Responses:
one of the things I believe should be improved is the monster issues that kasnavada mentioned, this is honestly the most annoying thing in the game right now seeing as early on they can one shot all your buildings and you cant do anything against them
Definitely heard loud and clear.
All the events I encountered have all just given me bonuses such as "1.01 bonus science" and such, I even encountered a event that had the exact same effect on both options. So in other words nothing that caused me to interact with the races yet.
There are overall three kinds of events:
1. Those that are you interacting with your people for some reason or other.
2. Those that are you interacting with another race, or the planet, for some reason or another.
3. Those that are passive "things that happened" that you don't interact with at all, but which result from your prior decisions (usually poor management of some part of citybuilding, but could be positive too).
Right now, there are pretty much only those in category #1 that have been fully implemented and turned on. There is a loooooot of work that is partially complete on 2 and 3, but that's why you aren't seeing more of those yet.
One thing I do not fully understand yet though is the new combat as I am not entirely sure how it differs from the previous version, so if someone could explain it to me that would be nice.
Basically, before:
1. AIs and monsters attacked you and each other during the interturns.
2. You attacked them during your turn.
3. Everyone only gets one attack per turn per building, unless there is a buff causing extra attacks from a building.
4. There was all this stuff with "interceptors."
5. The vast majority of buildings could not attack or counterattack.
Now:
1. AIs and monsters work the same when attacking one another -- that was already fine.
2. Currently, in the very short term, monsters work the same when attacking you. That is Very Bad, it turns out, so will need to be changed.
3. If you are initiating fighting (or, in future versions, if someone initiates fighting with you), then you go into a distinct "battle mode."
4. During battle mode, all of the buildings that are involved can attack "infinite" numbers of times, so long as you have enough money to do so and so long as they don't die.
5. After each attack from one side, the other side gets to attack. So there is no first mover advantage (or very little one), and instead is a big back and forth.
6. All buildings have "militia" capabilities, which allow them to attack back against the foes that are threatening them.
7. But, this is organized into "rounds" of battle (invisibly), so there are a few specific rules there:
- At the start of a round, it gets a list of the strongest to then the weakest attackers from the instigator of the fight.
- Then the same thing from everyone else.
- The militia buildings from the attacker can't be used; those are counterattack only.
- If the primary purpose of the militia is to be militia (aka guard posts), then it includes all of those, no matter what, for defenders.
- If the list of buildings of the defender is still shorter than that of the attacker, then it fills it in with other buildings that are not primarily militia.
- Now it goes through the list of buildings fighting back and forth as described above, and if the lists are different lengths then you'll see a period where one side attacks without getting attacks back at them. That's only fair.
- Once all of the buildings in the first lists have done their business (or died), it refills new lists.
Some of that comes off more complex than it needs to; I need to figure out a better way to explain some of that in a brief fashion. But at any rate, that's what is going on.
One last thing, I may have encountered a bug when I was playing but I may need confirmation on this. After attacking a rogue in the territory the Neinzul then decided to rush to the defense of the vicious beast and blew up my military, not sure if this is relevant information to add on or not but the neinzul were subjugated by the Thoraxians. Furthermore them attacking seemed to cause no harm in our relationship so not sure it that is also a bug.
Attacking into someone else's territory is definitely something that, at the moment, will cause you to go to war with them no matter what. In the next build, making it so that the monster has to attack out of that territory to get you is probably something I'll do. I have to think about this. There are actually several things to think about, there.
Relationship-wise, you probably increased the anger of them. The old attitude stuff is going by the wayside most likely, but hasn't yet.
PS Sadly I lost my savefile of that game to the bug where turns take forever due to events disappearing.
Wait, was this in 0.908?? Hopefully in 0.907, because that was fixed in this latest version.
Thanks for taking my remarks into consideration =).
Of course! Always.
It's not the order of constructing stuff, it's indeed the organization in the sidebar. If it's work for later, it's ok =),
After thinking about it, it's the "sidebar" organizaion itself that is confusing to me. Then again maybe it's just me. My personal preferences go to settlers 2 for the building interface, but anno 2070 had really good ideas.
Anno 2070 works for me because building are sorted by "tiers" and because the production lines were "hard coded" into the building selection screen. Settlers 2 worked for me because buildings are sorted via rough "obvious" lines like size and purpose. It also worked because the buidling was visible directly when building.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Settlers_II#/media/File:Settlers2-DOS.png
http://guides.gamepressure.com/anno2070/guide.asp?ID=13384
I'm not quite sure that I follow. I mean, I understand that you prefer not having a sidebar, but there's not much I can do about that. The way that Cities: Skylines does it works because they have such a small number of buildings that you can directly build, and then they have a bunch of sub-tabs within each section for those that have more than a few things.
I mean, that works I guess. Possibly we will wind up moving to something like that. The original design I have here was based more on SimCity 4 in terms of how the sidebar is handled. And SimCity 2000 did it this way, too, IIRC.
It's been a long while since I played Settlers, and I don't think I played that version, so the screenshot doesn't mean a whole lot to me. But Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom I think did something similar to what is shown there, from the looks of it.
The big thing with ROTMK is that it actually has huge numbers of dependencies: you need X to make Y which you need to make Z, etc, etc. In SBR, there really are zero dependencies now. Yes, if you want to have citizens there is the dependency of "some sort of housing, some sort of food, and water from somewhere." But there is no intrinsic order in that, and certainly between kinds of food there is no order in terms of building up from one to the other. The order I've chosen there is from most basic to more niche, in the main.
When it comes to the lack of dependencies, this is very much like a lot of RTS games, or all the SimCity games. You don't NEED to build fire stations, period, to be frank. In SimCity, if you're okay with buildings burning down periodically, there's no reason to ever build any. When the fires go out, just bulldoze. Etc. So there's no way to go "well, if you want to do this right, first build X amount of fire stations at Y density..." Yeah you want to build fire stations, but they compete with other wants for your money and your electricity. So how few fire stations can you get away with? There's a definite point of diminishing returns, but where is that? What are acceptable losses when it comes to fire? That's a subjective question that different players would answer different ways.
Further, when it comes to buildings that buff other buildings, those are all optional, too. It's not like you HAVE to have a certain buff. Maybe it doesn't fit with your playstyle, or maybe you're getting a similar buff a different way. Maybe that territory is not focused on that kind of production. So there again, having some sort of map of an order of operations is next to impossible. If I give you a palette of paint and you say "which color to start with?" Then we have a similar problem. Generally those palettes are ordered by like things being near one another, but the traditional artists palettes also usually have some of the really commonly-used stuff down near their thumb to make that quicker to get to. Etc, etc.
Anyway, my point is not to go "no, you're wrong, there is no problem." I do just want to make that clear! But I do want to make sure that we're actually discussing the problem under the same parameters, so to speak. I do agree that the organization could probably be more clear to new players. I don't mean the order in the sidebar sections -- I think that's pretty good, honestly -- but rather just the whole organization there in general. I think it's too early to make any final sorts of decisions on it, given the number of things that are incomplete right now.
I have a bit of limited mental bandwidth for tackling that particular problem right now, but it is something I don't want to leave until the last second, so talking about it some is definitely good.
