Messages

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Skyward Collapse / Re: Skyward Collapse Alpha 0.906

« on: Today at 03:06:48 AM »

Yep, the overspend thing is there.   It only happens with tiles though;  tokens of any sort wont do it.    Tiles give the "you dont have enough actions!" text whenever you're holding them over somewhere they cant actually go, but when you go to a spot that they can technically fit, they turn green and you're allowed to place them.

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Skyward Collapse / Re: Skyward Collapse Alpha 0.906

« on: Today at 02:10:13 AM »

Pulled the middle ss since it was pointless.  Check the tile placement TT in the remaining ss.  I moved the tile one spot and the TT changes.  That shouldn't happen.

There is a second issue that I ran into.  You can overspend AP on both sides.  That's why I put the save up.

Also, Misery, if you ignore bandits, they will be a big threat real fast.  I loaded up the game I played earlier today and before the game gets to turn 70, there were 12 keeps.  You want to lose by obliteration?  Don't handle the bandits.  if you have enough stuff to deal with bandits then your towns should be having a fairly fun battle

There is also something else.
Since you need to have enough stuff to fight bandits.. fun starts after they removed that last keep. You have suddenly large amount of stuff which is very interested in nearby enemy town. And that two groups of stuff can easily be in different places of map.

That is a good point, and I started to find that to be the case as I went further.  The defeat of a bandit camp does indeed seem to mean that suddenly you have a small army with nothing to do that will of course run off and FIND something to do (which is often something that's not them helping you in any way, hah).   So that does seem to be working out decently.

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Skyward Collapse / Re: Skyward Collapse Alpha 0.906

« on: Yesterday at 11:48:24 PM »

release has some issues. i'll elaborate on that.

Ugh.  Blue can go into AP debt, save attached here.
TC placement tooltip doesn't consistently show, ss that included.

Edit:  Added a ss I meant to add in the first place.  Apparently Red can go into AP debt also.

Game is a giant sandbox mode right now.

Wait, I'm a little lost on what the problem exactly is?   Cant tell quite what you're getting at with the screenshots there.


Anyway, as for this release, I cant say much for the score requirements or the difficulty changes as far as new games go, as I started my current one a bit before you guys put out this one, but so far in my current game on Medium I'm not having any major issues.   Things are definitely getting interesting here.   Though at times I think there might almost be TOO much bandit presence, with the strongholds;  red and blue both end up spending a bit too much time just fighting bandits, and not nearly so much fighting each other.   The strongholds though are very good in that they definitely encourage the use of siege units.  But yeah, I do think that the reds VS the blues is a more important idea rather than both together VS bandits.... I'm not sure just what to suggest on this one.   


EDIT:  Also, buildings actually collapsing entirely when they run out of HP: is a really great change.  It means that defense is that much more important now, and the position of certain tiles within cities has more of an effect.   Not to mention that combined with the requirement of cities being within a certain range of enemy cities, you can have situations where you think that a particular city is so totally safe, but..... suddenly it turns out that it isnt because a siege unit in an unconnected yet still close enough enemy city has wandered to the edge of it and is firing from there and wrecking your moon/sun and diamond buildings (argh, that one definitely hurts, it does).   

Also, I really like the idea of the score requirement thing;  losing the game entirely through total destruction still seems a little difficult to actually have it happen (at least on Medium, though I'm still in the first age so that may well change soon for me!), but the score thing is very interesting.   On one hand there's the temptation to use the big powers for the big points to get there faster, but if you do that of course you can really mess yourself up.  Even some of the powers that seem to be without a downside can mess you up, I had a sudden explosion of siege units from a particular Greek city because I'd used Cornucopia to enable me to place down a couple of mythological units to pop a couple of rampaging red guys that appeared in a totally different blue city, which suddenly re-activated a couple of siege buildings that I'd shut off by smashing their bakery, so I now had this big horde of siege units on the blue side that the reds were very unprepared to deal with.   Interesting indeed.

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Skyward Collapse / Re: Skyward Collapse Alpha 0.905

« on: Yesterday at 07:54:29 PM »

Okay, okay: no more mega towns.  Placement rules are same as before, but this should help as various noted:

* Improved the tooltip for "you can't place this tile here" to show you ALL the reasons you can't place that tile there, rather than just the "most important" one.  That way you can tell when you can place a town center if you just build out a bit more land, for instance.

Haha, that was fast 


As the TC placement goes, I dunno how hard this would be to do, but it'd help quite a bit if, when I'm going to place one, the possible spots all light up in the same way that cities show the green spaces when you go to place other buildings for them.   The placement rules make perfect sense for TCs, it's just hard to visually estimate where they can go when it's time to place one.   Alot of "Oh, I still need one more tile of distance here" moments.   Not a gameplay issue, more like just a thing that could do with a small UI change.

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Skyward Collapse / Re: Skyward Collapse Alpha 0.905

« on: Yesterday at 07:29:06 PM »

All righty:

* It's now possible to create mega-towns by placing allied towns right up next to one another.

Seems fun.

Hmm, isnt this kinda similar to how it was originally though?   Where each side just had this great heap of buildings with no branching out necessary (which honestly wasnt very interesting).   Not to mention this soiunds like it's going to make it MUCH harder to do concentrated damage to towns in general;  the more they're grouped up, the stronger they'll be, because of giant unit heaps all coming out of the same general area.   The "spaced out" placement seemed to make it so there was alot of strategy/decision making in building these, since they werent always super easy to place.    I agree with Mick in that my only problem with the spaced-out system was a lack of feedback on WHERE I could place a new one, I have to wave the TC around to see where is possible.

EDIT:   Also, I'm thinking production buildings will stop entirely making sense here.  They're tied to the city they're in, but that'd be confusing as all heck with too many buildings in one area. There'd be alot of "Ok, wait, this military building says it's not got any bacon, but I put it right next to a butcher!" sort of thing.   



Aaaaaaaanyway,

I've only just started a new game.... and I dunno how much I can get in on it tonight because my arm is flaring up again (bah!), but we'll see.  So far, so good.   It's clear that Iv'e missed some stuff in updates here, since I just had a bandit fortress pop up 2 tiles away from a blue town center in a city that isnt finished.    That's not a bad thing, mind you, it should be interesting to see just how I can deal with this one... with nobody having siege units or myth stuffs yet..... and the vanity woe going on at the same time.    I'm thinking bandit forts in general are a superb idea.

No glitches yet.

Also, yay, production info on town centers!   That was definitely needed.

Nothing else to say yet on the other stuff till I've had more time with it.   But I'm liking the sound of most of it pretty darn well.


More feedback later in the night!

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Skyward Collapse / Re: Developer question: What god powers or mythological tokens don't you use?

« on: Yesterday at 03:47:44 PM »

Fenrir:  Havent needed to kill a god.  Even moreso now that they do not defend areas with crazy attacks, this is totally useless.

Idunn and Apollo make a nasty pair of passives for the Norse.  I'd kill Apollo over that.

Hmm, that's a good point;  I havent really had to deal too much with nasty passives, so that might do with more experimentation.

It does seem EXTREMELY situational though, very unflexible, as abilities and such go.

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Skyward Collapse / Re: My new design for warfare points and town stuff.

« on: Yesterday at 03:46:35 PM »

Ye gods, you guys are bloody fast at all these new ideas!   I'll have much to mess with when I fire this game up tonight, it seems.

This all sounds good to me.   It seems like you guys have actually at least somewhat dealt with some of the issues I'd had with the game when I last played it.... such as that bit about outlying towns not having to take part.  The systems you mention here seem like they might do the trick for this, though I'll repeat what someone said above me and say that it's important that it also doesnt encourage uniformity:  I like that my cities end up being DIFFERENT from each other, like having one that's heavy military, while the next one might be focused mostly on wheat and clay and the occaisional siege unit, or stuff like that.   There's alot of strategy to the city building but it totally falls apart if you MUST do certain things within every single city that there is.

I also really like the "scorched earth" bit with buildings actually being WRECKED when beaten down.   That's something I've wanted to see since the start. 

If you're going to do this though, I'd like to add in one suggestion:  Give the player another "direct action" that simply repairs a building to full, but at some high price (perhaps Jewelery or something, or have it be another full-3-actions thing, as that seems to work with powerful actions in terms of keeping them from being at all easy to use).   This leaves the player a bit more options to deal with;  so they wont necessarily get TOTALLY wrecked if some super-important key building goes down, yet the high action cost means that while you CAN use it.... you really probably should avoid having to.      But yeah, keep it so that actual ruins simply cant be affected;  the player would have to respond BEFORE the building is destroyed.


Also I want to echo something Cinth said in that I'm wondering if Palladium might be getting a bit totally overpowered with these new ideas.  It's effect fit the previous state of the game, but with these new changes it really looks out of place to me.

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Skyward Collapse / Re: Developers requesting feedback: Warfare Points (Return of Points)?

« on: Yesterday at 03:35:58 PM »

By encouraging the correct behavior with score also limits your need to stop exploits (for victory that is).

See, I don't really like that. I feel like it's a shortcut to making a challenging game by just saying "Yeah, it's super easy to win, but at the end of the game we will tell you that you played it wrong."

My goal would be this:
1. It's hard to win at all, especially on higher difficulties.
2. If you want to go the extra mile, you can show off your mad skillz by having an extra high score.

I think that something like Bionic Commando: Rearmed is a really good example of this sort of system.

I just wanted to say that I totally agree with this idea.  I see this all the time in the sorts of games that I play (particularly shmups), and it's one of the things that KEEPS me playing them.   While you have to be a certain type of player to totally "get" this one, if you ARE that sort of player, it really adds alot to a game if it's done right.

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Skyward Collapse / Re: Developer question: What god powers or mythological tokens don't you use?

« on: Yesterday at 03:31:46 PM »

Yggdrasil:   I seriously just have no idea of what strategic use this might have.  Particularly late in the game, since it sounds like it'd just cover most of the board in random units which would then go randomly berserk at each other.

Fenrir:  Havent needed to kill a god.  Even moreso now that they do not defend areas with crazy attacks, this is totally useless.

Brokkr:  The Norse pretty much already have a powerful "decrease/remove cost" ability in Norns, so this is kinda redundant, and also by the time I could really pay his cost, I probably just dont need it anymore.

And it's not a "token", but I still have no use for the Elf.   It's weaker (by quite a bit) than the Ice Giant, and it's ability simply does not make up for that.  Valkyrie is pretty much the same here.  I pretty much stick to just the giants and trolls.

Hebe:  I've simply never had a need for it.

Labyrinth:  Not entirely sure on this one.   I havent unlocked the ability to actually use the minotaurs yet, not without Cornucopia in play, so I've never touched this.   But it seems like I'd need quite a number of those guys in play before this one would make any sense at all.

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Skyward Collapse / Re: Skyward Collapse tablet version?

« on: May 16, 2013, 07:40:14 PM »

I just thought I'd say:   If you guys end up doing an iOS version of this, that'd be pretty darn awesome, really.   This'd be perfect for that.   I just dont find enough good strategy games on there, I really dont.  You'd certainly have my purchase right away.

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Skyward Collapse / Re: Skyward Collapse Alpha 0.817

« on: May 16, 2013, 07:32:48 PM »

I wont have a chance to try this just yet, but I went and had a look through the patch notes.

This looks quite good.  I see the diamonds/jewelery thing looks balanced better, that one had been bugging me...  and the change to the gods looks VERY good.  Any city with a god in it previously wasnt going to go down whatsoever easily since they're so freaking strong (though I did have Heimdall just randomly melt once, I was never sure just how).   Makes more sense anyway:  What kind of god actually sits there and does all the defense work themselves?  That's for the believers to do!  Kinda makes me think of the various gods from the Discworld books, actually, with the lazy "I dont wanna do anything if I dont have to" attitude.

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Skyward Collapse / Re: Skyward Collapse Alpha 0.815 (Alpha Round 2 Starts Now!)

« on: May 16, 2013, 09:20:42 AM »

@Misery: FYI, my current laptop that I can use for development and most of the games I like to play cost less than $500 about a year and a half ago.  I call it the craptop because the specs aren't all that great but honestly it gets the "mobile" and "can do most of the things I want to do with a computer" job done.  Though I'm not sure I'd vouch for the safety of a sometimes-slow computer owned by you

Yeah, I wouldnt vouch for it either.



Now about that balance stuff....

I do think it's probably going to take alot more testing to really get a handle on just where the difficulty is.   There's definitely a big element of randomness with this game, and all of the different parts of it can combine to create totally different situations.   My current game has, so far, been decently challenging as far as keeping the balance, having one point where it tipped enough in one direction to put a couple of cities in danger (even if they ended up taking no real damage).   I'm not sure that I HAD to use that horn to solve the issue, but based on what was going on, anything else looked to have alot of added risk. 

Yet, next time through on that same map with the same settings could end up being much easier, simply due to what the RNG and the AI decide to do.  I expect the difficulty could vary by quite a bit based on that stuff.

This sounds like the sort of thing that might end up being quite difficult to properly balance, though.... you cant really expect perfect balance in any game that uses alot of random elements, so that's worth keeping in mind too.

But yeah, I do think Medium should probably be a good bit harder based on what I've seen.   At least, so far.

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Skyward Collapse / Re: Skyward Collapse Alpha 0.815 (Alpha Round 2 Starts Now!)

« on: May 16, 2013, 08:08:28 AM »

Excellent "more interesting, but not impossibly harder" was definitely what I was hoping for. There are some hard-rated woes in here for sure, but not a ton of them. Adding more of those will make the higher difficulties harder, but I had hoped this would make the lower difficulties nontrivial to master but not insane if that makes sense. Easy is supposed to be midcore.

Excellent notes on the mythological and god tokens. I'll have to put in a cooldown system for them in general, as I think that's very much warranted. Also their costs need adjustment, as you say.

Defensive towers might need to stop granting extra health to other buildings. I think that's what makes them seem invincible.

Spies and inside job sound easier than I expected, so I'll have to make those get harder based on the difficulty. Ie, more guys popping up than one when you go above easy.

For upheaval and flood, sounds like those might need to be limited to easy and medium, though its hard to say for sure.

As costs go, I dont think everything needs timers on them.... they simply need to cost more in some cases.   Pan's goat for instance... it costs 2 moonstone if I recall, and moonstone is a bit easier to get than sunstone, and I had like 8 or 10 when I used that.  Heimdall's horn costs 5 sunstone, and THAT was a pain to get;  I had to specifically set up more moon/sun structures than I'd wanted because I needed more production to hit 5 sunstone in time to use it.   

Stuff like Norns and whatever, they HAVE a cost, it's just that it's kind of a low one.   And Jewelery costs on pretty much everything that uses it is generally much, much too low.   2 or 3 Jewelery is trivial when having just 5 diamonds means that you have 60 or so of it.  I feel like if I only have 5 of something like that, I should be having to make some tough choices on what I want to use it for, and if I really need more, extra citybuilding should be done.   But currently 5 or 6 of that lasts forever.


If easy is supposed to be midcore, then Medium could probably do with being a bit harder.   Though, I still need more time to really test it, I only had time to get about halfway through a game before I had to stop for now.   I'll give alot more feedback about it on Sunday.

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Skyward Collapse / Re: Skyward Collapse Alpha 0.815 (Alpha Round 2 Starts Now!)

« on: May 16, 2013, 04:35:12 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).

There are very definitely alot of really wonky balance issues right now, specifically in relation to mythological units and tokens, and god tokens.   Norns, Palladium, Cornucopia, and Brokkr are all excellent examples of things that need a heavier cost.   Some god tokens also seem like they're really rather off (such as Pan's goat, which can be spammed a bit for crazy resource gain), giving too much easy-to-use helpful effects for nowhere near enough cost.  Also, diamonds/jewelery.... Diamonds are appropriately hard to get, but, this doesnt matter when you get like a zillion Jewelery count from like 4 or 5 of them, and when things requiring jewelery then need only like 3 or so.


Now, some initial feedback on this update.


I'm thinking that you're on the right track with the "woes" system here..... these seem to have pretty much done just what I was hoping they'd do, which was to create loopy situations that force the use of things I otherwise would not use, and tactics I wouldnt otherwise think of.   I've had to change my building strategy up quite a bit, as well as what I do with things like Smite and the Unit Up thing, and I've had to use numerous mythological effects as well, some of the strong ones even.   I've also had to use Heimdall's horn in my current game, which required some preparation and thinking with the situation that was going on, and I only just got it off before the blue guys managed to smash up the front parts of the 2 red front-line cities.

These are definitely not so predictable, too.  Currently the blue guys are the ones that have been hit the hardest by the woes, with numerous ones targeting just them;  yet because of other situations that occurred.... including my own mistakes.... and also because of Pan's sudden presence, they ended up being much stronger to the point of starting to totally overrun the reds.  Totally undid my plans, as I'd been beefing them up before that because I thought the reds were going to get too strong.   And this is on the forest map, so there's also random units popping up fairly frequently for both sides.


In other words, it's gotten very interesting very fast.   Even the supposedly weaker/easier events are not as simple as they initially seem. 


As for the difficulty of these events, I've still managed to pretty much completely protect all cities for the time being;  only one building has actually gotten knocked out so far, though a good number of them have taken heavy damage.   But things havent gotten messed up enough yet for any of the cities to be in danger of falling.   

That's all on Medium 2 by the way.   Or was it 3?   One of those.

All in all, this is pretty great so far.   Cant wait to see how this expands.   Though I wont have a chance to mess with it again till Sunday.

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Skyward Collapse / Re: Skyward Collapse Steam

« on: May 16, 2013, 01:44:55 AM »

I've never been banned from an online game either, but the possibility makes me uneasy enough that I avoid Steam.

But..... all you have to do is NOT be a complete troll or something.   From what I've seen you have to be pretty nasty to get totally banned from Steam.


Really, I never understand the anti-Steam thing that I see at times.   The way I see it, it's LESS risky (by quite a bit) than normal.   If my PC goes insane and dies (as my previous one did), I can lose *lots* of stuff..... but not if it's Steam titles, since I can just re-download them and in many cases get my saves back.