TLF Version 1.017 Released (Back From A Long Quest)

[x4000]

Original: http://arcengames.blogspot.com/2014/05/tlf-version-1017-released-back-from.html

Version 1.017 is out at long last!  Sorry for the delay with this one, but it's packed full of goodies.  There were a number of things that just needed more testing time internally, or to all be completed together, before we publicly released them.

So what's new?

- Well, there's a whole host of smaller bugfixes and improvements.  Several dozen things that players suggested, a lot of them balance or usability related.

- There's a new player-suggested dispatch mission type, where you get to provide tactical support for ground invasions in progress.  Beats just waiting around for the ground troops to do their thing on their own; now you can help speed them along if you have nothing else you'd rather be working on!

- The "betrayal from within federation" mechanic is now better balanced as well as vastly more clear what is going on and when.  The "grumbling" about you when you are low influence with a race is now something that you can recover from if you get them to like you, which is a pretty critical new thing.

- There are a number of improvements to the general mechanics of quests to make them more clear, and in a couple of cases more balanced.

- Six new quests have been added!  There are two main groups that they are in.  One group is just four different versions for the various RCI values.  Very powerful, though.  The other group is for these cool "joint missions" where you can have one or more races gang up on another for either a sneak attack of ground combat or bombing, making use of (and depleting) the emergency reserves from their planets.  It's a great way to build attitude between the collaborating races, while driving someone else into the ground.

- Auto-Resolve has seen a metric ton of updates, and now seems to give the sorts of results I would expect in all the test cases I have.  If you find any issues with it at this point, of course do let me know!

- The way that attitude and influence changes are both projected in "this is what will happen if you take this deal/action/quest" screens, and the after-action screens, is now vastly better.  This took me forever to get right, but it's a lot more condensed and clear now.  If you prefer the old way, though, which is more verbose (but too much so, in my opinion), then there are settings options that let you turn on the old way.

What took so long with this build?  Well, mainly it was a combination of the auto-resolve stuff (which mainly took a lot of testing and iteration), the attitude/influence stuff (same sort of deal with experimentation and testing, plus I kept making and fixing math errors), and some of the quest framework stuff that I had to add for the new quests in general (each time I add that sort of framework stuff, it makes future quests faster, but for now it still takes a while for each quest).

Anyway, I was the bottleneck with that one, and meanwhile Keith was working away on a whole host of things that make up that long list of other refinements.  My expectation is that we should be able to return to the more-or-less daily updates during weekdays after this one, but occasionally we'll have a particular set of features that will take some extra time (in this case, three workdays).

In an effort to keep my own sanity on the weekends, I'm going to also try to limit the main nightly releases to just Monday through Thursday, and then do a maintenance patch on Friday before midday if there is something that needs quick patching.  That way I'm not tied to the computer all weekend, which is something that (as you might expect) has a pretty negative impact on family time.  Anyhow, it's not like we'll be taking Fridays off, it will just make the Monday updates disproportionately large.

--------------- Ongoing Updates All This Month ---------------
The support of the community, and the growth of it, remain amazing to me.  I've been promising daily new features, but since launch it has became clear that there are other things more on your mind.  Things like added interfaces, new AI behaviors and options, and things like that.  So, you know what?  I'm just going to go with that -- those count as features, really, in that they help to make the game more interesting and easier to understand and play.

So what else is going on?  Well, we're going to be working at this pace on the game for at least another month, which means that you're going to be seeing lots of good things coming.  If you've liked what you've seen in the last few weeks, you can imagine what another month of that will be like.  We do have two other things in the works as well, but we're not quite ready to reveal either one of them (although I am betting that most long-time Arcen fans can guess what both of them are).  Suffice it to say, neither one of these two other things are going to impact the general updates, improvements, and free additions to TLF that are coming over this month.

More to come tomorrow.  Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the  in-game updater, or if you have Steam it will automatically update it for you.  To force Steam to download it faster, just restart Steam and it will do so.

[GC13]

Hey, the patch notes seem to have the explanation for "Show Detailed Influence Entries" twice, rather than its companion.

Other than that, I gotta say I'm really disappointed in the quick "fix" that disallows a race building an attitude building that would make it unhappy. Has that been playtested? Because it looks to me like it just makes war inevitable. Best-case scenario, you get high influence with the people who will be made upset by the buildings of your chosen races and get them to call off the wars every time, but doesn't the cost scale up as the opinion drops? There aren't very many credits unless you're fighting wars or insurgents. Worst case scenario, the races you're trying to get together into the Federation do a little too well in their wars and form a Solar Axis Pact, since you can't call them off of a defensive war they've started to win.

[x4000]

Hey, the patch notes seem to have the explanation for "Show Detailed Influence Entries" twice, rather than its companion.

Thanks, fixed!

Other than that, I gotta say I'm really disappointed in the quick "fix" that disallows a race building an attitude building that would make it unhappy. Has that been playtested? Because it looks to me like it just makes war inevitable. Best-case scenario, you get high influence with the people who will be made upset by the buildings of your chosen races and get them to call off the wars every time, but doesn't the cost scale up as the opinion drops? There aren't very many credits unless you're fighting wars or insurgents. Worst case scenario, the races you're trying to get together into the Federation do a little too well in their wars and form a Solar Axis Pact, since you can't call them off of a defensive war they've started to win.

I wouldn't call that a quick fix in the sense of it being a bandaid.  It's just logical -- why would you yourself build something you disapprove of?  Mormons don't make porn, as a general rule.  To pick one extreme example.  Having the equivalent of that as an option at all was something that was completely an oversight, so whatever balancing needs to happen needs to be in light of this anyway.  It was one of those things that just didn't make sense and was an oversight.

I've not playtested that extensively, no; I'm also not generally trying to avoid all wars, either, though.  More peaceable options is something that I do want to explore, but essentially just relying on attitude buildings alone and using them in a kind of exploity way (hey, I hate porn, but you like it, so let me make it for you so you'll like me!) wasn't intended.  They're basically meant to be a tool, not the entire tool belt, if that makes sense.

[GC13]

Well what's the rest of the tool belt? The player can't see the requirements for a valid trade route, so can only hope that his efforts to build mines and processing plants will matter; everything else gives really negligible effects to attitude, which has to get quite high in order to form the Federation.

I mean, I keep harping on it every patch, but we need more. There are precious few things it's reasonable for a player to ever do, so picking out the best one for the moment is pretty easy since they don't tend to ever be mutually exclusive. Nerfing the attitude buildings doesn't really make the game difficult in a fun way, it just forces the player to wait longer still before the Federation forms, or to take a chance on a Solar Axis Pact or Fear Empire forming as a result of defensive wars. It's just a waiting game right now, without the player really able to affect the developing situation beyond those attitude buildings. The strategic simulation runs only on a very high level, and the diplomatic side (the place where you'd expect someone flying a single ship built using the technology of the races being manipulated would focus most of his efforts) has only the most cursory element of simulation going on in it.

[ptarth]

In regards to the tool belt metaphor, from my perspective, it looks like they are adding tools one at a time (which is probably as good as way as any to do it). Therefore I wouldn't get too bent out of shape at the influence buildings, there will be plenty more options added as time goes by. Same goes for a lot of this stuff, stressing so much about balancing is somewhat premature because the things it needs to be balanced against, don't exist yet. When the community has provided sufficient motivation to balance something, it usually results in things going much too far the wrong way (e.g., Federation Points). So, I'd suggest just relax, expect things to be a little betaish, and that it will change in the next patch. Work on documenting and reporting unexpected mechanic outcomes, implementation problems, and such. Also, avoid egging on hard explicit arbitrary solutions to problems (e.g., Federation Points). If they get added, they'll make things a terrible nuisance to balance later or be removed (e.g., Federation Points. I might have a problem letting things go.).

So, keep your eye on the prize. Don't miss the forest for the trees. Don't be penny-wise and pound-foolish. Save some mustard for your hotodg. Etc. Etc.

Also: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0124819/

[chemical_art]

In regards to the tool belt metaphor, from my perspective, it looks like they are adding tools one at a time (which is probably as good as way as any to do it). Therefore I wouldn't get too bent out of shape at the influence buildings, there will be plenty more options added as time goes by. Same goes for a lot of this stuff, stressing so much about balancing is somewhat premature because the things it needs to be balanced against, don't exist yet. When the community has provided sufficient motivation to balance something, it usually results in things going much too far the wrong way (e.g., Federation Points). So, I'd suggest just relax, expect things to be a little betaish, and that it will change in the next patch. Work on documenting and reporting unexpected mechanic outcomes, implementation problems, and such. Also, avoid egging on hard explicit arbitrary solutions to problems (e.g., Federation Points). If they get added, they'll make things a terrible nuisance to balance later or be removed (e.g., Federation Points. I might have a problem letting things go.).

Your milage will vary depending on opinion. I'd rather expand the toolbelt first, then refine once there is a toolbelt, rather then make sure each individual tool is refined (as opposed to just broken) before adding another. I know why this approach is done (in theory, easier to balance) but it really drags on the whole player experience. I want to actually play, and not wait for a patch down the line. That is beta-like behavior of having to wait for things to enjoy the game at more then a snails pace.

[ptarth]

• I'm not sure our perspectives differ that much (or at all) chemical_art (or even with GC13). They just don't have the man hours to quickly put together and add "tools" relative to the what we might expect. From a development manhour standpoint they are blazingly fast, perhaps even unhealthily so. Looking at the AI Wars patch notes shows that it also isn't just post release fervor either. However, we'll see if someone winds up with a concussion caused by a bucket of dirty diapers.
• Why does the spammer always want to sell i am spam? Is Arcen a famous kitchen product related trademark somewhere?

[chemical_art]

• I'm not sure our perspectives differ that much (or at all) chemical_art (or even with GC13). They just don't have the man hours to quickly put together and add "tools" relative to the what we might expect. From a development manhour standpoint they are blazingly fast, perhaps even unhealthily so. Looking at the AI Wars patch notes shows that it also isn't just post release fervor either.
  

I agree Arcen has blinding fast development times.

It just is a matter of where to put that time. Chris has mentioned on almost every post how quests will help with attitudes. Now that quests have started to come out, we shall see how it works in practice. We shall see.[/list]

[Misery]

This looks like a good patch:  It looks like you fixed the bloody Terraforming missions.  Their previous versions were impossible, and I dont say that lightly.  No more of those.... lumpy spawning things should help ALOT with this.

As for the added quests, in theory they sound good, but just how high/low do these numbers need to be?  They sound like they could be a bit too situational; getting an RCI number up really high takes a long time, and getting it really low typically costs way too much influence basically everywhere to be worth it.  I typically dont see numbers beyond 100/-100, if that, in my own games.

I'll be eager to test this one but I cant do it yet, my arm is totally wrecked. Cant do much with the mouse, dont feel patient enough to control the cursor with the controller, could do that later though.