Author Topic: Skyward Collapse Alpha 0.950  (Read 13622 times)

Offline Misery

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Re: Skyward Collapse Alpha 0.950
« Reply #15 on: May 21, 2013, 12:44:04 am »
Well, there's ONE idea I had, but I dunno that it's a good one:  Instead of "total destruction", it could be "lose less than X town centers", wether that's over the full game, or by age.   The woes and score gate tend to very much lead to the NEED to make more of these, and the more there are the more the player would have to be careful of them.  And with the rules that make sure that each city does have to "take part", essentially, and bandits and woes that can happen anywhere.... And of course bandit forts and certain woes (and the score!) can force the creation of siege units.  hmm.   Yeah, this is the best suggestion I can think of at the moment.   TOTAL destruction seems to never happen.... but an individual city falling?   Definitely happens, and defending them isnt easy.


I'm not sure how that would fit thematically, but that one's not for me to have to figure out, hah.

Offline Cinth

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Re: Skyward Collapse Alpha 0.950
« Reply #16 on: May 21, 2013, 12:57:01 am »
Just playing around with artificial handicaps, I've had total destruction of one faction.  Usually because of bandits.  One problem with the idea are woes that target towns, EoC and Ultima.  Those two drop both sides to one town each.  That would make both auto loss. 

Play a round with these two restrictions, no mythologicals and no siege units.  Bandits are a pain in the hind end the whole game.  It is fun though.  Snowballs know no limits :)
Quote from: keith.lamothe
Opened your save. My computer wept. Switched to the ST planet and ship icons filled my screen, so I zoomed out. Game told me that it _was_ totally zoomed out. You could seriously walk from one end of the inner grav well to the other without getting your feet cold.

Offline SRombauts

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Re: Skyward Collapse Alpha 0.950
« Reply #17 on: May 21, 2013, 01:53:59 am »
Great Update, many noticeable improvements!

Two minor things though.
UI playback:
http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=11606 : Save the speed of playback between game sessions

Gameplay:
http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=11607 : Bandit Keep can spawn in town radius!

Good job so far!
Cheers

Offline PokerChen

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Re: Skyward Collapse Alpha 0.950
« Reply #18 on: May 21, 2013, 07:24:03 am »
http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=11607 : Bandit Keep can spawn in town radius!

 I'd like to think that's a "feature", :P although it should probably be fixed to not spawn too close to towns.

Offline Pepisolo

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Re: Skyward Collapse Alpha 0.950
« Reply #19 on: May 21, 2013, 08:26:07 am »
For me, this game just doesn't need score gating. If a game is going well then I may try and push things in order to bump up my score, I may not. I don't want to worry about that extra victory condition when I'm fighting for survival. For example, in my last game if I'd had score gating on I would have failed pretty early due to massive amount of bandit overrun and Edge of Civilization Woe hitting -- instead I had to come back from the brink of defeat, think hard, and I just managed to hold out until Wrath of the Gods kicked in which helped clear the bandit overrun. This felt pretty epic.

Hey, I can't really complain too much as the option is there to switch it off, thankfully. I may even try a score gated game some time for the extra challenge. It seems like an interesting bonus option. Not sure it should be the default setting, though, especially at this stage when the points haven't been properly balanced.
« Last Edit: May 21, 2013, 08:30:20 am by Pepisolo »

Offline Mick

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Re: Skyward Collapse Alpha 0.950
« Reply #20 on: May 21, 2013, 08:31:30 am »
Hm, it seems like individual units and buildings actually fall pretty easily.... but as the game goes on, the sheer numbers of each keep going up.   The more buildings there are, the harder it is to destroy the other guys completely... but the more UNITS there are, the more of a crowded mess the map gets, and the less building destruction is possible.

Overall then, I do agree with you on that one;  it's part of the reason why I love the score gate idea so much.  I get that the idea of the game is that if one side gets too strong, they'll start snowballing over the other side, eventually leading to destruction, but this is actually a pretty slow process and so far, not too hard to stop.   It's actually pretty easy to bolster the unit count of a given side, as military buildings (and heck, new cities entirely) are pretty easy to make.  You can also use mythological units of course, but not really in big numbers.... it's easy to get big numbers of human units to add to a side though.   And of course it's not JUST these.... you've got things like the big god powers that can fix things fast.  Heimdall's "kill everything" horn for instance can do this.

EDIT:   And there's also bandits!  Logically bandits should add to the danger, but I find that they tend to instead add to the DISTRACTION:  Units fighting bandits are NOT attacking the other side and thus not throwing off the balance at all.

I have to wonder if a different condition other than the "total destruction" one is necessary (and the score gate would be left in place).  Because you're right, it seems like it just doesnt quite work that way.  Not from my experience so far anyway.   I dont have any suggestions on what such a condition might be though.

The score one though is the one that interests me the most anyway.

I agree with a lot of this, and I think you stated well my feelings on why survival is just not a very motivating mechanic.

===
AI-War analogy time (I know it's a different game, but it's easy to use as a metaphor). Take AI-War how it is now, but change the victory condition to: Survive for 10 hours.

Is that difficult? No, not in the slightest, and if you were playing as smart as possible, it would be the most boring 10 hours of gaming in your life. The smartest move would be to not leave your system.

Now, you could say "Well, you're playing cheese, actually go out and take systems and then things get a lot more interesting," but that wouldn't really be fixing the problem.
===

I think ideally, score and survival would work against each other. Things that drive up score make survival more difficult, and doing things that only help survival should not contribute much at all to score. I think that's meant to be the general goal.

Survival is trivial as long as you can build faster than the units on the map can destroy. The amount you can build in a turn on average is a bit less than 3, because sometimes you have to plop terrain just to get a new center. For the sake of argument, let's just call it 3.

So to put things in a bit of perspective, to have any risk of destruction to a faction, you need to have one side killing more than 3 buildings on average every turn, and they have to sustain that rate for along period of time.

Things that get in the way of this happening:
* High health buildings.
* Units getting blocked by 1-unit-per-tile-restrictions (carpet-of-doom, like Civ 5).
* Restrictions to number of attacks per tile (even with multiple attacks, it appears units are forced to 'spread' those attacks instead of being allowed to focus, like arsonists)
* Bandits (huge distraction for units)
* Armies killing each other
* Some woes like vanity (to be fair, some woes will harm towns too, but that's an uncommon factor)
* And last but not least: A player who isn't asleep at the keyboard.

How to fix? I dunno, as I've said before, it's a lot easier to point to things and say "this is unbalanced" than it is to balance and make things fun. This is why Armchair Game Designer is not a valid occupation.

Here is a crazy idea. If the problem can essentially be boiled down to "the units can't do stuff faster than you (the player) can do stuff", maybe the solution is to simply strike at the heart of that. You can do this in two ways (or a combination of both):

1) Give the player less AP per turn.
2) Give the units more "rounds" between turns.

I like (2) better, because having 3 actions just *feels* bettter than only getting say.. 1. Maybe you should balance that out by giving the AI 3 "actions" as well. Basically, the equivalent of running two extra turns before the player can interact again. Each unit basically has 3AP of their own, where each AP represents a whole turn of action. They don't use all AP at once though, they take turns between themselves. You could even have units with special abilities (or ruin effects) that give them a boost to their AP (letting them take more actions in the round).
« Last Edit: May 21, 2013, 08:33:07 am by Mick »

Offline Cinth

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Re: Skyward Collapse Alpha 0.950
« Reply #21 on: May 21, 2013, 08:55:43 am »
I'm guessing you've never played the Defender mode in AIW. 

I thought the point of the game was to balance the chaos between 2 factions, incite war but not allow either faction to get obliterated.  If that is true then the player has to have the tools to accomplish that.  The player fights against the war between the factions, woes, and bandits.  Preserving life amongst the chaos. 

Right now score and survival do work against each other (in a sense).  To score points you have to destroy or kill.  To survive, you need to create more buildings and units.

Quote from: keith.lamothe
Opened your save. My computer wept. Switched to the ST planet and ship icons filled my screen, so I zoomed out. Game told me that it _was_ totally zoomed out. You could seriously walk from one end of the inner grav well to the other without getting your feet cold.

Offline Pepisolo

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Re: Skyward Collapse Alpha 0.950
« Reply #22 on: May 21, 2013, 08:58:50 am »
How about increasing the resource requirement for a town center? What is it at the moment, 10 uncut stone and a couple of prerequisites? While I was fighting for survival I did find that it was a little easy just to plop another town center down and continue to kite the bandits. With a much higher resource requirement this surely wouldn't be sustainable for very long. Bump it up to 50 stone, see how that works out. Heck, you could even make town centers directly vulnerable at all times forcing the player to drain AP in repairing them. This would stop you from just outbuilding your way to victory. Maybe a little outlandish that one, not sure.

Offline x4000

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Re: Skyward Collapse Alpha 0.950
« Reply #23 on: May 21, 2013, 08:59:34 am »
* Score rebalance:
** The points granted from a unit kill have increased from 5 to 15.
** The points granted from a building kill have increased from 100 to 150.
** The points granted from token uses previously varied by your general difficulty, which didn't make a lot of sense and made people have wildly different experiences score-wise.
*** For the most part, these are now the values that they were on Hard general difficulty before.
*** However, in some cases like Tyr's sword or Cornucopia or palladium, the points are actually now negative!
** The requirements for score during the age of man have been drastically reduced, while those for the later two ages have not been changed.
*** This allows you to get settled on your feet before you're having to deal with too much carnage, and it also makes it so that as more things open up to you (more resources available, new gods and their tokens, etc) the score requirements are increased then, rather than earlier.
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Offline x4000

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Re: Skyward Collapse Alpha 0.950
« Reply #24 on: May 21, 2013, 09:02:30 am »
* The cost of town centers has been increased from 10 cut stone to 30 cut stone.
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Offline Cinth

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Re: Skyward Collapse Alpha 0.950
« Reply #25 on: May 21, 2013, 09:11:59 am »
@Pepisolo: That would force me to preplace a second TC during the setup round.  It takes 6 turns of saving stone to make a TC btw (one quarry).

@x4000: That sounds good.  Age of Man usually is completely spent building up everything.  Things pick up in monsters and you have to play the hand you are dealt with by the time you hit the Age of Gods. 
Quote from: keith.lamothe
Opened your save. My computer wept. Switched to the ST planet and ship icons filled my screen, so I zoomed out. Game told me that it _was_ totally zoomed out. You could seriously walk from one end of the inner grav well to the other without getting your feet cold.

Offline Pepisolo

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Re: Skyward Collapse Alpha 0.950
« Reply #26 on: May 21, 2013, 09:17:22 am »
Quote
That would force me to preplace a second TC during the setup round.  It takes 6 turns of saving stone to make a TC btw (one quarry).

What are your thoughts on an increase to 30 then? Or did you think 10 was the correct amount? I'm really just interested in what you more experienced players think.

Offline x4000

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Re: Skyward Collapse Alpha 0.950
« Reply #27 on: May 21, 2013, 09:21:24 am »
Big big thing:

* All units that can attack multiple targets are now able to attack the same target multiple times per turn rather than having to switch targets with every attack.  This makes them a lot more powerful, and seem a lot more sane.

And then loads of siege stuff:

* Updated the tooltips on all the siege weapons to make it clear that they cannot directly attack units, but will damage any who happen to be standing on buildings they attack.

* Norse arsonists require water flasks, while norse catapults no longer do.
** This makes the arsonists unlockable, and the catapults not.

* Greek siege towers now require ale, whereas the trojan horses do not.

* Greek Siege towers can now attack multiple targets per turn, and their attack power has been only lowered by around half.  This makes them... deadly.

* Norse arsonists have had their level 1 attack power tripled, and the upper range of their attack powers goes up less now.

* Bandits no longer will use arsonists, siege towers, or mortars.
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Offline Mick

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Re: Skyward Collapse Alpha 0.950
« Reply #28 on: May 21, 2013, 09:26:12 am »
Would you consider making bandits only spawn melee units in general? If they end up with a ranged unit, it tends to neuter their ability to spawn while the unit is sitting directly on the tower.

Alternatively, they could spawn within within a range of the keep instead, so they would only be blocked if every tile is covered.

Offline Cinth

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Re: Skyward Collapse Alpha 0.950
« Reply #29 on: May 21, 2013, 09:30:59 am »
Quote
That would force me to preplace a second TC during the setup round.  It takes 6 turns of saving stone to make a TC btw (one quarry).

What are your thoughts on an increase to 30 then? Or did you think 10 was the correct amount? I'm really just interested in what you more experienced players think.

Personally it will take me 4.5 turns to have the cut stone at 30 (4 quarry).  I think requiring lumber might have been a good choice too.  It would eat up 4 spaces in the first town just to be able to expand though. 18 lumber would be the same amount over the same time frame.
Quote from: keith.lamothe
Opened your save. My computer wept. Switched to the ST planet and ship icons filled my screen, so I zoomed out. Game told me that it _was_ totally zoomed out. You could seriously walk from one end of the inner grav well to the other without getting your feet cold.

 

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