View Issue Details
| ID | Project | Category | Date Submitted | Last Update | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0011926 | Skyward Collapse | Gameplay Idea | Jul 5, 2013 2:18 am | Jul 5, 2013 9:30 am | |
| Reporter | vehementi | Assigned To | Chris_McElligottPark | ||
| Status | closed | Resolution | no change required | ||
| Product Version | 1.402 Man The Defenses! | ||||
| Summary | 0011926: Make bandit spawn rate proportional to economy size | ||||
| Description | Bandits love money, so make them appear more often if the world is richer! It's easy to get a massive economy going and ensure that bandits will never again be a threat even on hardest settings. The game then becomes trivial as you put all the monster caves and bandit camps on farm status. Make it like AI war where the more successful you are (in this case, economically - number of total towns in the game or perhaps # of resources produced etc.) the harder it gets. | ||||
| Tags | No tags attached. | ||||
| Internal Weight | New | ||||
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I think that this is something that needs discussion on the forum, as this is no slight change. ---------------------- With AI War this makes a lot of sense (the AIP) because a lot of it is a grand strategy game. So you are very deliberately capturing planets and territory, and most of the AIP increases come from there. But Skyward would be more like AI War on a single planet, or like a traditional RTS, in terms of the flow of the overall game and economy. In those sorts of circumstances, I feel like that's rubber-band AI. If AI War penalized you for how many resources you gathered, or how many ships you built, that would be super frustrating. Instead you have free reign for that sort of thing, but then have to deal with retaliations from territory expansions. That makes a lot of intuitive sense to most people, whereas people get super frustrated at Mario Kart (rubber band AI). ---------------------- All of the above said, balancing a game that is essentially solitaire needs to have some pushback for certain activities. Trying to achieve a "perfect" balance for a game like this, where there's no pushback, means that for many people it will either be impossibly hard or far too easy, with no middle ground. So that's no good either. Skyward already has a number of systems of pushback, and I'm curious why these are not really working for you (although from your post I have some idea, more on that below): - Score: To get score, you have to have guys -- and particularly _buildings_ -- die. You also have to use a fair plenty of god token or mythological token uses. Question: if the score is not causing pushback, is this because: a. You're playing on a low score gate? b. You're getting runaway score from the other imbalance? c. The score gates are simply too low under the hugely revised rules, and need to be increased in general? Comment: This game still needs to be balanced even when people are playing without a score gate, so this is only somewhat relevant. But a lot of the most interesting challenge can come from the score gates I think. - Self-Flagellation: To get score in particular, but also just to achieve a number of other things, you'll wind up shooting yourself in the foot a lot. This was a core premise behind the game, and actually turning off score gating really flies in the face of this quite a lot. Hmm. Still, there are a lot of cases where something big and nasty gets on your leg and you have to take a shotgun to your leg rather than just brushing the thing off. Metaphorically speaking. ;) The bandits and the ally camps and so forth are intended to be in that group, but it sounds like they are not serving that function. ---------------------- Since this is all multivariate, it's hard to know what all factors are contributing to what you are seeing. However, if you are farming ally camps and bandit keeps, I could see those as being problematic and causing the whole table to flip over, so to speak. You mentioned the health of ally camps making them unlikely to ever die before, which I thought was interesting. I think I will make a few changes based on this, which should help: - Firstly, make the units from the ally camps into "fanatics" that will ignore the yellow bandits and be ignored by them. This way they only threaten the enemy towns, which is the point. - Secondly, I think your idea of a ramp-up is a good one, but not in regards to the economy probably. On hard or expert difficulty (maybe on expert difficulty plus a new insane difficulty), having these get progressively stronger with each few turns they are on the map seems like a good idea. |
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Actually, I'm just going to close this issue in favor of the thread I created about it: http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,13556.0.html Thanks for raising the issue -- I think that it needs more discussion and will do better on the forums in this case. |
| Date Modified | Username | Field | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jul 5, 2013 2:18 am | vehementi | New Issue | |
| Jul 5, 2013 9:12 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0033070 | |
| Jul 5, 2013 9:12 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Assigned To | => Chris_McElligottPark |
| Jul 5, 2013 9:12 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Status | new => feedback |
| Jul 5, 2013 9:30 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Internal Weight | => New |
| Jul 5, 2013 9:30 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0033071 | |
| Jul 5, 2013 9:30 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Status | feedback => closed |
| Jul 5, 2013 9:30 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Resolution | open => no change required |
| Apr 14, 2014 9:30 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Category | Suggestion - Gameplay => Gameplay Idea |
