Print

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

[Samthropus]

Hi! I'm working on an online multiplayer 4x along with a few friends right now and I think it would appeal to other DF fans like me.  Our game, Tooth and Cog is a steampunk-themed 4x strategy game made for cooperative and competitive multiplayer. It's definitely not a DF clone, but I think it has a few echoes and definitely some inspiration from DF. Our game takes place within a procedurally generated landscape of a self-destructed mechanical metropolis and it's environs, and it's the prerogative of players to explore, rebuild, and defend it from other the player-teams trying doing so themselves. You just have to look at the unique, named units and their skill profiles to see that there's at least one huge DF fan on our team





Visit our Kickstarter to support us and give us feedback! http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/630327008/tooth-and-cog-turn-based-strategy-game?ref=df

[nenjin]

Hi.

For such a fan of DF, posting in OG forums having never made another post here, just to spamvertise your Kickstarter, is very undwarfy.

[Levi]

Looks awesome though.

Simultaneous player turns. No “waiting phase” – each player plays their turn at the same time. This creates a kind of fog of war on another dimension – time. You often can’t see what your enemies will do until it’s done - intuition, unpredictability, and flexibility are important to accomplish your plans and thwart your opponents’.

Especially this bit.  Non-simultaneous turn 4X's tend to get annoying when playing multiplayer because of all the waiting.  Simultaneous turns in 4X's are annoying when doing combat because whoever has the faster machine or fastest clicking skills gets the advantage.

This seems like a nice way to get around those problems.  I'd be curious to hear how you handle things like an explorer unit accidentally walking into an enemy, neutral or allied unit though.  Do they just stop if they aren't enemies and fight if they are enemies?

[Fikes]

Looks nice. You do lose dwarven points when your first topic is an advertisement for your Kickstarter, but you can get them back by answering questions like...

Has your team quit to work on this project? Is this their full time job or will it be if the Kickstarter funds? Also which member of the team are you?

I <3 steampunk.

[CognitiveDissonance]

Looks awesome though.

Simultaneous player turns. No “waiting phase” – each player plays their turn at the same time. This creates a kind of fog of war on another dimension – time. You often can’t see what your enemies will do until it’s done - intuition, unpredictability, and flexibility are important to accomplish your plans and thwart your opponents’.

Especially this bit.  Non-simultaneous turn 4X's tend to get annoying when playing multiplayer because of all the waiting.  Simultaneous turns in 4X's are annoying when doing combat because whoever has the faster machine or fastest clicking skills gets the advantage.

This seems like a nice way to get around those problems.  I'd be curious to hear how you handle things like an explorer unit accidentally walking into an enemy, neutral or allied unit though.  Do they just stop if they aren't enemies and fight if they are enemies?

This was actually handled in Space Empires IV multiplayer. Simultaneous turn-based processing is absolutely amazing, and I have been missing it in every game since. Such as the new XCOM, CiV...

[Matz05]

I remember Lords of the Realm 2 having a nice simultanious-turns mode.

[Samthropus]

Looks nice. You do lose dwarven points when your first topic is an advertisement for your Kickstarter, but you can get them back by answering questions like...

Has your team quit to work on this project? Is this their full time job or will it be if the Kickstarter funds? Also which member of the team are you?

Yep, we quit our jobs to work on this! Well... one of us quit our jobs and the other two stopped looking for jobs, actually (a not too hard decision, I could feel the job search eating my soul.) But yeah, we're working full time right now and would like to continue with the help of Kickstarter. If it doesn't succeed, we'll most likely find some kind of contract or part-time work and continue work on the game in the off hours. I'm mostly a programmer and game designer.
(Ha hA!  Dwarf points!)

I'd be curious to hear how you handle things like an explorer unit accidentally walking into an enemy, neutral or allied unit though.  Do they just stop if they aren't enemies and fight if they are enemies?

Currently, you can issue orders with specific contingency behavior baked-in, like patrol and scout orders - a patrolling unit will start chasing down an enemy on sight, and a scouting unit will try to flee. We're also planning on others like stalk and harass and skirmish. Eventually, we might also add in a passive behavior setting for all units (ie. evasive, belligerent, neutral) that would be parallel to orders. Multiple allied units can occupy the same tile, so they'll just ignore each other unless they have mutually exclusive orders, in which case it's currently just the early bird rule, but that's something we will likely refine during development. We'll have to get into beta testing to see what more is needed; we're still in alpha right now.

[Samthropus]

This was actually handled in Space Empires IV multiplayer. Simultaneous turn-based processing is absolutely amazing, and I have been missing it in every game since. Such as the new XCOM, CiV...

I'll have to check these out. A common problem in developing games is that you have less time to play them, but I'll have to rectify that. Thanks for the tips. Also, my impression from reading was that CiV's way of handling turns was kind of awkward, with a combat phase being real-time or something like that, but maybe I'm wrong, I'll go look it up. Or maybe I'll just load it up and play.

I remember Lords of the Realm 2 having a nice simultanious-turns mode.

No way! I LOVED lotr2! But I guess I never played multiplayer... I don't think I was aware of multiplayer. I was probably barely aware of the internet when I started playing that game.