behind, don't pay attention to this thread.   The model has moved on actually twice from here, heh.  Just so that you don't spend a lot of time responding here.