Topics

1

A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / AVWW in PC Gamer UK

« on: May 06, 2011, 12:53:34 PM »

Just got my subscriber issue of PC Gamer UK, and AVWW has a short column in their "The Future of Indie" feature:

There's a link to the AVWW page and the text is:

"This sounds a little bit like Minecraft: a procedurally generated RPG, where each world is unique to the player experiencing it. Except where Minecraft is about the player's impact on a mostly empty world, AVWW is a lot more involved.
A post-apocalyptic world where the apocalypse (an ice-age) might not have happened, the player's adventure takes him through the remnants of civilisation on a broken Earth, meeting the people left behind in office buildings and villages. Developers Arcen have come startling ambition, creating a game world without any boundaries: it'll go in any direction, generating challenges, characters and areas as the player explores. They claim it will never end, and that you'll never need to generate another world.
That openness is at the heart of the game. Everything you can see you can visit: every building will be open to the player, every settlement will have its own problems to help solve or avoid. Sounds intriguing."

(maybe some typos introduced by me)

This is in a feature alongside games like Miner Wars, Subversion, Hawken and Spy Party, although AVWW has one of the smaller columns. No idea if it will be featured online or copied over into the US mag (they often do both).

Just thought I'd post in case this is UK only and gets missed by you guys! Good publicity though eh!

2

AI War / Move-then-attack order?

« on: April 04, 2011, 11:49:43 PM »

Hi All! Witness my predicament: it's 5.30am here in the UK and I've given up trying to sleep between bouts of horrible d&v (if you don't know, you don't want to), as I keep having weird waking nightmares about murderous accountants and cricket players when I try. So, having gone off-topic before there is a topic, do I have something productive and non-self-pitying to say? Well yes, as you ask:

I haven't posted this to mantis as I'm still fairly new and thus may be missing some ingenious mechanic or nuance that makes this unnecessary, but would people value (and would it be possible to implement) a new move type that works as follows:

- Combine-able with group move and wormhole move, but not FRD or normal attack move.
- Once given, ships move to the specified destination as they would with a standard move.
- Once each ship arrives, it then enters attack move mode.
- Fin.

Numerous times, I find myself wanting to cluster all my ships into a 'blob' as quickly as possible, but then for them to be under attack move conditions at their new destination. Admittedly this can be achieve using G+Click, then Shift+X+Click, but that's almost too much micro for my petty, non Starcraft attuned mind and seems kind of inelegant. Plus if this was a move mode itself it could have it's own outline colour for the ships doing it so that you can see who is in that mode. . .

As I said, please feel free to point out if this is unnecessary or impossible to implement, and to poke fun at my inferior mind device and currently malfunctioning fleshy form if it pleases you. However,if this has some support, I'd ask if you'd allow me to post it to mantis as it would be my first report there 

Back to the toilet!

3

After Action Reports / Schooled by LotS

« on: February 17, 2011, 03:59:31 PM »

I love games where it's fun to lose!  

Just fired up LotS for the first time (this is coming straight from 4.021) to see what new tricks the AI could throw at me.

This was 7/7, random easier (which gave me turtle and vanilla), dyson, trader, roaming enclaves, forget what else.

I pick blade spawners as my starting bonus wishing to try out the exciting new toys, and my home is a nice backwater planet with two gates, one a dead end and one branching off to the rest of the galaxy.

The minute I start scouting I realise things are going to get ugly. The dead end has very little of note. . . except of course a Mk III fort! In the other direction the closest planet is nothing too nasty, but adjacent to that is a fairly full looking planet with an Eye AND a Spec Forces Alarm Post (I've never dealt with one of these before but it sounds hideous, and I've read much about the beefed up Eyes). Behind that is a mk IV planet with an ARS (and another eye). To say this could be a challenge is a mild understatement.

But challenge is what I'm here for, so I vow to press on and give it my best shot. I devise the following strategy for taking the fort planet:

- sit as many bombers as I can build on top of the fort (which is right by the command station) and pew pew it to pieces
- to cover the bombers and stop them being eroded by the fleet ships in the system (the AI has acid sprayers), I'll sit several blade spawners well out of the fort's range and their blades can take out anything that has the audacity to touch my pretty bombers.

Bombers kill forts rather well and spawners kill all else while evading retaliation from the fort: nothing can go wrong, right?

Wrong! The spawner bit works well but it turns out mk 1 bombers take rather a long time to kill a mk 3 fort. . . Worrying that waves are coming soonish, I unlock Mk 2 bombers and set my factory to churn out nothing but. With the fort still on about 330mil health (out of 360mil) the first wave gets announced: 170 odd cloaked ships (plus starship). Wonderful. I don't even know what I'm facing!

I decide it can't be that bad, cloaked ships are all naff, they can just hide to make up for it, right?

Wrong! It all seems fine as my mixed mk 1 fleet (triangle ships and spawners) deals with the siege starship and trickle of non-cloakers that come with the wave. Then 170 etherjet tractors uncloak off my command station and proceed to steal half of my fleet. . . Ah  

What happens next was a bit of a panicked haze. I attempt to pull my bombers and spawners back from the fort planet to deal with this 'situation', but they arrive too late to have much impact. It's then that I realise the tractors have pulled my poor confused fleed back as far as the mk 4 planet, and I'm of course gathering large amounts of threat from mk 4 ships. Giving up on taking anything for now, I try to churn out the ships necessary to deal with this, instantly crashing my fragile economy.  

I grin as mk 4 vampires take out my power plants, bombers whittle down my home forcefield and everything else anihilitates my one and only command station. I think it's safe to say: pwned. Awesome!

Now to plot my revenge. . .  

Edit: what would have happened if I'd killed the command center on the fort planet and tried to build my own command center without killing the fort?