Skyward Collapse Alpha 0.905

[x4000]

Okay, okay: no more mega towns.  Placement rules are same as before, but this should help as various noted:

* Improved the tooltip for "you can't place this tile here" to show you ALL the reasons you can't place that tile there, rather than just the "most important" one.  That way you can tell when you can place a town center if you just build out a bit more land, for instance.

[Cinth]

 

[Misery]

Okay, okay: no more mega towns.  Placement rules are same as before, but this should help as various noted:

* Improved the tooltip for "you can't place this tile here" to show you ALL the reasons you can't place that tile there, rather than just the "most important" one.  That way you can tell when you can place a town center if you just build out a bit more land, for instance.

Haha, that was fast 


As the TC placement goes, I dunno how hard this would be to do, but it'd help quite a bit if, when I'm going to place one, the possible spots all light up in the same way that cities show the green spaces when you go to place other buildings for them.   The placement rules make perfect sense for TCs, it's just hard to visually estimate where they can go when it's time to place one.   Alot of "Oh, I still need one more tile of distance here" moments.   Not a gameplay issue, more like just a thing that could do with a small UI change.

[Cinth]

Yeah.. and here I thought I was going to have something neat.  You guys viciously shot that down

If I'm reading what was posted right, the placement tooltip is going to display all the parameters for placement and I think that would work just as well as a visual guide.  It's not like you are in a race against time to place stuff.

[Pepisolo]

Had to pause  my game for the night -- I'm hanging on by a thread after that Woe that smashes all towns but one, hit. It's a lot of fun, albeit more of an all out free-for-all than just Red versus Blues with a few bandits. At the moment, Reds and Blues have got enough on their plate holding back the bandits let alone fighting each other. Easily my most enjoyable game so far.

Don't really understand why there are so many restrictions on where to build towns. Would it really be that bad if I built a megatown....? I'm struggling enough to win on medium without being restricted with how close I can build to my own towns. I don't even bother with looking where to place it, I just scan my mouse around until the tile turns green.

Also, Gods and lesser Gods need to be announced on playback. It's a little annoying scouring the map to see where they've popped up. Do Gods and Lesser Gods fight for you? They don't seem to be for me. Oh, playing on Medium 1 by the way.

Oh, my score is 5255 so far.

[Pepisolo]

I've quickly filled in your survey... oh, it wasn't a survey. Whatever!

My questions to you:

1. Did we solve the problem of "not enough depth?"  Aka, is this sufficiently hard to win on a high difficulty in a way that is interesting and brain-involving? ...

Can't fully answer as I only play on Medium. Hard enough on this difficulty as far as I can see. Not sure if there are still any cheesable strategies.

2. Does Easy difficulty feel sufficiently laid back, if anyone is playing that?  It shouldn't really require much strategy.  So long as you don't do anything egregiously silly, it should go pretty smoothly.

Don't know, haven't played Easy for a while.

3. How about Medium difficulty?  That should be like playing on difficulty 7 of AI War, I think.  It's definitely quite possible to lose, and frequently, but it shouldn't feel unfair.

What I'm playing on now, and it seems tough-ish. Seems ok to me. Can't compare it to AIwar as I haven't gotten into it yet. Planning on playing that co-op from the start after finishing up the tutorial.

4. Continuing the AI War analogy, Hard would be more like diff 8, whereas Expert is more like diff 9.

Dunno.

5. As I mentioned in another thread, we're expected to deliver a press build tomorrow.  Waiting is bad because it hurts our ability to have pre-release buzz.  But giving a ridiculous build to the press in terms of it being way too hard -- or having mechanics that we shift on them a ton -- also is a bad idea.  So how are your feelings on the current mechanics?

Mechanically it seems solid enough to me now and I don't think it's going to shift much. Although I think that there's a fair bit of balancing and polishing to come. If you don't mind the press playing a not completely balanced or not completely polished game, then seems ok. It would be of tremendous help if you could get some fresh blood to do a bit of late testing of the game on Easy or Tutorial mode, though, to spot any last minute problems.