Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Rollory]

Ok, this is a lot of stuff that will have to wait until assorted stability and features are done, but it is stuff I have been thinking about and want to put out there for consideration.

Right now, in my experience, every game is pretty much the same, and generally risk-free.  Once you master food production and handling immigrants - and avoid silly mistakes with flooding - the only real danger is the demons of the pit.  I haven't played on elephant maps yet but I already find it pretty easy to get across the cave river and set up my main base on the far shore by the first winter; that seems like a pretty effective escape from elephants (or pretty much any wildlife issues).  Also, there are no meaningful constraints on how or why you excavate.  Aside from the stone properties (soft stone tunnelling faster) mentioned in an earlier thread, ore quantity and type should be such a constraint - you should want to seek it out - but right now it's so plentiful people can just dig out according to preplanned layouts and pick up so much in passing they don't need to look for more (iron and coal being the exceptions).

Every map is also the same in the sense that every map has the same ores and stone types everywhere.  Games would be a LOT more interesting if this was varied.  You always need limestone, coal, and iron somewhere on the map, but the rest of it should vary - different games should play differently depending on the prevalence of different types of ores.  Maybe the map has mostly silver, and you make lots of silver weapons and armor and coins, and you're good against supernatural enemies like werewolves, and you're legendarily rich, but need to import your picks from caravans.  Maybe you find lots of tin, and end up building all your doors and furniture out of it (it would be better than raw stone) and trading huge amounts to the caravans in return for weapons.  Or you've got the ores for brass, and can either go with a weapons and armor strategy using the copper and be independent, or make brass tradegoods and be dependent on the caravans for equipment.  This would add a new and interesting challenge to the early-middle part of the game, and would make the various fortresses qualitatively different.

Actually, it would be even MORE interesting if there were different ways than just steel bridges to get across the lava.  But they'd be just as hard to manage.  Maybe bridges made of crystal glass with a dose of magic, or specially treated obsidian, or using aqueducts and channels to divert part of the river over the lava - a wide area, and only the very center would be walkable.  Or special equipment or heroes or something.  In Age of Wonders the dwarven Firstborn were immune to fire, and got sent across lava all the time; that was cool.

Then there's rock types.  It doesn't make sense that one particular area of mountain has ALL those types of rock all together.  The basic rock types should be one of just a few types.  Different areas on the world map should have different primary rock types, and different secondary rock typse, and other rock types that simply aren't found in that area at all.  Same for the light and dark stone - maybe a given map has a decent amount of marble and onyx, but no jet or obsidian at all.  This might not seem like a particularly meaningful change, given that the only constraints imposed by rock types are limestone being needed for steel and obsidian needed for obsidian shortswords - but it can be used for something much better; making search patterns more sensible.  Right now, when you go looking for a hard-to-find ore - usually coal or iron - the standard thing to do is to make a giant grid of rectangular tunnels.  That's kinda silly and looks ugly and wastes a lot of time.  What would be a lot more interesting would be to make the veins of a particular rock type be much larger, AND to associate them with a particular type of ore.  It wouldn't be absolute, but your odds of finding a certain ore would be much better if you find a vein of the right rock or stone and follow it.  This would make the different types USEFUL as opposed to their only effect being slight differences in caravan prices, and your dwarves' preferences.

There's just gotta be a better way to go looking for ore than digging up the entire map in rectangular grids.

Next, opposition.  You get frogmen popping out of the river, lizardman random attacks, and so on.  Ok.  Right now it's just an annoyance.  One comment I saw in the SA thread was that a guy who reached the demons had a herd of war dogs that had very efficiently dealt with every single other threat up to that point.  I believe it.  That shouldn't be possible.  Dogs are light infantry/cavalry types at best, they should be ok for the first couple years and for softening the enemy up (and maybe providing a screen for your marksdwarves) but there needs to be many more steps of threat before the endgame.  Maybe while tunnelling you break into a goblin cavern kingdom, or find a frogman village along the shores of the cave river, or a big nest of creepy-crawlies somewhere.  Maybe a lizardman army shows up and lays seige from the river (an unexpected direction).  Maybe a dragon - or three - climb out of the chasm and head for your treasury, incinerating everything and everybody in the way.  Stuff that makes you NOT just tunnel madly eastward to see what you find with no risk until you reach the lava.  The Underdark is _dangerous_.  You're supposed to be building a fortress and getting into serious trouble, not laying out a shopping mall.

Also: I haven't had a chance yet to play more than a year and a half on a haunted map, but the wildlife didn't seem at ALL more dangerous than in my current game, a "Calm" area.  Actually "Calm" has unicorn herds, which have already massacred half of one caravan; in the Haunted game I just had skeletal groundhogs to deal with (and skeletal macaques, which aren't much tougher than raccoons).  (There were some skeletal wolves and cougars too but they never bothered me.)  If I just haven't played long enough, ok, but I would expect that by the first winter there would be a lot more pressure from the undead and so on.  Maybe after a couple years a vampire count shows up with an army of thralls and tries to kick you out.  Maybe your dead dwarves rise from their graves all at once and attack their former comrades.  It should have the player be constantly - from the very first day - on the edge of their seat and paranoid, and right now it just isn't.

The game is supposed to be an "inevitable march to destruction".  Ok.  Fact is, that sounds like a fun challenge.  But it is fun if and only if there's lots of different ways to die - Yet Another Stupid Death, but with an entire city.  Right now, there's flooding, starving, and the demons.  There needs to be lots of others, that have a good chance of truly destroying the fortress, at every stage.  Minor random encounters aren't any sort of challenge.

Basically, there needs to be a LOT more variability in games aside from the precise locations of ore veins and the shapes of the three barriers.  (Though that also could use some more variability.  But it's not as important an issue as the rest of this.)  This is, in a lot of ways, a Roguelike strategy game; the great strength of the roguelikes is the randomness, and how every game is different.  There needs to be stuff in the game, choices presented to the player, that MAKE it different, and challenges beyond "how do I feed my growing population".  All the maps I see of people laying out the same basic type of giant rectangles and just steamrolling eastward tells me that's not present yet.

I understand this is "just an alpha" and the main thing right now is bug stomping and implementing features.  Not a problem.  I certainly will keep playing - even as-is the game is damn fun.  But before getting too far into feature creep like armies and world conquest, issues like these have to be addressed.

[RPB]

quote:Originally posted by Rollory:
<STRONG>But before getting too far into feature creep like armies and world conquest, issues like these have to be addressed.</STRONG>

I disagree. Adding pressure from foreign affairs and wars would itself go a long way towards increasing the variability of the game, as well as the challenge of the late game (where most of the challenge is solved by simply not tunneling east of the lava). Diplomacy and conquest would open up a lot more variability than just randomly not having copper sometimes.

[Rollory]

"more" - in an absolute sense, yes.  But not the right sort of variability, not at the right point in the game.  The scale of challenge and choice is too large at that point, there's nothing intermediate, which is what I am discussing here.  Armies etc. have no effect on the base game of establishing and developing your fortress.  That is the core gameplay.  That is what has to be fun and interesting and variable.

[ August 23, 2006: Message edited by: Rollory ]

[RPB]

Yyesss, but I don't see the core itself being too much of a drag at this point. Maybe that's just me, because I find optomization problems interesting. Trying out tweaks to layout is enough to keep my interest for a pretty good while; the problem I find is that after I get everything built there's not much to look forward to except getting slaughtered by demons.

(Realize too that triggering more restarts means the player ends up going through the same parts of the game more often, causing them to wear old sooner; trying to increase variability by creating more fortress-destroying conditions is at least partially self-defeating.)

One thing I think needs to be done is refining the noble system; as a city management game, nobles are I think the really genious touch but they need some work. Other similar games run into the problem where you get everything up and running and... that's it. Here you've got this steady stream of more immigrants and more nobles which add this steadily increasing threat to the smooth functioning of your fort... except really, they don't. They should, but generally fail to--once you know what to expect from your nobles, all their demands are either simple or impossible (like when they mandate the production of items from certain types of bone that are extremely rare on your current area--I don't know if they can mandate for item types that are impossible to make in the current area, but they might do that, too). And other than nobles, immigration never seems to pose any new types of problems--just more of the same problems as before, problems you've already got solved if you've lived past the 2nd or 3rd migration. Well, OK, there is the problem of trying to get immigrants to be able to afford housing, once the broker comes in--but even that can be solved, counter-intuitively enough, by just building crappier furniture.

[ August 23, 2006: Message edited by: RPB ]

[Rollory]

quote:Originally posted by RPB:
<STRONG>the problem I find is that after I get everything built there's not much to look forward to except getting slaughtered by demons. </STRONG>

I think my suggestions do, counterintuitively perhaps, address this.  If you have more difficulty and more gameplay GETTING to the demons, it doesn't so much matter that that is effectively the end of the game at that point.  You don't want to just burn through the fortress-building, have the one major fight against demons, and THEN and only then get into the meat of the choices and strategy.  That makes the early game FAR more boring, once you figure out your optimization methods and are practiced at expanding fast.

quote:<STRONG>(Realize too that triggering more restarts means the player ends up going through the same parts of the game more often, causing them to wear old sooner; trying to increase variability by creating more fortress-destroying conditions is at least partially self-defeating.)</STRONG>

Which is why different strategies to handle the early part of the game, resulting in qualitatively different fortresses in the later stages, giving the player qualitatively different tools to approach certain problems.

"More restarts" happens all the freaking time with Roguelikes.  If you don't like it, you can backup your savefiles and restore when bad things happen.  I do.  But playing it straight is a fun challenge too - and this game, with the fact that lost/abandoned fortresses persist in the world and can be returned to later, makes playing it straight and losing have positive entertainment value for the player.  Losing and restarting helps the player populate their world; it is something they will WANT to be doing.  It NEEDS to happen for adventurer mode to live up to its full potential.  The motto is "losing is fun", after all.  

And allowing the player to find/choose their own preferred level of challenge is important.

[RPB]

quote:Originally posted by Rollory:
<STRONG>I think my suggestions do, counterintuitively perhaps, address this. If you have more difficulty and more gameplay GETTING to the demons, it doesn't so much matter that that is effectively the end of the game at that point. You don't want to just burn through the fortress-building, have the one major fight against demons, and THEN and only then get into the meat of the choices and strategy. That makes the early game FAR more boring, once you figure out your optimization methods and are practiced at expanding fast.

Ah, but in equally counterintuitive fashion, increasing the variety and complexity of the demands of the mid-late game can increase the variety of the gameplay of the early game. Finding new problems later in the game gives you new concerns to think about when planning out your fortress early in the game, giving you new goals to work on when you start over. And sooner or later the player will probably choose to start over, as more and more unforeseen mistakes crop up in their early plans. The end result is much the same, but the player retains a greater measure of control over their playing experience instead of randomly and arbitrarily getting killed off.

quote:[QB]Which is why different strategies to handle the early part of the game, resulting in qualitatively different fortresses in the later stages, giving the player qualitatively different tools to approach certain problems.</STRONG>

Right, but adding lose conditions doesn't do anything by itself to increase the qualitative variety of the game. Things that can disrupt the player's plans create varied gameplay; things that force a restart "use up" gameplay. You want to ensure enough restarts to assure that the player will get a reasonable amount of gameplay, instead of just playing through once and deciding that's it, but too much repetition is harmful no matter how varied the gameplay is.

quote:<STRONG>But playing it straight is a fun challenge too - and this game, with the fact that lost/abandoned fortresses persist in the world and can be returned to later, makes playing it straight and losing have positive entertainment value for the player.  Losing and restarting helps the player populate their world; it is something they will WANT to be doing.  It NEEDS to happen for adventurer mode to live up to its full potential.  The motto is "losing is fun", after all.  </STRONG>

Does it not occur to you that there might be a teensy problem with a game's design if it NEEDS hundreds upon hundreds of hours of play to begin to live up to its full potential? Although I very much imagine once the game starts soaring that people will be swapping shared worlds and distributing saves of already-populated worlds, which would alleviate the need somewhat. I imagine someone is going to come in and proclaim what a horrible, horrible shame it is that people would do such a thing and deprive themselves of the experience, but some people can't afford to dedicate their entire adult lives to playing a single game--a single "playthrough" of a single game, in fact, considering that the world continues after each failure.

quote:<STRONG>And allowing the player to find/choose their own preferred level of challenge is important.</STRONG>

OK, I agree that different map hostility settings definitely need some fleshing out sometime soonish (once development is out of the fixing-lethal-bugs phase and starts heading into the fleshing-things-out direction), as do different temperature zones. Forestation levels are about all that really seperate different maps, which is kind of a shame.

[Rollory]

quote:Originally posted by RPB:
<STRONG>Does it not occur to you that there might be a teensy problem with a game's design if it NEEDS hundreds upon hundreds of hours of play to begin to live up to its full potential?</STRONG>

That is an excellent point.

[Mechanoid]

quote:Originally posted by RPB:
<STRONG>Does it not occur to you that there might be a teensy problem with a game's design if it NEEDS hundreds upon hundreds of hours of play to begin to live up to its full potential?</STRONG>

This is the main issue i have with many MMORPGs. It takes thousands of hours (or >100 days) of gameplay in order to reach an "enjoyable" level.

quote:Right now, in my experience, every game is pretty much the same, and generally risk-free.

In one map i've had 2 enemy NPC creature groups attack my fortress within the first year. Sometimes it's easy, sometimes it's hard. Completely random. And some types of stone are searched for, mostly to fullfill some noble's want or to cheer a unhappy dwarf up long enough to stop him from going berserk.

quote:Every map is also the same in the sense that every map has the same ores and stone types everywhere.

Well of course you're going to find the same minerals everywhere. And they are already varried; on several occasions i've had fortresses hit silver just 8 tiles into the first dig; on otheres, i had to cross the river to get copper.

quote:Then there's rock types. It doesn't make sense that one particular area of mountain has ALL those types of rock all together. The basic rock types should be one of just a few types. Different areas on the world map should have different primary rock types, and different secondary rock typse, and other rock types that simply aren't found in that area at all.

This would be hell to try and ballance. What if a noble shows up and requests an obsidian chair but you have none?

quote:Right now, when you go looking for a hard-to-find ore - usually coal or iron - the standard thing to do is to make a giant grid of rectangular tunnels. That's kinda silly and looks ugly and wastes a lot of time

It is ugly and it does waste alot of time. OF COURSE IT'S GOING TO BE UGLY AND SLOW, WTH DO YOU THINK HAPPENS IN REAL LIFE? Further, if you associate rocks and ore together, and then say "No, this map wont have any X stone" then you'll effectively kill any chance of having the ore associated with that rock on the map.

quote:Maybe your dead dwarves rise from their graves all at once and attack their former comrades.

Sixth year.

quote:Minor random encounters aren't any sort of challenge.

"Minor random encounters" with just one full-time military dwarf or just your initial 7 dwarves is hell. On one 'Sadistic' type map i had a werewolf show up just after my metalsmith, and he got torn limb from limb. Also, the game is in an alpha stage right now, so what do you expect the game to do? Kill you off within the first year and a half from an enemy attack, or find and kill game-destroying bugs?

Just imagine all the bugs that are lurking within the "end-game" code with that, because all your forts die before you get to that point, because certain rock types weren't found to please a noble, or you didn't make enough quality items to trade for picks, or you mined into a group of 200 goblins with +9 swords of dwarf slaying led by 3 dragon lords that just all happened to spring up from the chasm all at once...

[Rollory]

Calm down, dude.  I'm not attacking anybody.  This isn't personal.  I believe I made it quite clear in my original message that 1) I'm not asking for any sort of immediate action on this sort of thing, 2) I don't think immediate action would be appropriate given the current focus on making sure all the basic functionality is there, 3) I am not expecting the game to be anywhere close to balanced at this state.  However I would like it to get there eventually so I think discussing these issues now is worthwhile.

As for "WTH DO I THINK HAPPENS IN REAL LIFE" - that's really quite irrelevant.  I play games for fun.  If realism enhances that, good.  If it gets in the way, realism goes out the window.  That's an absolute, and games that defy that end up catering strictly to rapidly shrinking niches.  I used to work for a flight sim company.  I know all about that.  People _hate_ digging grids to find coal and iron.  Sure it should be a challenge, but it should be an _interesting_ challenge, that they can use something other than brute force to solve.

It's actually rather ironic you refer to RL right after saying "of course" you find the same minerals everywhere.  Any geologist could tell you that is nonsense.  Anyway, I think I outlined sufficiently how having different types of minerals on different maps could be used to make things interesting.

The ores being on one side or the other of the river isn't a big deal.  By the time your industry is really up and going you can easily be across the river and/or have tunnelled multiple screens to the north, south, and east of the gate area.  You end up with any type of ore you want.  Again, I think I described sufficiently in my OP how more restrictions here would make for more interesting problems for the player to solve.

As for the noble thing, I thought it was so obvious as to not need mention, but a check would have to be added for all thigns of this sort (fey moods too) to have them request only things that the map specifies as available.

I've had two NPC groups attack in the first year too.  I find it to be perfectly calibrated in terms of danger and challenge at that point.  However the first year is the only time such random attacks are any serious threat at all.  It is important to maintain similar levels of challenge and interest later on in the game.

Thanks for the 6th year hint.  None of my games have gone that long yet.

[RPB]

Supposedly the "regular" random attacks are already supposed to scale up in intensity, although if that's true it's really so slow as to be unnoticeable.

[Woodstock]

quote:Originally posted by RPB:
<STRONG>Supposedly the "regular" random attacks are already supposed to scale up in intensity, although if that's true it's really so slow as to be unnoticeable.</STRONG>

Following a frogman ambush early on that killed two dwarves, a lizardman assault surrounded a single dwarf and killed him before the others got there. They then killed everyone else down to the last dwarf, after which they then went back into the river. This was in the period from the first late spring to the first late summer.

[ August 23, 2006: Message edited by: Woodstock ]

[RPB]

Yes, and then the attacks never get any noticeably tougher than that for the rest of the game. Or at least not the next 5 years.

[ August 23, 2006: Message edited by: RPB ]

[Mechanoid]

quote:Originally posted by Woodstock:
<STRONG>Following a frogman ambush early on that killed two dwarves, a lizardman assault surrounded a single dwarf and killed him before the others got there. They then killed everyone else down to the last dwarf, after which they then went back into the river. This was in the period from the first late spring to the first late summer.</STRONG>

It could also be argued from this point that if you had no easy access to a specific type of ore, the game would indeed become more interesting, but then also more aggrivating as you continue to find that you fail to attain the proper ores necessary for success. If the only sources of iron were from slain foes and the caravan, attempting to access the demon's pit (past the lava) would be suicide, as the player wouldn't have enough steel to properly protect his dwarves. I'm not exactly keen on [the idea or plan of] reducing or altering ore /stone types for this very reason. Being without silver on a werewolf-infested map isn't "Interesting" it's simply aggrivating; like playing a RPG and only being allowed to take 4 Minor Healing potions when the game has all the way up to **Heal Great Wounds** potions, and the enemies you're facing do hundreds of points of damage.

The main issue Rollory is that you didn't give any suggestions to your post. "There's just gotta be a better way to go looking for ore than digging up the entire map in rectangular grids." Well yes there is, if you'd look at real life for a moment^ you'd notice that only old or low-tech mines are in that classic "Grid" fassion. Thanks to a higher level of technology many mines use core samples to examine the rock many meters ahead, getting a fairly accurate idea of where the ore vein is and where it's going. Thus, the solution to the grid issue isn't linking ores to certain types of rocks, or increasing /decreasing the quantity but is instead giving the player a way to see what lay ahead of the rock face.

That's the solution to the grid issue. Let the player start with or create a core-sampling rod which a miner can use to probe the rock wall in a certain direction for a certain distance. Or possibly even use Dowsing rods.

"However the first year is the only time such random attacks are any serious threat at all. It is important to maintain similar levels of challenge and interest later on in the game"

Piss off human traders for long enough and see what happens.    

^ irrelevant? if RL provides problems, then it could also provide answers; answers are not irrelevant! Fall damage in an FPS getting you down? Put proper physics into the game and turn the downward force into and outward and onward force -- Fall-damage averted!

[ August 23, 2006: Message edited by: Mechanoid ]

[ August 24, 2006: Message edited by: Mechanoid ]

[Rollory]

Yes, core samples would work too.  But for it to be effective, you'd have to have them basically be x-ray vision.  I was looking for ways to apply something of real geology to the issue.  Rocks aren't random.

[ August 24, 2006: Message edited by: Rollory ]

[ August 24, 2006: Message edited by: Rollory ]