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Skyward Collapse / Re: Nick Trujillo Presents: Skyward Collapse Comic Page 2
« on: Yesterday at 01:32:35 AM »
Vegetarian... 
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Skyward Collapse / Re: Skyward Collapse Alpha 0.817
« on: Yesterday at 01:24:57 AM »I could be mistaken, but I seem to notice a distinct lack of counterattack damage...is that intentional?
Hot dang the counterattacks are indeed missing! I missed that in the last game - I ended up with pure ranged armies (Skadi, that pilfering woman!) by the time 0.816 rolled in.
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Skyward Collapse / Re: Skyward Collapse Alpha 0.816
« on: May 16, 2013, 05:01:35 PM »
Oh, has anyone else's Gods stopped responding to tokens?
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Skyward Collapse / Re: Skyward Collapse Alpha 0.816
« on: May 16, 2013, 12:41:44 PM »
A good step!
I'm actually a bit worried as to how the AI changes will affect Greywolf's Veteran system.
You allow us to create a monster, and then remove ways that allow us to try to take them down. I'll go check out how that pans out - can commandment be on ordinary enemy units as well (wasn't in notes)?
My opinion has been that some woes could be more intricate. There's the "wham!" kind of disasters which we currently have and work fine, and then there's those scheming, Machiavellian types that can inspire developing dread. The kind such as in UFO:Aftermath where you know the world is being taken over by an all-consuming biomass and there's nothing you can do to eradicate it, only delay it long enough to get to the finish line.
Although, these things can wait until your returns dictate an expansion.
I'm actually a bit worried as to how the AI changes will affect Greywolf's Veteran system.
You allow us to create a monster, and then remove ways that allow us to try to take them down. I'll go check out how that pans out - can commandment be on ordinary enemy units as well (wasn't in notes)?My opinion has been that some woes could be more intricate. There's the "wham!" kind of disasters which we currently have and work fine, and then there's those scheming, Machiavellian types that can inspire developing dread. The kind such as in UFO:Aftermath where you know the world is being taken over by an all-consuming biomass and there's nothing you can do to eradicate it, only delay it long enough to get to the finish line.
Although, these things can wait until your returns dictate an expansion.
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Skyward Collapse / Re: Skyward Collapse Alpha 0.815 (Alpha Round 2 Starts Now!)
« on: May 16, 2013, 02:04:29 AM »
I figure as long as you get a laptop with a reasonable second-line nvidia/ati graphics card, things will go okay. Nvidia if you ever do linux on it.
= = =
@Chris, some first feedbacks:
I think, and don't go off on a limb on this just yet, that two Greek mythological tokens can use a small cool-down or more varied resource requirements after being placed. I'm going through the game on hard-4, which gives me a reliable source of woes from every category.
- The quintessential problem is actually Palladium, which protects all buildings including the resource it needs from destruction. This seems to make Greeks all but invincible except against woes like Edge of Civilisation. You can have Norsemen running over all their towns killing every greek soldier that pop, but go nothing against buildings.
- Compared to that, constant resource tokens are less of an OP issue.
EDIT: Speaking of which, I'd like to invite suggestions on possible un-loseable strategies in the current stage of balancing. This is mantised, so we can think about post-release patching.
EDIT2: On the Greek tokens, I pin this down to the fact that the GReek tokens require only 1 resource. Cornucopia requires only 2 tiles but cannot be reasonably increased to 10 horse+ due to conflict with barracks cavalry, and Palladium requires 5 tiles. In contrast, due to requiring two resources Brokkr requires 5+ tiles, or Norns requires 12+ tiles with accompanying Woe problems (town conversion via presence of Seer).
= = =
@Chris, some first feedbacks:
I think, and don't go off on a limb on this just yet, that two Greek mythological tokens can use a small cool-down or more varied resource requirements after being placed. I'm going through the game on hard-4, which gives me a reliable source of woes from every category.
- The quintessential problem is actually Palladium, which protects all buildings including the resource it needs from destruction. This seems to make Greeks all but invincible except against woes like Edge of Civilisation. You can have Norsemen running over all their towns killing every greek soldier that pop, but go nothing against buildings.
- Compared to that, constant resource tokens are less of an OP issue.
EDIT: Speaking of which, I'd like to invite suggestions on possible un-loseable strategies in the current stage of balancing. This is mantised, so we can think about post-release patching.
EDIT2: On the Greek tokens, I pin this down to the fact that the GReek tokens require only 1 resource. Cornucopia requires only 2 tiles but cannot be reasonably increased to 10 horse+ due to conflict with barracks cavalry, and Palladium requires 5 tiles. In contrast, due to requiring two resources Brokkr requires 5+ tiles, or Norns requires 12+ tiles with accompanying Woe problems (town conversion via presence of Seer).
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Skyward Collapse / Re: Skyward Collapse Alpha 0.814
« on: May 15, 2013, 02:18:02 PM »
Can't wait for the next patch...
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AI War Strategy Discussion / Re: Need Advice on Game, 16+ Hours in
« on: May 14, 2013, 12:03:31 PM »
- 5 Entry ways, 700AIP... you'll need fortresses in addition to the military setup suggested to free-up your fleet. You'll need one one each entry way, since I don't see a way to narrow down the number of entry points. Also, you're going to stall soon with that automatic progress, so concentrate your fire-power and punch through to what you need. E.g.:
- Scout the galaxy, find that Dyson Sphere, and free it. It's a bit late now, but you can still use their help.
- Find the remaining research stations, and pick up a couple of golems.
- Try to go for the vanilla AI world soon with help of several of them.
If you need a delay at home, leave your Mark-Is behind as they're useless on the offense now with mark-III foes. I hope you have better ships? Leave a cursed golem on defense and come back only for exos.
- Scout the galaxy, find that Dyson Sphere, and free it. It's a bit late now, but you can still use their help.
- Find the remaining research stations, and pick up a couple of golems.
- Try to go for the vanilla AI world soon with help of several of them.
If you need a delay at home, leave your Mark-Is behind as they're useless on the offense now with mark-III foes. I hope you have better ships? Leave a cursed golem on defense and come back only for exos.
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Skyward Collapse / Re: Skyward Collapse Alpha 0.814
« on: May 14, 2013, 01:10:49 AM »
Thinking over the woes list while having breakfast.. I remember two issues that may need addressing when implementing each of them:
- A woe should probably not be completely avoidable by simply stocking up on 9 action points (both faction) and smiting (almost) a whole section off. I'm imagining this problem with the woes where the particular disaster grows over time, such as plague, fire and floods.
- They should be dangerous enough to player towns to have a possibility of losing.
Although, I do admit that isolating a plagued town by smiting all the terrain around it is good medical practice. 18 action points will allow you to snip off an entire corner of the island when done on terrain instead of buildings.
= = =
EDIT: Hera's Diadem ability will swap out a major God for a minor one, assuming that there is no other minor God to choose from I think? Will provide a save. - but this could also be because I'm using an old save-game in the new version. Can someone reproduce this with a new game?
EDIT2: Here. Confirmed in Sandbox. Hera always targets newest enemy God created, thus Tyr saves himself by calling on a new minor god.
- A woe should probably not be completely avoidable by simply stocking up on 9 action points (both faction) and smiting (almost) a whole section off. I'm imagining this problem with the woes where the particular disaster grows over time, such as plague, fire and floods.
- They should be dangerous enough to player towns to have a possibility of losing.
Although, I do admit that isolating a plagued town by smiting all the terrain around it is good medical practice. 18 action points will allow you to snip off an entire corner of the island when done on terrain instead of buildings.
= = =
EDIT2: Here. Confirmed in Sandbox. Hera always targets newest enemy God created, thus Tyr saves himself by calling on a new minor god.
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Skyward Collapse / Re: Skyward Collapse Alpha 0.813
« on: May 13, 2013, 04:29:22 PM »
BTW, although Njord's ability now works as intended:
(1) They continue to convert flower gardens to primary schools. The flower garden's new role as a delayer makes this undesirable.
(2) The new schools and universities spawn as destroyed. Known issue, but just a reminder.
= = =
On Hera's Diadem: the new minor God is placed randomly on the map. This can be highly dangerous, so I think that could be stated rather than be left as a nasty surprise to new players.
= = =
On Pan and Heimdall's building destruction - I presume that you don't want to accidentally slay a God by smiting their tile, because Njord is still alive after Pan's attempt to kill him. On the other hand, he is now standing on a swamp tile formerly known as a woodchuck's place. Swamp intended?
(1) They continue to convert flower gardens to primary schools. The flower garden's new role as a delayer makes this undesirable.
(2) The new schools and universities spawn as destroyed. Known issue, but just a reminder.
= = =
On Hera's Diadem: the new minor God is placed randomly on the map. This can be highly dangerous, so I think that could be stated rather than be left as a nasty surprise to new players.
= = =
On Pan and Heimdall's building destruction - I presume that you don't want to accidentally slay a God by smiting their tile, because Njord is still alive after Pan's attempt to kill him. On the other hand, he is now standing on a swamp tile formerly known as a woodchuck's place. Swamp intended?
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Skyward Collapse / Re: Player feedback request: Crime removal.
« on: May 13, 2013, 02:25:03 PM »
Okay, good call - go for it.
Don't forget that removal of crime will ease the pressure on players' military - upping the base spawn rate of bandits, or rather group them up a bit more, would compensate. Potentially add this to bandits capturing buildings. More chaos, plz. ;P
Don't forget that removal of crime will ease the pressure on players' military - upping the base spawn rate of bandits, or rather group them up a bit more, would compensate. Potentially add this to bandits capturing buildings. More chaos, plz. ;P
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Skyward Collapse / Re: Player feedback request: Crime removal.
« on: May 13, 2013, 01:20:34 PM »
I don't think the current system is bad, it's the higher number with difficulty that constricts your options. Fixing the rate w.r.t. difficulty will help.
On the woes front, I think "removing X, use woes" is really too much faith in woes (something that we haven't seen in-game) - they're not a fix-all, and I do think the game can use a different regular pressure to bandits. Perhaps increasing crime causes losses in resource income, kicking in from 20% - that may be worth trying. Increases in difficulty then affects just bandit spawn-rates, and not crime-rates.
Definitely suspect this is going to be a #$^$& to balance, and not all that intuitive either. I like the location-based mechanism though.
Taking both the suggestion and the desire to see a mini-woe out of it, would it be more intuitive to:
- suppress the spawn rate based on the presence of military units (so they pop up where you are not actively protecting, and actively encourages more military without being able to directly specify where that protection is).
- When bandits spawn, have a chance to spawn multiple of them at once based on nearby tiles (emulating a mini-woe, so that woes don't have the burden of creating bandit-threat).
- Set chance to zero afterwards as before?
More bandits at once will naturally make them a bigger influence, and the presence of military set-up will encourage them to spawn near the back-edges of the map.
= = =
More thoughts:
With crime, what do people think of this simplification/alternative formulation:
- When there's a military unit in/next to a town, crime goes down (fast).
- When there's no military unit in town, crime goes up (slow).
What this does is to:
- free a town from having to make a military building at all.
- but it also places higher crime pressure against the current habit of setting up protected resources towns in the back. Encourages placement of military buildings at the back of all of your towns, which will change as you expand deeper and makes relative arrangement of towns a larger factor.
- Give players an interactive/dynamic control over crime by altering military flow-paths, as they act like patrols. Players are free to build all-resource towns in the back if they periodically place tokens/ruins to suppress crime there. Or, they can build it at the front, in the line of fire. Or, they build military buildings in every town.
I think it's more intuitive to say that the continual presence of police forces encourage on-time payment of taxes/spawning of bandits, than the creation of said force. Depends on how you think of crime in the game.
On the woes front, I think "removing X, use woes" is really too much faith in woes (something that we haven't seen in-game) - they're not a fix-all, and I do think the game can use a different regular pressure to bandits. Perhaps increasing crime causes losses in resource income, kicking in from 20% - that may be worth trying. Increases in difficulty then affects just bandit spawn-rates, and not crime-rates.
Quote
Going with Mick's idea on the bandits thing, what if we revamped how bandits are spawned? Right now it's just a global number and bandits appear periodically based on the number, always on new tiles that are coming into the game (aside from the dead forest spawns, which are a different matter). What if, instead:
1. There was no global "bandit spawn counter."
2. Instead there was a "percent chance of bandit spawn" on each tile on the map. This starts at 0% and counts up every turn for every tile.
3. Every time a military unit is produced, the bandit spawn counter is reduced a certain amount in a certain radius.
4. If the percent chance gets high enough that a bandit spawns on a tile, then all the tiles within a certain radius of the tile that just got the bandit revert to 0% chance of a bandit for now.
There's a good chance that would be a #$^$& to balance, though...
Definitely suspect this is going to be a #$^$& to balance, and not all that intuitive either. I like the location-based mechanism though.
Taking both the suggestion and the desire to see a mini-woe out of it, would it be more intuitive to:
- suppress the spawn rate based on the presence of military units (so they pop up where you are not actively protecting, and actively encourages more military without being able to directly specify where that protection is).
- When bandits spawn, have a chance to spawn multiple of them at once based on nearby tiles (emulating a mini-woe, so that woes don't have the burden of creating bandit-threat).
- Set chance to zero afterwards as before?
More bandits at once will naturally make them a bigger influence, and the presence of military set-up will encourage them to spawn near the back-edges of the map.
= = =
More thoughts:
With crime, what do people think of this simplification/alternative formulation:
- When there's a military unit in/next to a town, crime goes down (fast).
- When there's no military unit in town, crime goes up (slow).
What this does is to:
- free a town from having to make a military building at all.
- but it also places higher crime pressure against the current habit of setting up protected resources towns in the back. Encourages placement of military buildings at the back of all of your towns, which will change as you expand deeper and makes relative arrangement of towns a larger factor.
- Give players an interactive/dynamic control over crime by altering military flow-paths, as they act like patrols. Players are free to build all-resource towns in the back if they periodically place tokens/ruins to suppress crime there. Or, they can build it at the front, in the line of fire. Or, they build military buildings in every town.
I think it's more intuitive to say that the continual presence of police forces encourage on-time payment of taxes/spawning of bandits, than the creation of said force. Depends on how you think of crime in the game.
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Skyward Collapse / Re: Cubed Target Bonus
« on: May 12, 2013, 01:52:27 AM »
She is the Dark Elf Goddess, and deigns not to stain herself with blood.
I suspect that some units have strange AI - all instances of Dark Elves I think end up not doing very much. It doesn't beat the empty Trojan Horse though.
I suspect that some units have strange AI - all instances of Dark Elves I think end up not doing very much. It doesn't beat the empty Trojan Horse though.
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Skyward Collapse / Re: Skyward Collapse Alpha 0.812
« on: May 11, 2013, 07:38:18 AM »
Yeah, the Gods' issues may need some adjustment - I'm not sure that multiple attacks per turn description of Hermes' and Poseidon's military tokens seem to confer much more attack power. At the same time, you don't want to just smite them like the time I suicided Heimdall by placing his sword on a barracks tile.
Excellent... "What woes thee?"
Yeah, the woes are going to be really effing with you.
Excellent... "What woes thee?"
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Skyward Collapse / Re: Skyward Collapse Alpha 0.812
« on: May 11, 2013, 06:34:34 AM »
We figured. Take a break and think about your "woes"; you'll need it.
Take a break and think about your "woes"; you'll need it.
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Skyward Collapse / Re: Cataclysm ideas
« on: May 11, 2013, 06:33:25 AM »
EDIT: Modified mechanism slightly.
The Malignant Seed
- Age of Man/Age of Monster cataclysm.
- You discover that a rival Creator has sneaked in something very sinister into your island...
- A seed will grow and supplant a tile, turning into a giant malignant tree. It is considered to be a building with a large amount of health (30.000).
- The purpose of this tree is to corrupt your landscape. Each turn thereafter, it will randomly smite 1~3 adjacent tiles nearby (not already a deadforest/swamp), then randomly place 1~3 tiles: dead-forest, swamp, or fetid-lake. Fetid lakes are lakes that increase the chance of bandit-spawns around it. There is a chance that a dark-elf, centaur or bandit-only units will spawn on the tile created. The change allows it to grow a little more dynamically by not always replacing the same tile.
- On the turn of it's creation, smite the surrounding 8 tiles to help it get a foothold and helpfully prevent melee units from accidentally being smited when attacking on the first few turns.
- New tiles that have been randomly created are automatically one of the appropriate corrupted tiles, if it's in tile contact with the tree. This aids the tree to grow if the player tries to smite off its tendrils.
- Over time, the landscape will warped. Be warned that this will gradually take over nearby-towns. If there's a clear path of dead-forest/swamp/fetid-lakes between the tree and a town, then the tree will prefer to smite the town's buildings.
- The tree itself spawns serpents (same icon as god token if needed) every 5 turns.
- You need to destroy the tree or corral it somehow. It counts as a military production building in accordance with God tokens.
I think for the fetid-pools, it may be useful to franken the graphics by filling the rock quarry with brackish water and plant dead trees around it.
Meaner option: on Hard difficulty or above, when the tree is converting the surrounding landscape, have a 5% chance to create a bandit fortress.
The Malignant Seed
- Age of Man/Age of Monster cataclysm.
- You discover that a rival Creator has sneaked in something very sinister into your island...
- A seed will grow and supplant a tile, turning into a giant malignant tree. It is considered to be a building with a large amount of health (30.000).
- The purpose of this tree is to corrupt your landscape. Each turn thereafter, it will randomly smite 1~3 adjacent tiles nearby (not already a deadforest/swamp), then randomly place 1~3 tiles: dead-forest, swamp, or fetid-lake. Fetid lakes are lakes that increase the chance of bandit-spawns around it. There is a chance that a dark-elf, centaur or bandit-only units will spawn on the tile created. The change allows it to grow a little more dynamically by not always replacing the same tile.
- On the turn of it's creation, smite the surrounding 8 tiles to help it get a foothold and helpfully prevent melee units from accidentally being smited when attacking on the first few turns.
- New tiles that have been randomly created are automatically one of the appropriate corrupted tiles, if it's in tile contact with the tree. This aids the tree to grow if the player tries to smite off its tendrils.
- Over time, the landscape will warped. Be warned that this will gradually take over nearby-towns. If there's a clear path of dead-forest/swamp/fetid-lakes between the tree and a town, then the tree will prefer to smite the town's buildings.
- The tree itself spawns serpents (same icon as god token if needed) every 5 turns.
- You need to destroy the tree or corral it somehow. It counts as a military production building in accordance with God tokens.
I think for the fetid-pools, it may be useful to franken the graphics by filling the rock quarry with brackish water and plant dead trees around it.
Meaner option: on Hard difficulty or above, when the tree is converting the surrounding landscape, have a 5% chance to create a bandit fortress.