Messages

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Skyward Collapse / Re: Skyward Collapse 1.010 "Self Immolation" Released!

« on: June 14, 2013, 05:07:49 PM »

Most of this stuff looks great.

Having taken a quick peek though, I'm really sorry to be negative here, but though the icons are clearer, they also clash with the style of the game. It's a really strong clash, in fact, one that's jarring and makes the game look much more amateurish. The art in the game is beautiful IMO, with the buildings resembling the detailed sprites from the Settlers series and the units having a classical look of their own. The cartoon style is very different and obtrusive. I would recommend that you have your artist go over the cartoons and remake them in her style to be consistent with the rest of the game.

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Skyward Collapse / Re: Limit to town expansion

« on: June 12, 2013, 02:49:27 PM »

I suspect there would be much rage at that, but I don't know.  I would certainly feel very constrained if I had to give up 4-5 turns just to build a new town.

Well, it would only be if that new town is in space. If you choose to build on land, you'd be able to do it instantly. It would mean that you'd really have to plan your land bridges so that expansion is efficient, and it would be a strong incentive to use what you have (in terms of land) rather than build a land bridge. A land bridge buys you a certain peace of mind (from invaders), but it comes at a cost. Also, you could use  upcoming woes to build up land for you so you could build a town quickly.

While 4-5 turns is perhaps a bit extreme, I don't think dedicating 3 turns towards building a town that's out of the way and therefore protected is extreme at all. To the contrary, I'd say that being able to do that in one turn seems extreme (in the other direction).

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Skyward Collapse / Re: Limit to town expansion

« on: June 12, 2013, 02:36:12 PM »

Maybe the cost of creating land bridges should just be raised? If building a land bridge to nowhere is more expensive (say 3 AP or maybe even 4), you'd avoid it unless you absolutely had to do it. This is the constraint on expansion: you'd much rather build on the existing continent than have to build expensive land bridges. In this way, continent layout actually begins to matter more.

EDIT: What this would mean is that laying certain land types (field, swamp, hill, and a city center) on pre-existing tiles stays cheap, while doing it in space would be expensive.

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Skyward Collapse / Re: Limit to town expansion

« on: June 12, 2013, 01:14:59 PM »

Oh I forgot one thing I wanted to mention. In Civ, even though expansion is important, you're really limited by the situation of the particular game. If you're stuck on an island, you have to build up that island as much as you can until you can develop triremes, at which point you can only expand if there's a nearby continent. Otherwise you have to wait for proper shipbuilding to expand. Alternatively, you might be boxed in by competitors, making your expansion limited again until you can accomplish some other goal.

In SC, there's no limit to your expansion since you can always build up more land. This means that it's a strategy that's always open to you. Don't like what's going on on the mainland? Just build a land bridge and establish another city. It feels like a cheap option for this reason. There are virtually no limits placed on you as far as expansion is concerned. Think about how this contrasts with a game like Settlers of Catan, where you a. struggle to find space in which to expand, b. have to build roads to it first and c. compete for that space with other players . Expansion is also a huge deal in that game, but because of that, it's tightly controlled. This is IMO part of the secret of that game's genius.

What I would like to see is either a limit to expansion or a real opportunity cost to expansion. Because expansion is so powerful, putting your resources towards it should rob you of something else. In Civ 3, if you over-expand you might lose your new shiny city. If you're stuck on an island and you steer your research towards ships, you lose the ability to do other things with those resources.

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Skyward Collapse / Re: Limit to town expansion

« on: June 12, 2013, 12:39:19 PM »

I like this souls concept -- sounds cool and is pretty much what I wanted in that regard.

With regard to expansion, I didn't like it in Civ either. Once I figured out that the optimal strategy in Civ is to build as many settlers as possible and expand, expand, expand, the game stopped being enjoyable -- at least up to Civ 3. In Civ 3, they introduced cultural switches, where if you over-expanded without culture (ie. without properly investing in your cities first) your cities would switch over to the enemy. It's somewhat unrealistic, but it's essentially a mechanic to counterbalance the overwhelming power of an expansionist strategy. Civ 2 had corruption, where your cities became less effective the further they were from your capital, but it wasn't enough to counteract the unbelievable effectiveness of constant expansion.

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Skyward Collapse / Re: Limit to town expansion

« on: June 12, 2013, 12:22:46 PM »

Allow me to try to refine my observation: inevitably, you're going to get to a point in the game when there's a lot of chaos going on. Many units fighting many other units, towns getting destroyed etc. At this point in the game, you generally still have many resources, as well as many action points. However, rather than using those action points to sort out the mess as much as you can, it seems like it's a better idea to just keep expanding with passive cities while dropping a bunch of mythos. Trying to fix the supply chain of broken cities enough to produce units again is a lost cause, since inevitably you'll lose a critical tile and have no place to rebuild.

Intuitively also, I don't like constant expansion. It means you aren't attached to your cities and don't care about them. That means you also don't care when bandits/woes ruin them: they're all disposable. It also means the goal of balance is really about expanding as fast as you can to guarantee survival, and that feels wrong to me. It should be a battle to save what's there, not just to throw away everything and start over with some new towns.

Perhaps what I would like to see is the ability to clear ruins after X turns. Perhaps after 10 turns ruins become regular grasslands and you can rebuild your cities. This, coupled with some mechanism of limiting the number of cities (possibly just a hard limit), would mean that you have to really struggle to keep your civilizations intact as opposed to just expanding endlessly.

EDIT: A limit to the number of cities would also limit your resource production capacity. It means you really have to choose carefully when you place your resource tiles rather than just dumping as many of them as you want. The game becomes much more strategic this way.

Another idea: perhaps the limit could increase with every age.

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Skyward Collapse / Re: Limit to town expansion

« on: June 11, 2013, 10:34:26 AM »

I'm not saying it's 'cheese' as much as it's one ideal strategy. As far as I can tell, nothing in the game encourages you NOT to expand, and every mechanic encourages you to expand. It seems best to build small towns without using all of their space (so you can replace destroyed buildings), and just build as many of them as possible. This isn't from playing the harder difficulties -- I admit I haven't done so. It's just a simple analysis of the rules of the game, and extrapolation from my (admittedly limited) playing time.

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Skyward Collapse / Limit to town expansion

« on: June 10, 2013, 04:26:00 PM »

It seems to me that the design of the game encourages one particular playstyle: expand as much as you can, preferably relegating only a few cities to be soldier producers. The more cities you have the less chance of the factions dying out, the more resources you can produce, and the more you can recover from the destruction of town squares.

It seems to me that there should be some downside to expanding - some counterbalance to discourage expansion and resource buildup - but I'm not sure what that should be.

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Skyward Collapse / Re: Age of Gods as a mighty challenge

« on: May 31, 2013, 08:52:56 AM »

Even though the title of this post includes the words 'mighty challenge', that was more to sell the idea What I would love is for gods to wander the continent creating chaos. I believe this was mentioned in another thread. The twist is that they're the factions' gods, and they respond to what happened previously in the game. So if one side suffered much more than the other, a god of vengeance spawns and does some damage before he goes away. If a faction was bored, a god of war spawns and blows stuff up. It's a feedback system done in a natural way. If you cheesed your way through the first 2 ages, now you'll have 6 or so upset gods to deal with, whereas if you caused adequate chaos, you'd only have 2 gods to deal with.

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Skyward Collapse / Hunger

« on: May 31, 2013, 08:23:14 AM »

One of the ways to make humans more appealing than mythos is to have monsters demand tribute every couple of turns. The way I thought this could be done is using a hunger mechanic. Mythos would have a hunger meter, and every X turns (could vary by mytho) they would need to get to a town and raid it for food (or some other resource). This would make the placement essential: mythos need to be placed because they can't stay and fight for too long.

Additionally, the hunger meter could affect the mytho. Once a mytho is 'hungry', they could get angry. A giant could flatten a mountain out of anger, or even eat another unit. But, they would also get weaker as their hunger went up. At some point, they'd be so weak that one or two regular units could beat them. This would mean that you could deliberately starve a mytho (by putting mountains/swamps in its way for example) in order to take it out.

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Skyward Collapse / Re: Age of Gods as a mighty challenge

« on: May 30, 2013, 12:04:26 PM »

OK but the last age really doesn't have anything different going for it, plus there's a problem of over-abundance of resources at that stage. So gods appearing to help/avenge their factions with their own free will seems like it would be interesting and fit the name of the age, no? Even if it isn't as extreme as I describe it above (though it would be a great way to fix cheesing IMO).

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Skyward Collapse / Age of Gods as a mighty challenge

« on: May 30, 2013, 10:00:16 AM »

OK confession -- I haven't reached the age of gods in-game yet. However, I get the impression that it's not so different from the Age of Monsters from reading the forum. So here's an idea that builds off of the 'moody Master' idea, but I think integrates it better into the game's existing concepts, and it also takes care of cheese.

The age of gods could be a huge challenge to survive. The idea I have is that the game tracks what you did during the first 2 ages. Essentially, your people pray to their gods during whatever happens. And your people want their share of enemy blood. So if the Norse didn't do anything during the first 2 ages, their gods now show up in the age of gods and wreak complete havoc on their behalf. If the Greeks were massacred unfairly (ie. suffered a lot more) during the first 2 ages, their gods now show up and do serious damage. And trying to contain the gods when they're angry is TOUGH. They flatten mountains on their way, dry lakes, collapse tiles etc.

The aim of the game becomes 'maintain balance during the first 2 ages, and do your best to survive the gods' wrath during the age of gods'. There's strategy involved in making the towns as fortifiable as possible against the gods' wrath that is to come. This way, during the first 2 ages, you're planning ahead -- you're not just in the moment (which is one of the complaints I've personally had about the game).

So yes, you can cheese your way during the first 2 phases if you want. But good luck to you in the age of gods: you'll have both sides' gods extremely pissed off and your chances of survival are very low. This way, you make cheese a viable if extremely risky tactic.

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Skyward Collapse / Re: Developers requesting feedback: near-term changes to mountsains & mythologicals

« on: May 29, 2013, 11:02:02 AM »

I have to agree with Panopticon. The Master concept can only be used to a certain degree before you're just a middle manager.

I'd like to bring up the problem of resources. The game essentially has unbounded resources. You can have as many towns as you want and as many resources as you want. All you have to do is build more towns and tiles. This makes mythos' high cost prohibitive only in the very first stages of the game.

I've been toying with the following several (independent) ideas:
- Mythos can spawn automatically in towns if you have too many mythos resources. This means you need to keep your incense down if you want to control chaos. This is a great way to make mythos resources (and therefore mythos) less desirable.
- Towns have a warehouse where their stash is stored. Build up too many resources without using them, and you'll attract bandits. A thief bandit unit would be able to sneak into your city and steal your resources.
- Bandits are attracted to towns without protection.
- A more complex mechanic: the blight. A force that starts out separate from your continent and grows with time. Eventually it'll connect with your continent, especially if you grow too fast. This gives you a reason to not want to expand to fast, and also to fear the destruction of your towns. One the blight expands to your continent, it makes land unusable. This also gives a more strategic, long term focus to the game.

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Skyward Collapse / Re: Developers requesting feedback: near-term changes to mountsains & mythologicals

« on: May 28, 2013, 07:29:59 PM »

A few more ideas for dealing with mythos and the whole mythos vs troops balance:

- One solution is that bandits could have magician units they'd put out that were very weak against regular units, but could capture and turn mythological units.
- Mythos could lose interest in fighting the enemy, get bored, and walk to random parts of the map. This is an interesting idea because placement is one of their big advantages, but what this idea means is that without placement, they'd be useless. i.e. placement is the only thing that counters their lack of focus.
- Another way to look at it is that mythos already have a disadvantage: they destroy towns. The problem as seen from this perspective is that it's too easy to rebuild towns, since a mytho-dominated strategy requires that you constantly rebuild. If town building costs (especially town centers) went up as you built them, you'd have an incentive to appreciate the scalpel-like troops rather than the hammer that is a mythological creature. This would also give you something to spend your built-up resources on, which is an issue by the mid-game.

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Skyward Collapse / Re: Idea: random missions

« on: May 28, 2013, 02:21:07 PM »

How about a mini-version of this idea? The end goal is unknown until you reach the last turn. At that point, the Master reveals his true intent for the world. He could give you the task of eliminating one of the sides, destroying a huge number of spawned bandits/monsters or even destroying both sides. It's like a cathartic release. Since there would be no other goals at this point, it wouldn't be hard to convey the goal.