Just a few thoughts that occurred to me while reading the latest devblog.
Buying items with the same points you use to buy skills is a bit risky. As you advance skills and attributes while progressing through the game they'll stack with the ones you bought at character creation, whereas items will generally be replaced as you obtain better ones. This makes it a better choice to invest as many points as possible in skills and attributes and only take the bare minimum items required for initial survival. A Bronze Axe is only useful until you find a Steel Axe, but +1 Strength lasts forever. It's not necessarily gamebreaking or anything, but doesn't feel balanced.
Your home town is selected at random, based on those owned by your species. I considered letting you select a town, but that would reveal the map, and exploration, discovering new lands and the like are going to end up as a significant goal in the game.
I don't think you've ever mentioned how map-generation works. Is it procedurally generated at the start of each game, or a more DF-like system where you can play in the same world over and over again? If it's the latter, I would put more weight in letting the player choose his starting city, otherwise it probably doesn't particularly matter to most players.
As a compromise, you could let the player choose a city without revealing it's location on the map, and just give population/racial makeup/industries/whatever as information. Or only reveal territory owned by the race you selected, which would probably be considered pretty common knowledge within a society.
Many thanks for the feedback! To answer your points in order:
- I completely agree about items/skills. Skills do stay with you forever, and items don't. On the other hand, choosing items might have life easier for new players, and you could always give you outdated items to your allies when you find something better. For an experienced player, I strongly suspect it will be far more worthwhile to go all skills, but I think it could be a little bit more friendly for new players, or for players who quickly want to recruit and arm some allies.
- The map is generated at the start of each game. In the future, you might be able to play multiple games in one world, but not yet. I think you'll be able to choose what kind of civilization you want to be born in - militarized, cultural, magical, whatever; human, dwarf, elf, etc - then the game picks one for you. Which is pretty much what you just said, really. Once you start in your city, you can only see the areas your civilization has explored.
Putting this on watch.
Unless it's like DF with the skills and stuff. So you can choose steel axe and start off untrained in axe skill, with 500 xp to get to basic. Or start with the bronze axe and basic, and 1000 xp to get to trained.
Thanks! Each weapon (like 'hitting' weapons - axes, clubs, flails, and maces) has multiple skills which improve your damage, accuracy, and a few other things. Experience for each weapon (and everything else) simply builds up as you use it. Experience is, I think, going to be a tricky one to balance between all weapons etc, so we'll have to see how it plays out in the first alpha.
Will titans be able to wield you and/or other NPCs/animals as weapons?
Once dead, yes. While alive, huge creatures can pick up and throw around small ones, so a Titan can certainly try and pick you up and hurl you into a tree. You will likely not survive
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Topic: Dwarf Fortress meets The Outer Wilds? "Ultima Ratio Regum", v0.10.1 out Feb 2023 (Read 634547 times)