0007271: Adding strategy and urgency - Arcen Idea Tracker (Bugs and Features)

ID	Project	Category		Date Submitted	Last Update

0007271	Valley 1	Gameplay Idea		Apr 27, 2012 9:10 am	Apr 27, 2012 9:16 am

Reporter	Bluddy	Assigned To
Status	considering	Resolution	open
Product Version	1.001

Summary	0007271: Adding strategy and urgency
Description	This is in response to Professor Paul's suggestion that there should be a timed 'call to action' to go do something every once in a while to insert urgency into the game. My take is that this is a good idea, but it should be expanded to be the strategy layer that was left behind in the beta. Here's the rest of my post from the forum: I always thought that some of the strategic stuff from the beta should come back in some form or another. Perhaps this is a good way to do it, although it's not clear in what timeframe you're supposed to be battling the overlord strategically. For example, it'd be cool if the overlord sent over a fast scout to try find out where the settlement is, and your job is to kill the scout before he can get back to the overlord. You could have the lieutenants send scouts first perhaps. Anyway, what timeframe does that happen in? Is it a sudden call to action? Should it happen in mission time? Should the bad guys move in real time? Perhaps the overlord and the lieutenants could do some actions in real time, per tier. The longer you wait in a specific tier without countering their actions, the more stuff they can do. But if you move into the next tier, they suffer a serious setback and can't accomplish everything they wanted to in that tier. So they keep doing bad things, one thing leading to the other: first they send scouts. Once they send scouts they send armies. They build encampments of armies. Then they assault the settlement. Eventually maybe they start building a dangerous magic artifact. You can fight all those things individually, but they'll become more and more common. You can also use guardian powers to slow them down. But the best thing you can do is move to the next tier. Yes, their armies are strengthened, but for some reason they're also really pushed back and their work is destroyed -- the tiers represent you working on something that will eventually defeat the bad guys. Why is this so important? Because it counters the currently negative effect of doing missions. Missions advance tiers, which make the game harder. But they're supposed to be continent progress towards the good solution. This mechanism would also clarify the connection between mission time and realtime. And it appears that people really do want a more pressured component to this game -- one that raises the stakes for all your actions rather than giving infinite time to do everything. This has always been a sticking point: the game is about the end of the world and overthrowing a dangerous overlord, but the devs wanted to make it laid back and non-time-sensitive. Perhaps this is a good way of combining the two. Regarding the calls themselves, I see 2 ways to do this. You could have an immediate call to action that opens up a warp to the location. But perhaps it's better to have a call that starts a specific mission on the map, like an assault of your settlement. You can go to do this mission at any time within reason ie. if you don't respond within a ridiculous amount of time, the event resolves itself, usually badly. Again, you could make most events (or perhaps a certain amount of them) go away just by advancing the tier. Another thing to note here is that this idea divorces the concept of tier from enemy progress, which was the intent behind turning enemy progress to continent progress. One would have thought that at tier 1, the enemy shouldn't be able to do anything too major to you, and at tier 5, the enemy should be building nuclear weapons. But this is a mistake IMO. It brings back the concept of enemy building up to a doomsday weapon via tiers, and makes missions even worse for that reason. The key here is that tiers should HELP the player, as it represents the player advancing with the continent and the Ilari. So yes the bad guys get tougher, but that shouldn't be the focus, even though unfortunately it currently is. So at any tier, given enough realtime and player inaction, the current enemy forces will do worse and worse strategic stuff. And the best antidote to that is advancing the tier, at the cost of making the enemy forces stronger. There's a really cool tension here between allowing the enemy time to build and yourself time to explore, and at the same time strengthening the basic enemies.
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Internal Weight	Feature Suggestion

Date Modified	Username	Field	Change
Apr 27, 2012 9:10 am	Bluddy	New Issue
Apr 27, 2012 9:16 am	tigersfan	Internal Weight	=> Feature Suggestion
Apr 27, 2012 9:16 am	tigersfan	Status	new => considering
Apr 14, 2014 9:30 am	Chris_McElligottPark	Category	Suggestion - Gameplay => Gameplay Idea