Skyward Collapse Alpha 0.906

[x4000]

Now out: http://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=Skyward_Collapse_-_Pre-Beta_Release_Notes#Alpha_0.906

Features of note:

1. Bandit spawns are not so brutal with the mythological creatures.  Aka, the difficulty fluctuations based on die rolls are a lot less severe.

2. Holy moly the difficulty systems.  I hope I didn't break anything much, because this was major surgery on the internals of the game.  But better now than closer to release, I guess.  Anyway, this also introduces the new "score requirements" option that a lot of folks had wanted.  I think that provides a pretty compelling secondary goal, and so it defaults to Easy on that now (though you can turn it to Off if you like, which makes it work like the prior build did).

My questions to you (repeat from last thread):

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?  It's sounding increasingly like the answer is yet.  And the score requirements, if you play with high ones of those, remove pretty much any chance of overt cheese of the style we'd been seeing before (new styles may of course arise, and probably will given enough time; players are so darn clever).

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.

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.

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

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?

My read on the situation from what folks have said so far.

1. It seems like we've solved the obvious cheese situations, as I noted.  So the game should be sufficiently interesting to the grognards here for a sufficiently long amount of time to survive a week or two of interest at worst; and if more cheese is uncovered, we can always deal with that on a case by case basis, as with AI War.

2. I'm a little worried that the bottom end of the difficulty levels are too hard now, but some recent adjustments may have brought that more in line with what is needed.

3. I feel like the current mechanics are -- knock on wood -- pretty stable.  The repair buildings option seems like a really obvious thing to have now, though it never occurred to me.  The scorched earth stuff really makes a ton of sense and I think is obvious to keep.  Score is great, and the score requirements, so on.  Tuning will be needed, naturally.  But I think in terms of a press build, we're not going to be yanking the rug out from under people too much with wildly changing mechanics between now and 1.0.  But I've been wrong before -- it all comes back to the cheese factor, which is why we went through this round of changes today and yesterday in the first place.

So... thoughts?

[Cinth]

I guess I know what I'm doing

Now to find that Sledgehammer AI...


Specifically I'll hit Easy and Med with the scores on so I can give feedback there.  I'll leave the upper reaches for those that like that sort of thing

[Cinth]

release has some issues. i'll elaborate on that.

Ugh.  Blue can go into AP debt, save attached here.
TC placement tooltip doesn't consistently show, ss that included.

Edit:  Added a ss I meant to add in the first place.  Apparently Red can go into AP debt also.

Game is a giant sandbox mode right now.

[Misery]

release has some issues. i'll elaborate on that.

Ugh.  Blue can go into AP debt, save attached here.
TC placement tooltip doesn't consistently show, ss that included.

Edit:  Added a ss I meant to add in the first place.  Apparently Red can go into AP debt also.

Game is a giant sandbox mode right now.

Wait, I'm a little lost on what the problem exactly is?   Cant tell quite what you're getting at with the screenshots there.


Anyway, as for this release, I cant say much for the score requirements or the difficulty changes as far as new games go, as I started my current one a bit before you guys put out this one, but so far in my current game on Medium I'm not having any major issues.   Things are definitely getting interesting here.   Though at times I think there might almost be TOO much bandit presence, with the strongholds;  red and blue both end up spending a bit too much time just fighting bandits, and not nearly so much fighting each other.   The strongholds though are very good in that they definitely encourage the use of siege units.  But yeah, I do think that the reds VS the blues is a more important idea rather than both together VS bandits.... I'm not sure just what to suggest on this one.   


EDIT:  Also, buildings actually collapsing entirely when they run out of HP: is a really great change.  It means that defense is that much more important now, and the position of certain tiles within cities has more of an effect.   Not to mention that combined with the requirement of cities being within a certain range of enemy cities, you can have situations where you think that a particular city is so totally safe, but..... suddenly it turns out that it isnt because a siege unit in an unconnected yet still close enough enemy city has wandered to the edge of it and is firing from there and wrecking your moon/sun and diamond buildings (argh, that one definitely hurts, it does).   

Also, I really like the idea of the score requirement thing;  losing the game entirely through total destruction still seems a little difficult to actually have it happen (at least on Medium, though I'm still in the first age so that may well change soon for me!), but the score thing is very interesting.   On one hand there's the temptation to use the big powers for the big points to get there faster, but if you do that of course you can really mess yourself up.  Even some of the powers that seem to be without a downside can mess you up, I had a sudden explosion of siege units from a particular Greek city because I'd used Cornucopia to enable me to place down a couple of mythological units to pop a couple of rampaging red guys that appeared in a totally different blue city, which suddenly re-activated a couple of siege buildings that I'd shut off by smashing their bakery, so I now had this big horde of siege units on the blue side that the reds were very unprepared to deal with.   Interesting indeed.

[Cinth]

Pulled the middle ss since it was pointless.  Check the tile placement TT in the remaining ss.  I moved the tile one spot and the TT changes.  That shouldn't happen.

There is a second issue that I ran into.  You can overspend AP on both sides.  That's why I put the save up.

Also, Misery, if you ignore bandits, they will be a big threat real fast.  I loaded up the game I played earlier today and before the game gets to turn 70, there were 12 keeps.  You want to lose by obliteration?  Don't handle the bandits.  if you have enough stuff to deal with bandits then your towns should be having a fairly fun battle

[orzelek]

Pulled the middle ss since it was pointless.  Check the tile placement TT in the remaining ss.  I moved the tile one spot and the TT changes.  That shouldn't happen.

There is a second issue that I ran into.  You can overspend AP on both sides.  That's why I put the save up.

Also, Misery, if you ignore bandits, they will be a big threat real fast.  I loaded up the game I played earlier today and before the game gets to turn 70, there were 12 keeps.  You want to lose by obliteration?  Don't handle the bandits.  if you have enough stuff to deal with bandits then your towns should be having a fairly fun battle

There is also something else.
Since you need to have enough stuff to fight bandits.. fun starts after they removed that last keep. You have suddenly large amount of stuff which is very interested in nearby enemy town. And that two groups of stuff can easily be in different places of map.

Getting the score back and that scorched earth stuff makes the game more interesting.
For me bandit keeps also added a bit more fun. With effect I described above giving more Fun.

[PokerChen]

looks like I won't be able to test your media build before it's sent, but I'm glad that
- the light elf finally has a ranged attack.
- bandit fortresses were put in the game.
These were suggested many patches back, and the game has finally reached the polishing stage to receive them.

IIRC most things on the community to-do list were addressed. Mini-map / hot-key to jump to town / auto-jump to town I haven't seen in the notes yet, but others seem to be covered.
If reviewers spend 40% of their game time scrolling, then it's going to be a negative impact. I'm sure some of them will try to build a wide front. Hot-keying towns or map locations is the final thing I think is needed for amooth core gameplay.

[Cinth]

The jump to the oldest TC on each side is in btw. Happens at the start of each turn.

[PokerChen]

Cool. Then some way to zoom across my vast empire of 8 towns each will be the last item (they aren't deep, just a ~long~ battle front).

P.S. btw, does this new cheese work?: drop a lone red town-centre at the back of your blue towns. for as long as it's alive you are free to build deeper.
What happens when the red TC is destroyed? I presume your deep blues keep churning.

[Cinth]

The only restrictions on building TCs are the 8 tiles between like colors/ 5 tiles between opposite colors (min)/must be within 16 tiles of an opposite color.  So yes, the "cheese" you describe is possible.  And yes, if that red gets popped, your blues would carry on.  No reason they wouldn't.  I don't really see a way to stop someone who really wants to cheese like that.  If a player is intent on it then whatever.

[PokerChen]

It's a cottage cheese, not very strong. True that it's very difficult to stop a determined player - to me, the neatest conceptual way to play off both sides was to checkerboard blue and red towns. This is just a slight development.

NB: if it isn't in, for scoring purposes, minor God summoned by Tyr should not give points or few points. summon - commandment - repeat, anyone? if this is hard, then give that token large negative points so you are encouraged to kill the summoned minor God to get them back.

[Misery]

Pulled the middle ss since it was pointless.  Check the tile placement TT in the remaining ss.  I moved the tile one spot and the TT changes.  That shouldn't happen.

There is a second issue that I ran into.  You can overspend AP on both sides.  That's why I put the save up.

Also, Misery, if you ignore bandits, they will be a big threat real fast.  I loaded up the game I played earlier today and before the game gets to turn 70, there were 12 keeps.  You want to lose by obliteration?  Don't handle the bandits.  if you have enough stuff to deal with bandits then your towns should be having a fairly fun battle

There is also something else.
Since you need to have enough stuff to fight bandits.. fun starts after they removed that last keep. You have suddenly large amount of stuff which is very interested in nearby enemy town. And that two groups of stuff can easily be in different places of map.

That is a good point, and I started to find that to be the case as I went further.  The defeat of a bandit camp does indeed seem to mean that suddenly you have a small army with nothing to do that will of course run off and FIND something to do (which is often something that's not them helping you in any way, hah).   So that does seem to be working out decently.

[Cinth]

I don't think trying to stop every cheese is going to something to spend time on.  3 days left ya know.
Heh. I haven't dug into the nuts and bolts for scoring.  I just want everything to work as it is supposed to.  Many of you guys are better at judging balance stuff. 

For Tyr's token, maybe the best remedy is to make it expensive to use. 


@ Misery: Have you been able to overspend your AP in the latest release (once at 0 AP keep trying to spend on stuff)?

[Misery]

Yep, the overspend thing is there.   It only happens with tiles though;  tokens of any sort wont do it.    Tiles give the "you dont have enough actions!" text whenever you're holding them over somewhere they cant actually go, but when you go to a spot that they can technically fit, they turn green and you're allowed to place them.


EDIT:  Whoa.  Midgard Serpent, really quite nutty now.    I like that change. 

[Mick]

Checkerboard cheese can be easily handled by requiring a max range from you own color as well (and that just makes sense anyway).

I really do like the sound of score gating. If the only requirement is survival I lose interest very fast. Splitting out woe difficulty makes sense now too. Woes seem kinda like the minor factions of SC.