Messages

1

AI War / Re: Minor Faction Intensity

« on: March 20, 2013, 10:02:02 AM »

So minor factions separate from AI difficulty is literally better for everyone, plus more intuitive.  The multipliers will probably need to change somewhat, but the system is superior.

por que no los dos?

1. Remove the dependence of the minor factions on the AI difficultly.
2. Get rid of the arbitrary 1 to 10 scale for minor factions and make it so the scaling factor can be changed directly from 0 to insanity at whatever increment you want, and the scaling factor of 1 is the balanced scenario. 

This way you know exactly what you are getting if you choose FS difficulty 0.25 or difficulty 20. 

2

AI War / Re: About the new Astro Train AI Plot

« on: December 05, 2012, 03:32:22 PM »

It's just I'd noticed we don't have the same culture of avoiding spoilers here as at Bay 12.  Though perhaps the difference is due to the games, not the people.

If this were more like Bay12, a newcomer asking about spoilers would probably be answered with intentional misdirection for the amusement of the experienced players.

"AI eyes?" "Oh yeah, send your whole fleet against it, and it will explode!"

"Core Raid Engines?" "Trigger one within the first hour and you automatically win!"

Also, MAGMA.

3

AVWW Technical Support / Re: Trapped in a bugged room

« on: October 06, 2012, 10:58:23 AM »

Thanks for the response

The world is 28.8 MB. Windows compression only reduces it to 28.5 MB and using 7-zip only compresses it to 25.2 MB .7z file. 

What would happen if I deleted an entire continent area instead of just one local area? I'm just wondering if there is a way to force the player to respawn at the settlement.

Let me know if anything develops or if you know a way I can upload the world. Thanks!

4

AVWW Technical Support / Re: Trapped in a bugged room

« on: October 02, 2012, 09:01:30 PM »

I have had two characters run into the same problem. Both times it happened while exploring a regular windmill building. Tried forcing a regen but it ended up back in the room again.

Both are still stuck, but the world is 18 continents large so uploading might be more difficult.

Is there a workaround to free the characters?

5

AI War / Re: I know I was slow to discover this but...

« on: September 19, 2012, 11:01:43 AM »

I think this is one of the easiest ways to beat higher AI difficulties or to pick up AI types achievments. With the harvester upgrades and 8 HWs of resources, you can make two chokepoint planets pretty strong pretty fast. However, if I did it again, I would probably do 7 HW out of 10 so that there is at least one non-AIHW planet to pick up a Fact IV, ARS, Golems, etc, before having to crack the first homeworld. Mk I vs core is not pretty...

...I had to use a lot of nukes just to get a presence on each planet, though that may have been partially due to the core beam guardian covering the entrance wormhole. The second HW was easier once I controlled all of the manufacturing buildings on the first one.

6

AI War / Re: About that Human Home Forcefield Generator...

« on: July 26, 2012, 08:32:39 AM »

You could make the home command station itself generate the force field, such that no additional structure is necessary. This removes the need for fancy transferring of damage or AI attack priority. This way the home station cannot fall without the shield falling, yet it leaves the other structures still vulnerable.

Alternatively, I also support buffing the existing HFF with local gravity and/or simply allowing the HFF to leave remains and be able to repair fully to its initial health and radius.

On a semi-related topic of home command station defense, can you PLEASE make Home command stations auto-repairible regardless of the large project auto-assist cutoff? It's so annoying to have to set my home planet's cutoff to 3334 (as 3333 is the rate the home command station repairs at), and to have to explain to new players why they should do something similar, or at least why their engineers aren't auto-repairing THEIR MOST IMPORTANT STRUCTURE IN THE GAME.

How about setting the construction/repair cost of the home command stations really low. With the whole "cannot repair if taking damage" function, this does not seem too exploitable.

7

After Action Reports / Re: Rematch - Keith's Revenge

« on: July 16, 2012, 04:54:03 PM »

Given that the whole stack idea was basically nixed by Keith due to the invasiveness of the change, we probably want to try to figure out an alternate approach.  One idea I had was that Warp Gates would open next to the inbound wormhole, and the target would 'refill' as ships were destroyed.  This ends up with the multiple 1000 ship waves though that the original carriers did, so it's not a worthy one, though it's a better balance since you'll always be fighting 1000 ships or so.  The difference is with the right setup I could theoretically stop a continuous assault for a long time.  This game I didn't implement that, to my chagrin.

Current alternatives:
1. Old system, unfair player advantage, allowed waves to be fought piecemeal. A warp gate approach would allow this too.
2. Current system, unfair AI advantage , gives the AI additional "free" firepower since the player has to fight the carrier shell and then the contained ships.

Solution?
Carriers have currently have ~1/3 of their contained firepower. Give them a fair amount of health, and then remove 1/3 of the contained ships when the carrier pops. In this way, you fight the whole wave once, just in different forms. For the first 1/3 of the battle you have a powerful carrier, for the latter 2/3 you fight the ships. Alternatively, the contained ships could simply take some amount of damage upon spawn to achieve a similar effect.

8

AI War / Re: Poll: Worst Unit Of The (time interval) Award (VI)

« on: July 12, 2012, 10:32:32 AM »

Well, aside from the cap, the Decloaker and the Tach drones are essentially in function the same. I'm however quite against giving any of them a system-wide pulse as that would completely negate the Tachyon Warhead since that costs AIP.

A planet-wide tachyon pulse would trade AIP for three things: time (wait 30 min to re-fire), K cost (probably increased), and resource cost (they would need to be expensive to avoid quick scrapping/rebuilding). The scout starship already gives you planet-wide coverage for no AIP, but at a huge micro-managing time cost.

There should be a balance point where they become a choice you can make to get out of tough situations at a steep non-AIP cost.

9

AI War / Re: Poll: Worst Unit Of The (time interval) Award (VI)

« on: July 12, 2012, 08:09:49 AM »

The Tach drone and the decloaker are the same ship. They fulfill the same role, and therefor one of them should really be removed and the remaining one changed to fulfill the intended role. That's my personal opinion at least.

How about changing one of them to have a penetrator-like once per 30 minutes planet-wide tachyon pulse? That gives them very distinct and separate roles.

10

AI War / Re: Ye Ol' Reactor debate

« on: July 09, 2012, 11:03:12 AM »

What would the construction cost of the Energy Collector be? If it was cheap enough, it would be an automatic build on all new planets. A settings option to "Automatically build Energy Collector near Command Station" would be really nice. (unless this seems too much like modules). Alternatively, the Energy Collector might not need to exist, a larger base energy could be provided by the command stations themselves instead of having a separate building and that makes updating old saves a lot easier.

An idea for Matter Converters:
The micro gets worse if instead of just powering on/off reactors you have to manually build Converters. What if Converters were allowed to power down, and would do so automatically if the power requirement dropped below the power provided? (maybe also a setting to control a maximum cushion and/or the minimum power provided so that a fleet wipe or loss of a Golem does not cause an unintended drop).

Here are a few ideas to make this balanced without a lot of switching on/off or required micro:
-Make Converters take some amount of time to power back on (roughly equal to the time it would take to build them, but it saves you the micro).
-Or make it so that when a planet has a Converter switch power modes, it does not allow an additional switch for some amount of time, so they could only turn on/off one at a time on a particular planet. This would also promote spreading out your power base since it could respond automatically more quickly.
-Or make the converters have a large up front construction cost so that a tough decision has to be made to add more of them, but once you have them you can take advantage the automatic switching.

11

A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: Spell Loadouts

« on: June 26, 2012, 05:23:57 PM »

LMB - Forest Rage
RMB - Ball Lightning
MMB - Melee spell (usually Flamethrower, but Miasma Whip for meteor missions)
MB4 - Creeping Death
MB5 - Crates/Platform

W - Greater Teleport (it is just too useful to not have it ready at all times)
2 - Lightning Rocket
3 - Luminance Arc
Shift - Insect Orb
Caps Lock - Light Snake for exploring
Spacebar - Jump plus Ball of light. (If no enchants with light are equipped. This lets me automatically create light sources and only interferes with laying of platforms due to cooldown between jumps. I just set a slot in my inventory to spacebar and keep my shards in it unless I want to use spacebar to auto-deploy light sources.)

12

A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: Dealing with the divide: customization vs randomization.

« on: May 23, 2012, 10:28:45 AM »

I like this idea a lot as an alternative to upgrade stones or dex.

At this point, I like to keep a few enchants for each slot around. Adding three more enchants slots will probably push this up to around 20 enchants permanent in my inventory, which quickly becomes disorganized when I get new enchants. When I have the enchants inventory open, I need to have the game paused anyways since it covers so much of my screen, so maybe it is time to move to a full screen enchants inventory?

See attached image for a quick mock-up I just did. The big white rectangle in the middle might be a picture of your current character's body. The slots are meant to be in meaningful locations on the character image, so right arm enchant would be on right arm, etc. The three slots at the bottom are for the new enchants. The restricted inventory size for each slot forces strategic decision as to which to keep, and they could be different sizes based on how many different types of enchants are available for each slot. This way the enchants that need to be compared would always be right next to each other.

If people do not like the idea of a limitation on number of enchants per slot, a "backpack" area could also be added that works like the current enchant inventory.

Also, like in this Mantis:, a "New!" mark would help a lot, and different border colors per slot could also help.
http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=7624

13

A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: AVWW Post-Release 1.027 "Lieutenants In Freefall" Released!

« on: May 22, 2012, 08:05:45 PM »

My wife and I are both getting fatal errors within a few seconds of starting on the new patch both in single and multiplayer. See attached error log.

Edit: It happens when trying to open the enchant inventory, nothing shows up except the error  .

14

A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Suggestions for game-play smoothness.

« on: May 21, 2012, 10:23:36 AM »

Note moved from the end of the post: I did not intend this to become a book, but it did.  None of these things are criticisms from my side, I am enjoying almost everything in this game, but especially because it allows me to play the way I want to. Removing the cap on missions through CP and adding the store really helped this. Most of these are small things that may or may not help the game much for most people based on playing style.

I just finished Continent 2 with most things unlocked and I have a few suggestions that would make the game seem smoother.

1. Healing: To regain health without killing a lot of monsters, I find a warp gate, warp to the first chunk in the area, then go to the edge of the chunk to exit to the continent map, then run over to the settlement, then storm dash over to the green stone and back. At this point I need to do all of these actions in reverse just to get back to the point I was exploring. Is there an easier way?
My suggestion is to cut this off at some earlier point to allow healing without wasting time. What I would personally like is to regain to full health just by running over to the settlement in the continent map instead of having to enter it and run to the stone. However, since most of the string of actions feels unnecessary once you reach a warp gate, it might be changed so that you heal as soon as you reach the continent map, or even as soon as you enter a warp gate?

2. NPCs: Right now I am struggling to find a few of the different types of NPCs (I know at least one is still locked to me on continent 2). It would be nice if on the unlocks menu it listed which regions and/or types of building you are most likely to find each race. Also, once there are a ton of NPCs in town, it gets difficult to glyph transfer to the correct one since they are all running around and they tend to form a group around you. Maybe when you use a glyph transfer it brings up the settlement residents screen and you can then compare all of them and select the one you want in one simple step? I would like it if the residents screen showed health/mana/attack for each character instead of having to click each one.

3. Other unlocks: On a similar note to unlocking new NPC types, it would be nice if the rest of the unlocks gave more hints as to where to find them. For example: Find a stash in a deep wood house. What region type do those appear in? Same with listing which regions some monsters are most likely to appear in. Also, the ones that are not actually possible to unlock yet should maybe be marked that way.

4. Store: Can we have some option for selling things back to the store for a small amount of shards? I am not using most of the traps and have so many platforms and crates. At this point stashes are not really worth going to because the only thing I gain value from is enchant containers.
Also, can we have the option to buy enchant charge containers or full (random) enchant containers at the store at an appropriate price?

5. Mission rewards, advancing time: I am seeing a lot of rewards of white witch hair, and others of sunstone or moonstone. Both of these are often combined with gems that I do not need any more of. It seems like maybe the seeding of these is too high considering the very low amount of spells that use them. I have a high mana character that can cause time to advance by the day and night spells, but it is a pain to switch to her because of #2 above, and it is also kind of a pain to go into an area, cast the spell a few times, check the continent map... repeat. It would be nicer if once you have an NPC with enough mana, you could cast those spells directly from the continent map regardless of if she is your current character.

6. New continents and multiplayer: For a little while on continent 2, I was stuck without being able to build wind shelters. The building I needed was in a difficult area, so I wanted to advance time and get it to seed in an easier place. However I think I was stuck on the continent since all of my deep sea ports were in the wind! Likewise, when I go to look at continent 3, all of the ports are in the wind, so will I be stuck there as soon as I land and until I can get wind shelters? Can you make it so that each continent has at least one open deep sea port?
This was also a problem because my wife joined in on multiplayer and she spawned on continent 1. She wanted to play there for a little while to get a feel for the game without messing with the current continent, but I could not leave continent 2 to go play with her until I built some wind shelters.

7. Continent overlay: The continent map could use some additional information. I find myself hitting escape and bringing up my loot goals almost constantly, can loot goals be added to the continent map permanently or as a toggle? It would also be nice if it showed the number of tier X orbs/spells you have versus your maximum so that you know if you have all the orbs you want before advancing the tier. (Maybe a server admin command could be to lock all of the lieutenants and overlord at the current tier until the max number of orbs has been reached?)

8. Minor bug? I saw this across two different computers on the latest beta, but it was not consistent enough for me to be sure it was happening or to catch a trend of when it would happen. Mech units were occasionally not dropping either health or consciousness shards. I am also sometimes seeing the orange marker appearing in the top left of the mini-map like they were when shard drop was first added.

9. Minor bug? Lava flats Fix Anachronisms in cave mission had very few native monsters, and none of the ones I was expecting. This was on low continent tier and the only monsters in the area were non-natives except for some skelebot kneecappers. I thought they did not belong so I killed two of them, and there was only one of them left at the end of the mission (1 native monster in the whole cave compared to 8-9 anachronisms!). I think this means there was probably only one non-anachronistic monster in the entire mission. Did I get really lucky, or did something go wrong?

Edit: Just remembered one more. The blade and spike trap infestations are really too much in some areas. In particular, when I come across an abandoned town building with a spike or blade trap room, I am likely to just skip it and go back rather than search the building. It might as well be a destroyed room. A narrow hallway with a row of jumping spike traps is going to hurt you way more than anything you can find in the building will help you. Teleport is not accurate enough to get around these and my normal jumping/dodging tactics do not work when the spikes fill 1/3 or the corridor. I also had a rescue survivor from deep cave mission that was infested with tons of blades. I turned back after about 30m because there was no way I was going to get a live NPC out of there. I am fine with how damaging they are, but the risk does not match the reward at this point, especially in narrow spaces.

15

A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: Out with upgrades, in with initial custom characters?

« on: May 17, 2012, 04:37:50 PM »

2. I'm now leaning a bit more against the "lots of customization" thing.  It's true, this would just encourage players to specialize less, and to try and recreate the same character repeatedly.  Which, while attachment to ones' character is good, the former is actually detrimental to gameplay so that's not so hot.

I think the easiest way to have the customization we want is for it to "remember" the last few characters you created and allow you to re-select them. This has the same effect as keeping a few different types of characters that you switch between in the settlement. To keep the customization from being too confusing, have a drop-down for race and also one for "desired playing style" which would preset the upgrade sliders to something which you could tweak to your liking.

3. I really prefer Jerebaldo1's suggestion on dexterity and how that would work.  Regardless of how the rest of this goes, I think that makes a lot of sense.

I really do not like this idea, since it nerfs single jumps for characters with less dexterity. Now my character with no dexterity has to press space three times to achieve what I could do with one press before? Maybe changes in jump height could be more intertwined with the different races, and the 1st, 2nd, 3rd jumps could scale differently with increasing dexterity? For one race it could be that 1st, 2nd, 3rd jump all scale the same with increasing dex, for others the 1st jump could always have a value of 1 and the 2nd and 3rd could increase proportionally with dex from 0 to 1. This gives a lot more possible combinations and some additional uniqueness to different races.

4. Penalty for death is something that can't really be nailed down until how the whole character-creation stuff works settles down.  It's like building a house, you have to have the foundation before the roof.  Permadeath consequences are of lesser importance to me than the other stuff here, so those get decided on last.  Same thing with boss drops.  As we start including more and more spellscrolls, it may be that bosses simply drop spellscrolls.
.....
6. That said, having a stable of characters in your settlement that are all useful and that you can switch between sounds really good to me.....

If we can switch to a new characters design at any time with use of a scroll, then there is no need to keep a "stable" in our settlement. Simply use a glyph transfer scroll on yourself to trigger the character design. That way the rescued characters with professions never get interfered with and people can still switch between types they like.

Even though you say that the penalty for death cannot be nailed down until after the character creation, they are really intertwined; since the cost of dying will directly influence how willing people are to repeatedly die until they get the character they want... You might as well just let us have it in the first place, since nobody likes a stiff penalty just to enforce randomness. There can even be a random roll button for those who want to do that.

A way to get people more attached to the current iteration of their favorite race might be to record stats on the things they accomplish before death and also how they died and put them in a "Hall of Fame" in the settlement that displays the feats of the glyph bearers that have died and also the current ones (a purple Illari stone?). Things like shards/enchants collected, monsters/lietenants/overlords killed, missions completed, etc. This could later be expanded to potentially work for achievements or unlocks that are specific to completing a certain number of things without dying (progress towards these would continue on if you used a scroll to switch characters instead of doing it after dying).