View Issue Details
| ID | Project | Category | Date Submitted | Last Update | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0004132 | Valley 1 | Gameplay Idea | Sep 27, 2011 8:59 pm | Jan 26, 2012 9:48 am | |
| Reporter | GrimerX | Assigned To | keith.lamothe | ||
| Severity | feature | ||||
| Status | resolved | Resolution | fixed | ||
| Product Version | 0.501 | ||||
| Summary | 0004132: Make constructing wind shelters challenging | ||||
| Description | It is too easy to construct wind shelters. I can pretty much do all the visible wind shelters at L1 without much effort. Some ideas 1) Have to escort somebody to construct the wind shelter, then protect them as mobs/xBosses try and stop you. Also gives people a meta reason to go after trash mobs/monster generators in preparation. This also encourages you to level up locally before you go expand your network. Seems in a dangerous world this is what you would do. 2) Have the roads mean something -- and mob blocades of the roads caues problems. Not sure what this would be, but maybe impacting resource flows, etc. Again, encourages you not to spread yourself thin in a dangerous world. 3) Some action/cost required to build roads. having them magically appear seems wrong. Maybe this is an action the NPC can take, or maybe it is like building a wind shelter -- would be kind of interesting if you had to do it in a specific chunk of a region. Would give the impression of altering the landscape, and give a location for "questing". Roads could cross a region (1 part of 1 chunk), or maybe cross multiple chunks. Not sure how that would work, but could help visualize the expanse of the world/break up the background a bit. | ||||
| Tags | No tags attached. | ||||
| Internal Weight | Polish Tweak | ||||
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Making the wind shelter erection more of a challenge is potentially a possibility, and we've talked about some things. But really, the question becomes: does that add fun? I can't think of any model that adds anything other than hassle, so we don't have any other model in there at the moment. Regarding the specific suggestions: 1. NPCs coming out of the settlements with you in adventure mode is something we're staying away from completely pre-1.0, and quite likely for good. Allied AI is something players complain about endlessly, and it's more trouble than it is fun. I mean, Alyx Vance is one of the best ever, and she had an enormous budget behind her, but people still gripe about her constantly. We also ran into this with allied AI in AI War, too. 2. They do mean something, in terms of cutting out the windstorms on those tiles. Longer-term, in the strategic side of things, we absolutely do want to do some more interesting things with them, for sure. 3. We really don't want players to build roads directly, as we don't want them making the world too over-developed. When it starts looking like a fully-developed sim city, a lot of the theme and ambient of the game is really out the window, and that's not where we want to take it. That said, revised road mechanics in some fashion are certainly on the way. |
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Fair enough. Agreed with you on not wanting to make this into sim-city. Your points about NPC AI make sense as well -- hadn't considered that. Mostly, erecting a wind shelter seems like it should be a more significant event than it is in the game today. Agreed that it should be fun :-) My first thought in response was to put a boss mob there, but that doesn't fit well with the fact that humans are sheltering there. Maybe just outside the chunk with the wind shelters -- that's why the humans are 'trapped' in that location. |
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There's no mechanical reason we couldn't have it seed a group of guarding monsters in another chunk that you have to clear out before the wind shelter can be constructed (just like you have to clear out guarding monsters before you can exploit a resource deposit), but I wonder if that's playing the "here's a group of bosses you have to kill before you can xyz..." card too much. |
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There's actually some thematic reasons for them to be trapped there -- non-glyphbearers can't leave the protection of the Ilari without basically going crazy. The Ilari provide protection both in life and at the time of death. And I think that a boss for there is kind of the lazy answer -- I mean, it's all Keith and I could think of, too, I don't mean that in an insulting way to you. I just feel like... whatever it is should be more special than anything that we've thought of yet. Quite agreed on making this more special and more of an event, anyhow, but I don't know what that would be. I'm reluctant to lean on the "always put a boss anywhere we want to make something epic" any more than we already are. I think we are borderline leaning on that too much already, and we really need to start doing something else with new mechanics. Ideally whatever we do here would not be too complex, in terms of the player having to take a lot of steps. And it would be somewhat obvious and intuitive, in terms of them not needing some involved tutorial to do it. And it wouldn't have any enormous technical requirements like the huge allied AI thing, etc. There's a simple solution, I just know it -- there always is. But we've just been kind of waiting for inspiration while leaving it simple in the meantime. And are very open to ideas, but we're just picky on the criteria for this one (well, for everything, really, but you know ;) ). |
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Ninja'd by Keith. Yeah, my thoughts also. This might be an interesting venue for the "text quest" stuff you were working on a while back, Keith. Or some other sort of... minigame, for lack of a better word. |
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Chris, I think we could get some mileage out of revising the previous approach from a few months ago: multiple kinds of challenge, randomly selected. One could be the "there's a gang of monsters in another surface chunk in the same region and we can't stabilize the field, go kill them", another could be "there's a fragment of a dark/fallen Ilari stone somewhere in the underground and we can't stabilize the field, go destroy it". And potentially a variant where the thing-to-kill is in an interior. And maybe some don't have a challenge at all, they're just freebies. |
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Could go the minigame route as one possible challenge, I think, but I think it would get old to have it be always needed. |
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Eh, I guess so -- that gets really cross-chunk and complicated, though, the way that it was implemented before. I think that there should be another macro game location that represents the challenge type, and that then gets seeded like any other macro game location. And it would always take place elsewhere in the region, never in the wind shelter chunk itself. That would be more interesting, I'd think. Of course, then having NPCs able to bypass all this for minor resources in the strategic side of things gets laughably obvious to do. |
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My thought is that the NPCs can't build the shelter if those monsters are there either, and there's more way to skin that particular cat. But yea, if the challenge is in a separate chunk it would be its own MacrogameLocation and/or TacticalUnit. |
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I think there's a lot of things more pressing than this for the next month or so, but it's definitely something I want to look at pre-1.0. |
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Since the only way to build shelters now is through missions, I think this one is solved. |
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Agreed. |
| Date Modified | Username | Field | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sep 27, 2011 8:59 pm | GrimerX | New Issue | |
| Sep 27, 2011 9:08 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0014071 | |
| Sep 27, 2011 9:08 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Assigned To | => keith.lamothe |
| Sep 27, 2011 9:08 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Status | new => feedback |
| Sep 27, 2011 9:14 pm | GrimerX | Note Added: 0014075 | |
| Sep 27, 2011 9:14 pm | GrimerX | Status | feedback => assigned |
| Sep 27, 2011 9:20 pm | keith.lamothe | Note Added: 0014077 | |
| Sep 27, 2011 9:22 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0014078 | |
| Sep 27, 2011 9:23 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0014079 | |
| Sep 27, 2011 9:25 pm | keith.lamothe | Note Added: 0014081 | |
| Sep 27, 2011 9:26 pm | keith.lamothe | Note Added: 0014082 | |
| Sep 27, 2011 9:29 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0014084 | |
| Sep 27, 2011 9:32 pm | keith.lamothe | Note Added: 0014085 | |
| Sep 27, 2011 9:38 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0014087 | |
| Sep 28, 2011 6:26 am | tigersfan | Internal Weight | => Polish Tweak |
| Jan 26, 2012 9:27 am | Toll | Note Added: 0018150 | |
| Jan 26, 2012 9:48 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0018152 | |
| Jan 26, 2012 9:48 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Status | assigned => resolved |
| Jan 26, 2012 9:48 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Resolution | open => fixed |
| Apr 14, 2014 9:30 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Category | Suggestion - Gameplay => Gameplay Idea |
