View Issue Details
| ID | Project | Category | Date Submitted | Last Update | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0008877 | Valley 1 | Gameplay Idea | Jul 10, 2012 2:10 am | Jul 10, 2012 10:01 pm | |
| Reporter | Misery | Assigned To | |||
| Status | considering | Resolution | open | ||
| Product Version | 1.116 | ||||
| Summary | 0008877: Make building placement matter more | ||||
| Description | Not sure how best to phrase that summary, heh. This is gonna be a copy/paste of a topic I'd done on the forums on the same subject. Figured I'd best do a mantis post as well. Now I know there are bonuses for certain region types, depending on the actual building. Lumbermancy buildings go in the forests, for example. The problem is..... that's all there is to it. There's no real strategy/planning/thinking involved. If I've got a building that goes in the desert, well, dont matter where the desert is or how much of it there is or which tile I choose; just walk over, slap one down randomly, and bam, full building bonus. This means that I could, say, have my settlement on one side of the continent, right, and maybe a few buildings near it..... but if I were to walk aaaaaaaalllllllll the way across the continent.... maybe even to a seperate island.... and slap a building there, it'd be still "part of the city", despite making absolutely no sense whatsoever. It'd look like the sort of building only a crazed hermit would live in and wouldnt connect at all to the settlement, and sure as heck wouldnt look like part of a city..... but it'd still WORK. Pretty much the ONLY restriction with this is the wind shelters and the area they open up..... and that's about it. Within those boundaries..... and it's not that hard to unlock huge tracts of land with those..... you can just plop buildings anywhere and you have a "city". My thoughts for this were something along these lines: Have a rule that any new building needs to be within 2 or 3 tiles of another building, in order to A: work at all, or B: get the full effect. Whichever seems to work out the best. If B:, you could say, have the building's effectiveness reduced by half or something, if it's not close enough to other buildings. This would all mean that placement..... AND planning/strategy/whatever would both matter, for this system. Yet at the same time on lower difficulties, for those that dont want to deal with it really, you could still mostly ignore this part. This is basically what I was kinda hoping to see with the citybuilding system right from the start, as it makes the shape of the continent and placement of individual area types and regions really matter, from a strategic point-of-view. | ||||
| Tags | No tags attached. | ||||
| Internal Weight | Feature Suggestion | ||||
|
|
Going to copy-paste my counter-suggestion for the actual mechanics of this off the forum as well. Here's an alternative thought on building placement: use the wind shelter tunnels. This would need to add "sea tunnels" that travel underwater as necessary (connecting to ocean buoys and using that path if possible) to make the wind shelter tunnel network a single connected network rather than the current disconnected sections. (It'd also be good if wind shelters always connected to the nearest one when placed, or multiple nearest ones if there's a tie, so that the tunnel path is more predictable, and favour north/south over east/west while staying on land for the same reasons). Once there's a single network, half the effectiveness of any building not built on the tunnel or adjacent to an ocean buoy (since you can't build on an ocean buoy), since those are the buildings that survivors can get to without perilous overland journeys, and since then you have to expend resources to go into particular regions if you want their bonus instead of having to just get near them. (Roughly speaking, this would mean that with the most "efficient" wind shelter layout you'd only be able to build efficiently on 36% of the land, which seems like a reasonable limit given the continent sizes.) |
|
|
My copy-pasta'd response: Aye, this one is a pretty good idea as well. There'd have to be a small change to the..... er..... UI, I guess, for placing shelters, to have like a "preview" line to show exactly where the tunnels are going to appear once a shelter is placed, as it'd be pretty annoying to place one, and then find out that the tunnels went nowhere near where you wanted them to go. If I might add one other thing, this might be a good point for the blasted Ice Pirates to, you know, DO something. Have it so the player simply cannot build in any region that the Ice Pirates can reach; after all, these are the bad guys, and building near them would be futile as they could just blow up the building from afar! The shelters themselves though would be unaffected, so no change to how those can be placed. This might finally give a reason for the player to actually DO something about them, as currently there's no reason to do so. These guys might actually be a bit of a problem, for once, instead of just being amazingly ineffective. |
|
|
I like the idea of having some restriction on where buildings can be placed beyond not allowing them in windstorms. However, I would want it to make sense within the game's lore. For this to happen, we would need a definitive answer to the question: How do residents get to the buildings? After all, a major reason we have cities, instead of scattered buildings, in real life is that it makes it easier to get from one building to another. Do the Ilari transport them there, like they do with survivors when you're rescuing them? If so, then maybe every building needs to be placed within N squares of the settlement or a Transport Beacon (or at least there's a penalty for placing it more than N squares away). Transport Beacons should be rarer and/or harder to place than wind shelters. Do they drive there in cars, or whatever vehicle they use in Environ, which somehow protect the driver from being ripped apart? Then it makes sense to use roads of some kind. These could be the same roads/tunnels that the wind shelters currently use, or you could turn it around and require roads before placing wind shelters. There could be a "Place Road" guardian power; a stack of several charges of Place Road might count as one mission reward. There could also be a way to claim ports, or build new ones, to allow transportation across the water. The second one would feel more like a city as we know it, but neither one is really a city as we know it; even buildings that look adjacent on the map are actually separated by a region full of monsters. |
|
|
I agree on that as well. Benmiff had a point there though; those things that connect the Wind Shelters may as well be tunnels that the survivors could travel through, providing the safe passage to buildings on the path. Unless the game already explains them as something else? I've never actually been sure what they are supposed to be, they've just sorta always been there. But, Wind Shelters have special placement rules; based on how they're set up, you might have a certain area you WANT to place some buildings in, but because of earlier decisions, you might not be able to get a tunnel/pipe/whatever going there. Having some sort of additional "roadway" or something to get to spots like that would be a good idea. Or something of that nature. I like the idea of combining those ideas together, the Shelter tunnels and roads; as long as the roads take a bit of work to get & cost a proper amount; they could connect offa the tunnels/pipes provided by the Shelters. This could all make the worldmap cityplanning stuff alot more interesting. And the thing with the Ice Pirates, I definitely think that'd be a great way for those guys to become relevant. |
|
|
I wouldn't want roads to be required before Wind Shelters, to be honest. They seem a little cheap anyway compared to wind shelters in terms of managing your path network since then you can use them to venture off of your main wind shelter path and not have to do wind shelter mission in some regions while still being able to then build in those regions. Perhaps adding a limit that roads cannot cross region boundaries (due to the time disruption) and have to be able to trace a path through roads + the wind shelter network to the settlement or a wind shelter without crossing region boundaries would solve that, though (treating the ocean regions as a single region including the shallows and letting roads also build there so ocean shallows aren't off-limits to roads but the ocean is still difficult build in.) |
|
|
I was thinking that any of these restrictions would be in addition to the rule that you can't build in a windstorm, not instead of it. So roads wouldn't allow you to get around building wind shelters. |
|
|
Ice pirates thing seems good to me; I must say the other ideas just seem like rules for the sake of rules. I don't see how it's more "strategic" if I get punished for having no forests close to my settlement or whatever. |
|
|
@lavacamorada: The issue with roads aren't with them not dealing with windstorms. My issue is that you could build, say, on the Grasslands next to the Deep, and then road into the Deep thereby being able to build there without needing to bother doing a wind shelter mission there. They also seem like they would weaken the limited space aspect of where you can build, since (at least from your description) they sound like they would be pretty plentiful so it's unlikely you'd have areas you couldn't build in. @martyn van buren: You already get "punished" if you have no forests near you since you already have to spend time getting to one of the forests in that situation; this means you would have to decide which regions you go for since you'd need more wind shelters to be able to get them all, so it's a case of prioritising what you want first. |
|
|
Well, you can already do that a lot of the time with clever wind shelter placement. The issue I have with wind shelters being the only way to allow you to build somewhere is that it feels like a really artificial constraint. Why should you have to find a place for a wind shelter 4-5 tiles away if you're only interested in building something 2 tiles away? You could end up in situations where there's a place 2 tiles from your settlement where you can never, ever build because there's nothing but ocean past it; or where you have to build wind shelters to *minimize* their efficiency rather than maximizing it, because that lets you get more space for buildings; or where you have to plan 3 wind shelters ahead to get the space you want, then you get upset because the tunnel isn't exactly where you thought it would be; or where you just stockpile tons of wind shelter scrolls and build them all at once so that you can build more of them. I also don't think that roads would be "pretty plentiful" if one of the secret mission rewards was a pack of, say, 4 roads. There are lots of secret mission rewards. |
|
|
This is why I'd suggested doing both ideas; the wind shelters would provide the main "tunnel"; roads would basically allow you to refine that, for if the tunnel passes close to an area you want to use, you can use a few roads to get there. I dont think crossing time-shard boundaries would be that much of an issue; the Shelters can already do that as it is, and it seems strange to add that particular restriction. They'd just have to make sure the roads arent overly common. The player though would still have the option of "grinding" secret missions for roads if they REALLY wanted to. @martyn_van_buren It's more strategic basically because the current system is completely mindless. The bonuses for area type are a good idea that they put in, but.... it's still mindless. A building that you need to put on grasslands to get the bonus, for instance.... well, that's great and all, but chances are you're GOING to have alot of grassland tiles to choose from, and currently there's no effort to get to ANY of them, and it doesnt matter whatsoever which one you choose. Just run over to a random grassy area, select a random tile, drop a building. For a game that's supposed to have a good strategic/planning aspect to it in addition to all of the platforming/exploration stuff, it's a strange misstep. And what Benmiff said was also true.... you're not getting "punished" for not having forests; you'd STILL have to build Wind Shelters to uncover those forests in order to place stuff on them, even with the current "mindless" system. The whole point of this idea is just to make it more interesting/challenging/whatever and require some actual planning & thinking... currently, it requires neither. Which is too bad, because the whole citybuilding thing itself is a very sound idea, and it's off to a pretty nice start with the dispatch system and all that stuff. |
|
|
If there are going to be roads, I think they should not be mission rewards. Instead they should only be purchasable from the Opal Guardian for a token sum (100 C shards?). It is already hard enough to get the rewards we want from the missions, we shouldn't throw more reward types into the mix. |
|
|
It could be doable to have roads gotten in other ways if that system were to be used. They'd still have to be a bit difficult to get though.... if they were in the store, they'd have to be relatively expensive. Having them at a super-low cost would basically make the system meaningless; it'd go right back to being mindless, because it's like, well, dont matter WHERE it is I gotta stick this building, I can just buy a bazillion roads easily anyway.... |
| Date Modified | Username | Field | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jul 10, 2012 2:10 am | Misery | New Issue | |
| Jul 10, 2012 3:24 am | BenMiff | Note Added: 0026613 | |
| Jul 10, 2012 3:40 am | Misery | Note Added: 0026615 | |
| Jul 10, 2012 5:18 am | lavacamorada | Note Added: 0026617 | |
| Jul 10, 2012 5:39 am | Misery | Note Added: 0026618 | |
| Jul 10, 2012 7:03 am | BenMiff | Note Added: 0026621 | |
| Jul 10, 2012 7:10 am | lavacamorada | Note Added: 0026622 | |
| Jul 10, 2012 8:10 am | martyn_van_buren | Note Added: 0026624 | |
| Jul 10, 2012 9:58 am | BenMiff | Note Added: 0026641 | |
| Jul 10, 2012 11:08 am | lavacamorada | Note Added: 0026647 | |
| Jul 10, 2012 5:12 pm | tigersfan | Internal Weight | => Feature Suggestion |
| Jul 10, 2012 5:12 pm | tigersfan | Status | new => considering |
| Jul 10, 2012 5:47 pm | Misery | Note Added: 0026661 | |
| Jul 10, 2012 7:31 pm | weelillad | Note Added: 0026663 | |
| Jul 10, 2012 10:01 pm | Misery | Note Added: 0026665 | |
| Apr 14, 2014 9:30 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Category | Suggestion - Gameplay => Gameplay Idea |
