View Issue Details
| ID | Project | Category | Date Submitted | Last Update | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0028557 | Heart Of The Machine | Gameplay Idea | May 30, 2024 2:42 pm | May 30, 2024 2:58 pm | |
| Reporter | Jake Cooper | Assigned To | Chris_McElligottPark | ||
| Status | closed | Resolution | no change required | ||
| Product Version | 0.528 Unforgivable Composting | ||||
| Summary | 0028557: Varying resource income based on location | ||||
| Description | Wiretaps could make more wealth in more affluent areas, gathering could provide different quantities/proportions of resources depending on affluence and/or sector type. This could be expanded to your own buildings getting de/buffs based on locational suitability, but that might be a step too far towards citybuilding games for your taste. | ||||
| Tags | No tags attached. | ||||
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The wiretap is already only possible on middle-class buildings with a suitable number of people -- in other words, it's a targeted ability. There's some thematic notes about that in the ability description, too. If you want to steal from people other than the middle class, then you'll need something more sophisticated. In general, giving soft bonuses or penalties based on location is something I'm really really against -- earlier versions of the game tried that (over a year ago), and one of two things happened. Either one, the player couldn't tell what was going on, and would just kind of build randomly. Or two, the game would show kind of a heat map of what the player could build, and the player still couldn't tell because we're bad at distinguishing gradients in lighting like that. So instead it was then show numbers all over the place, and now the player's sole contribution to the proceeding was to find the highest number and click it. There's really no incentive for player to build non-optimally when there's a gradient of options, unless it's a pain in the butt to build optimally. So what that winds up doing is separating the economy into rich player who do the tedious micro, and poor players who don't and then struggle. As a general philosophy, the game uses hard borders for things instead. Any of this category of building that you've been presented is equally valid, always. However, that means that secondary factors unrelated to income can start coming into play; ranging from ideas of defense, or aesthetics, generally trying to set up synergies with other things you have going on. I originally was going to have a larger synergies system as a whole, too, but that also wound up making it so that players stopped seeing the actual map, and just saw the endless numbers. Things like the overdrivers were kind of my compromise for now, because you don't need to see the numbers to understand that that they are unmitigatedly good, and have no downside. So now it's not a question of if they're suitable or not, but instead which thing you want to apply your limited stockpile to. I think that ideas more in that vein, where you can get some extra bonuses out of something, but there's an opportunity cost to using it on one thing versus another, tend to be the space where players are really making interesting decisions. But I also welcome other ideas I might not have thought of. In general, there's also various buildings coming up that can only be built at all near certain features on the map. This binary nature means that you have some choices of where you can put them, but it's a thing that people can evaluate based on whatever other merits beyond direct yield, since the yield is the same in any of the spots. Every tree is the same yield in an age of empires map, for example, but which trees you chop has a cumulative impact over time on how your empire expands and where the weak spots might be, etc. As for being able to target the rich more effectively, that would need to be a new thing that is better than the basic wiretap. Again, I welcome suggestions like that, but basically that would need to be a project chain that is like "okay, we go through these missions and then get the ability to target the rich via these specific means." And now that new capabilities only targets a new selection of buildings, but gives a higher yield from doing so. This turned into an essay, but hopefully it helps a bit with the philosophy of how I'm looking to expand things. |
| Date Modified | Username | Field | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| May 30, 2024 2:42 pm | Jake Cooper | New Issue | |
| May 30, 2024 2:58 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Assigned To | => Chris_McElligottPark |
| May 30, 2024 2:58 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Status | new => closed |
| May 30, 2024 2:58 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Resolution | open => no change required |
| May 30, 2024 2:58 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0068891 |
