0007748: How to do tiers in a cool way - Arcen Idea Tracker (Bugs and Features)

ID	Project	Category		Date Submitted	Last Update

0007748	Valley 1	Suggestion		May 11, 2012 1:49 pm	May 11, 2012 2:19 pm

Reporter	Bluddy	Assigned To
Status	considering	Resolution	open
Product Version	1.017

Summary	0007748: How to do tiers in a cool way
Description	People don't like scaling. They just don't. They like to feel like if there was a monster that kicked their butt, now that they upgraded their weapons, they can wipe the floor with that monster. Tier upgrades also don't make much sense from a narrative perspective. How are all the monsters getting harder? This is a much bigger deal than it seems. People can tolerate mechanisms that make sense to them. If they don't make sense, they seem broken. So my idea is that monsters are never upgraded in tier level. Instead, with every tier, you get an increase in new monster types that are stronger. Basically take the same way that elites are done now. So bats will always be tier 1. Fire bats can be tier 2 or 3. The weak monsters will still appear in higher tier levels, but with less of a chance. The idea here from a narrative perspective is that the overlord is sending out stronger and stronger enemy types to fight the glyphbearer. Since it's not the same enemy types getting stronger, this makes a lot of sense. I realize there are probably not enough monsters yet in the game to do this. For now, monsters can double up. So bats can be tier 1 and tier 2, but no other tier. Fire bats can do double duty as tier 3 and 4 etc. The idea here is that you're constantly encountering fresh enemies, and you still have old enemies to trounce. This idea can even be combined with my other idea that only some tile types advance per tier (randomly) to create an effect where you have tiles populated with lower level monsters which you can destroy at your leisure. Now the coolest part IMO is that the first continent would have a set order: bats are lowest level (with a chance of sonic bats appearing at tier up etc), fire bats higher... but when you get to the 2nd continent, the hierarchy is shuffled. So you could suddenly have lightning espers as your strongest enemies. The bestiary would be continent specific, as you'd learn (and adjust) to monsters having different tiers. This together with some new monsters unlocked per continent would really make it all feel fresh.
Tags	No tags attached.

Internal Weight	Feature Suggestion

Chris_McElligottPark May 11, 2012 1:58 pm administrator ~0024070	Something like this could work -- however it presupposes a really vastly larger number of enemies than we have now. I don't think I'd want to attempt this until we had closer to perhaps 300 enemies. Frankly at the rate at which it takes us to add monsters I don't know when this would be feasible. Part of the thing about monsters is that they get more interesting when they are combined in different ways: when you have Monster A and Monster B together, you sometimes get a synergy that makes for a whole different experience than either one alone. The more you segment the monsters out, the less of that sort of synergy you get. The fact that the region types are already so split is problematic for that already, and the migration mechanic was meant to somewhat alleviate it. It's still better than the opposite case, for instance AI War, where things get over-homogenized. Which, if we do wind up with 300 enemy types is certainly a risk as well. I think that a progression along these lines could theoretically work, but not anytime remotely soon.

Date Modified	Username	Field	Change
May 11, 2012 1:49 pm	Bluddy	New Issue
May 11, 2012 1:58 pm	Chris_McElligottPark	Note Added: 0024070
May 11, 2012 2:00 pm	Chris_McElligottPark	Relationship added	related to 0007750
May 11, 2012 2:19 pm	tigersfan	Internal Weight	=> Feature Suggestion
May 11, 2012 2:19 pm	tigersfan	Status	new => considering
Apr 14, 2014 9:28 am	Chris_McElligottPark	Category	Suggestion - General Idea => Suggestion - General
Apr 14, 2014 9:30 am	Chris_McElligottPark	Category	Suggestion - General => Suggestion