View Issue Details
| ID | Project | Category | Date Submitted | Last Update | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0006484 | Valley 1 | Gameplay Idea | Mar 6, 2012 11:18 pm | Apr 27, 2012 9:22 am | |
| Reporter | BobTheJanitor | Assigned To | Chris_McElligottPark | ||
| Severity | feature | ||||
| Status | resolved | Resolution | no change required | ||
| Product Version | 0.904 | ||||
| Fixed in Version | 1.002 | ||||
| Summary | 0006484: Enchant recycling | ||||
| Description | As a way to reduce enchant inventory clutter, allow some sort of turn-in point in the settlement (maybe it has to be built first with a guardian power) where old enchants can be tossed out and turned in to something like 5 or so percentage points towards the unlock of your next enchant. Make those that you can find whole in rooms only worth 1/2 a percent since they're easier to acquire. Hopefully the game can still remember that you've already found those enchants so you don't just immediately unlock old low power enchants again. | ||||
| Tags | No tags attached. | ||||
| Internal Weight | New | ||||
| has duplicate | 0006998 | closed | Enchant Recycler |
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Just dump anything you don't want, it affects nothin now. The game does not consider your ineventory in any way, shape, or form when deciding what to give you anymore. Turning in old enchants for points would just break the progression system and let you get even better stuff too fast. |
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Just barely decrease the amount each enchant container gives you, or increase the required points to get the next enchant and you can easily keep the same unlocking rate. The number of enchants that could be recycled would be a known quantity, because people would have to unlock them first the normal way. And even at 5% per, you only get one extra enchant per 20 old enchants. Make each normal enchant take 1/20th longer to obtain and the rate is practically identical. It just seems like it would add a little fun, and the illusion of being more active in your own progress. But I don't want to be argumentative, so I'll let it go. :) |
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But then we also have to code in a bunch of new mechanics for just this, and some people won't even find it, and everyone else will feel like they have to hang onto every piece of junk enchantment just to minmax their enchant points, etc. It does strongly encourage a clean inventory, which I like, but it also opens up another can of worms I'm reluctant to dive into right now. |
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I find myself storing the old ones in my first settlement. I don't know why, maybe I'll need them for the Enchant Dungeon later. If I can't destroy them, I feel like I should keep them. My inventory is much more cluttered. Only way I have found to fully remove them is to go into a mission and drop them there. |
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Maybe we should put a new "incinerator" into settlements that lets you put in various stuff that you want to get rid of. Spellgems would give you nothing, but perhaps enchants would give you some consciousness shards of an appropriate color/scale. Putting in other random things like scrolls and such would potentially have unexpected results, for the sake of fun -- perhaps even giving you something secret and more powerful if you incinerate some spell scroll or another. Making the incinerator a bit of a minigame in itself, of sorts. |
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That could be fun. It doesn't have to be enchant points of course, that's just the first thing I thought of. If that pseudo-currency system that was in the brainstorming monster drops thread ever goes in, that might be a good way to 'get paid' as well. |
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As a general design principle, I want players to feel like they understand the world around them and generally what they need to do to win... but at the same time, have this lingering, ongoing sense that "anything can happen." And some sort of generalized incinerator where you can put various mess into it and mostly get nothing or shards out, but sometimes you find some special item where you get something even better out... that's the sort of thing that sets people's minds to wondering. I think that's a big part of what attracts me to dwarf fortress, minecraft, terraria, and even in some senses AI War (where it's a strategic opposition thing more than a "things I can do" thing). I lost interest in minecraft when that sense of anything being possible was lost, based on having played it too much and it not getting many new updates (as well as not having that much that was hugely procedural beyond the terrain itself). So ways to put in lots of little easter eggs, in some senses, that players can find, is something I want to do more and more of. Plus with the way that our enemies evolve and change behaviors over time, that's something we're going to be emphasizing even more so that players hopefully increasingly feel like the world is alive around them. That, to me, is essential for the spirit of adventure -- as soon as you understand _all_ the rules, and know _everything_ you can get, the game is dead to you. |
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How about putting timers on enchants? That would make them more like enchantments, which is what they sound like. They expire after X days. Not X days of use -- that would cause hoarding. But if they expire after X days, that gives you the ability to give some overpowered ones, since they're temporary anyway. Super powered ones would last a shorter time than weaker ones. And it would reduce clutter naturally. Most importantly, it would prevent an ever growing power curve that would make PCs superpowered (and bored) by continent 10+. |
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Interesting, but definitely not where I want to go with it -- the growing power curve is actually intended. The monsters, similarly, will be getting their own power curve. By continent 10+, if you can survive at all you'll be doing really really well. Right now that is not true, but that's where we're angling to go. The enchants will be your only refuge against the insanity of some of what will come out of the monsters as you get further. That, in turn, will actually put some practical limits on how many continents will ever be in a given world, which is counter to one of my original goals of the game, but that's how it goes. Instead of making ever-more continents, I'll instead then focus on giving players reasons to come back and and do things on older continents. Sauron is defeated, the Shire is saved, and that's great. But there are still Balrogs and whatever else in the world to be dealt with, etc. As noted elsewhere, the problem with enchants isn't that they are unbalanced or that they get players to a place where they are bored or enemies are too easy. The problem is that enemies didn't yet have their own progression system to match. That's just due to lack of time so far, not lack of intent. But starting this morning, I've been getting some of that in place for the enemies to become a lot more interesting longer-term, and thus for enchants to have a more natural place to fit. |
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In Dungeon keeper, each level you had to start from scratch, build up your troops, create your technology etc. However, you could pick a few of your favorite troops to bring with you to your next level. If you brought a tough combat guy, you could get a head start of killing things. I always liked bringing one of my level 9 imps with me so they could teleport all over the place. I get that enchants are our permanent progress, and I like that. I have no idea where this would go, but what if you could only bring so many enchants with you to the next continent? I like the concept of going back to old places. But it might curtail the limit on low many continents are allowed. This isn't a real idea, but maybe it will allow someone else to think of something. |
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Please just let me actually implement what I have planned before starting to suggest alternatives! :P |
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Wow. That's a pretty big change to the original design. I thought you might have to go in this direction. From balancing Din's Curse in my mod for a while now, I can tell you what happens there: the higher levels try to deal with player empowerment by making the monsters stronger and stronger. Eventually both the player and the monsters get so strong that they both become glass cannons. That actually has to do with the fact that the player has many ways to boost attacks, but few ways to boost HP. But the general problem is that it gets really hairy when you get to heavy boosts -- the balance gets harder and harder to maintain. The other issue is that players get discouraged when they can no longer play at higher levels. The game gets naturally harder and harder, but the player didn't choose to play at higher and higher difficulty. Eventually the player hits a wall of difficulty -- and that isn't very fun. You may want to reconsider this approach. I don't know if it'll be as problematic as what I'm describing here, but consider the fact that the original RPG approach kept a very smooth curve where the difference between you and the monster power remained constant throughout. In essence you're re-instituting an RPG approach, but there's no guarantee that the player can keep up with the monsters. The foreign element here is the enchants, which keep scaling up. That's why I recommend making them expire and restoring the non-RPG approach of the game. You could still have a very slow curve up in difficulty, but that can be chosen by the player. For example, the player could have 3 continents to choose from when finishing a continent: a harder one, one of equivalent difficulty, and an easier one. This way the player can always change direction if he's getting his butt kicked, but he can also follow a slowly increasing challenge curve. |
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Sorry -- it took me a while to write up my response and I didn't get to see yours. |
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Not a worry. A few things: 1. After coming on three years now of balancing AI War, we have some experience in this regard, too. 2. I feel that most of the problems that arise from this approach come from unbridled "let's give you this sword that is 2x as powerful!" type of approaches. 3. Players generally speaking grow in skill as they play. If the difficulty were to stay constant, they will get bored, period. Therefore a slow difficulty creep as you play, with mainly the focus being on added complexity and decision making rather than raw stats buffs, is what is needed. Nintendo is exceptionally good at this, and is my model. 4. I hate how every western RPG I've ever played handles stat increases, and most JRPGs. I've not played Din's Curse, but it doesn't sound like I'd like how the stat increases would work there, either. What I have planned is a lot more subtle, and again based on that more organic complexity/decision-space sort of design, rather than just stats inflation. 5. Again this comes back to balancing strategy games. With just flat stats inflation, things only get so interesting. Between the difficulties in AI War, we do some of that because some of that is needed -- as here. But mostly, what we do is increase the complexity of the scenario and the AI of the opponents. In AVWW, it's not so much global AI as it is the challenge of the sort of scenarios you are running into, as well as the combinatorial effect of enemies, the environment, the missions, etc, etc, that make you have to choose your upgrades and enchants ever more carefully. This takes a much more delicate hand, but what you'll find is that even if you stack the maximum damage-increasing enchants on your character, and if you max out their damage while doing nothing else (aka, making yourself as much a glass cannon as you can), at the moment you can get about 400% of the baseline power. Thereabouts. That is just a drop in the bucket in terms of general stats inflation of the sort you are worried about, and is basically the "endgame" for that sort of thing as I see it at the moment. Rampant stats inflation is why we went back and got rid of civ levels, you might recall. When I said that there would be a finite number of continents you'd want to go through, that's taking the same premise in that the "infinite" caves are effectively finite because once you get too many tiers down it gets impossible and un-fun. So rather than just plugging ahead there (if you happen to actually find that fun), you turn around and go do something else outside of those ultra-deep caves. Same idea with continents. Not making "the world end," where you can't play anymore, but making it so that overlord 10 is such a freaking monster that you might just want to ignore him and go after some more interesting/appropriate challenges elsewhere. Otherwise we're on an infinite overlord-treadmill, right? Which, really, you still are -- but once you pass a certain point each overlord is such a difficult feat that you're not likely to get to 100 continents or something. There would simply be far more fun and entertaining ways to spend your time with the game if you've already got 9 continents, so most players would tend to do those other things instead. In other words: the growth of this stuff is partly to _curtail_ exactly what you're worried about, while also curtailing infinite world growth in the sense that the world map gets overwhelmingly crazy huge. TLDR: I hate RPG stats balance, and don't want to touch it with a ten foot pole. Keith and I are some of the most experienced asymmetrical-RTS stats balancers around, though, and I intend to approach the cross-continent progression from that angle rather than anything remotely like has been done in other adventure or RPG games. That's why I keep saying this isn't an RPG, and why at the moment I'm asking for some latitude on at least letting us get a first pass of this approach in. AI War is working evidence that this sort of approach can work, but the first pass is likely to have imperfections. Side note: when we introduced the Spire in AI War, folks were worried those were just going to be "Golems, but even larger" as a lot of strategy games tend to do. "New, most powerful expansion now includes even bigger ships that make everything else obsolete!" We got a lot of comments along the lines of what you were just saying. But, if you look at what we actually did, you'll see that we introduced some really massive ships that did indeed increase the complexity of the game (and thus the difficulty in that sense), but a Spire ship is still not inherently always better than any other class of ship, despite individually being more powerful. There's a lot of other factors at play there. Anyway, hopefully that helps put your mind at ease some and explain where I'm headed with this. Holding any RPG up as an example of what we're about with this game is really going in the completely opposite direction. :) |
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OK that does actually sound pretty good. In DC, the weak part of scaling is the part where monsters get tougher as you go up in level up to 100 (though I do fix that up quite a bit in my mod if I do say so myself :) ) That part has to happen because the game follows the Diablo mould, meaning that the character gets stronger and stronger as you invest points in attributes and gain skills. The much cooler difficulty comes from the randomness of every town -- each town gets random modifiers like 'poor', 'undead infestation' etc. Also, a town might have no vendors, meaning that you can't buy supplies or fix your gear until you happen to get a quest to invite a vendor over to town. This randomness creates a difficulty curve that's spiky and random rather than a constant uphill climb, and that's really neat. You might want to consider adding something along those lines for your difficulty curve. For example, a continent might be dominated by lightning beings (though now there are mostly just espers) and if you have enchants that only boost your lightning damage (assuming there are such things -- and if so, they should be more powerful than general enchants), you'll have a much harder time on this continent. |
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Precisely -- that's exactly the sort of thing you run into in AI War, and what we're aiming for here. The ability for that sort of complexity doesn't come in with this game until things have been unlocked, though, hence the growth. On the first continent enemies are tamer because, well, it's too complex otherwise. And thus if you get some enchants, well, great, you can overpower the enemies because let's face it some people will need that. And experimentation is the best way to learn. But later once you're getting things like random modifiers on the continent/overlord/whatever like (from your examples) "poor," "undead infestation," etc, you're going to get those random sort of spikes. But if some of those are continent-gated, then you get a complexity/difficulty curve through n number of continents before all that starts becoming a bit overwhelming even for advanced players. That's when we're trying to then circle people back to their existing continents with interesting things to do there, which is really a post-1.0 sort of goal but still. If we can keep someone interested in a world for 3 continents at the moment, that's our main goal for 1.0. |
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I wanted to just chip in and say I really like the gambling incinerator idea! |
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Thanks! * Most enchants, when dropped, are instead (after player confirmation) "reabsorbed": ** Reabsorbing an undroppable enchant gives you 10% progress towards the next enchant, but this process completely and irrevocably destroys the reabsorbed enchant. There is no way to undo this, and so should only be done with enchants you'll never need again. ** The basic light-emitting enchants, seeker, and diluter enchants can still be dropped (and cannot be reabsorbed). |
| Date Modified | Username | Field | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mar 6, 2012 11:18 pm | BobTheJanitor | New Issue | |
| Mar 6, 2012 11:22 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Internal Weight | => New |
| Mar 6, 2012 11:22 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0020472 | |
| Mar 6, 2012 11:22 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Status | new => closed |
| Mar 6, 2012 11:22 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Assigned To | => Chris_McElligottPark |
| Mar 6, 2012 11:22 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Resolution | open => no change required |
| Mar 6, 2012 11:39 pm | BobTheJanitor | Note Added: 0020475 | |
| Mar 7, 2012 8:37 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0020487 | |
| Mar 7, 2012 8:37 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Status | closed => considering |
| Mar 7, 2012 10:51 am | Penumbra | Note Added: 0020512 | |
| Mar 7, 2012 10:54 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0020513 | |
| Mar 7, 2012 11:37 am | BobTheJanitor | Note Added: 0020517 | |
| Mar 7, 2012 11:44 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0020519 | |
| Mar 7, 2012 12:19 pm | Bluddy | Note Added: 0020522 | |
| Mar 7, 2012 12:26 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0020523 | |
| Mar 7, 2012 12:49 pm | Penumbra | Note Added: 0020524 | |
| Mar 7, 2012 12:51 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0020525 | |
| Mar 7, 2012 12:52 pm | Bluddy | Note Added: 0020526 | |
| Mar 7, 2012 12:53 pm | Bluddy | Note Added: 0020527 | |
| Mar 7, 2012 1:09 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0020529 | |
| Mar 7, 2012 1:10 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Edited: 0020529 | |
| Mar 7, 2012 1:12 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Edited: 0020529 | |
| Mar 7, 2012 1:13 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Edited: 0020529 | |
| Mar 7, 2012 1:34 pm | Bluddy | Note Added: 0020532 | |
| Mar 7, 2012 1:45 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0020535 | |
| Mar 7, 2012 7:09 pm | zebramatt | Note Added: 0020550 | |
| Apr 4, 2012 2:28 pm | Rx09 | Relationship added | has duplicate 0006998 |
| Apr 27, 2012 9:22 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0022824 | |
| Apr 27, 2012 9:22 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Status | considering => resolved |
| Apr 27, 2012 9:22 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Fixed in Version | => 1.002 |
| Apr 14, 2014 9:30 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Category | Suggestion - Gameplay => Gameplay Idea |
