View Issue Details
| ID | Project | Category | Date Submitted | Last Update | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0006278 | Valley 1 | Gameplay Idea | Mar 1, 2012 6:38 am | Mar 1, 2012 10:19 am | |
| Reporter | Terraziel | Assigned To | Chris_McElligottPark | ||
| Status | closed | Resolution | won't fix | ||
| Summary | 0006278: Remove the Scroll Requirement for Non-Shape Matter Guardian Powers. | ||||
| Description | Firstly Reiterating leave the shape matter powers as they are they work fine as mission rewards. But for the other powers, I think the flow and feel of the game would be improved if essentially you cast them as many times as you can afford, obviously a cost increase is necessary, the benefits to changing the system i see as this... 1) Flexibility (You will never be stuck waiting for the power you want to spawn) 2) It makes the Civ buildings feel like they are actually gaining you something. 3) It gives added value to consciousness shards, and consequently the sources of them, so you would gain something from fighting surface bosses and underground bosses 4) It gives you something to actually spend your shards on, currently your income seems to far exceed your expenses. This is related to 1) but as the number of powers increases I think you will have to do something like this eventually anyway. Personally, if it is a concern, I don't think this would unbalance the game greatly, for example, at a a quick estimate to clear the land of my continent I would require another 9 wind shelters, with a cost increase to 250 shards, that's 2,250 shards, which is probably more than the amount I will accrue simply playing through the game normally. EDIT: Part of the impetus for this was my inability to acquire a an "Ocean Buoy" scroll, currently I'm not sure whether they don't spawn or i'm just unlucky, either would be avoided by this. | ||||
| Tags | No tags attached. | ||||
| Internal Weight | Feature Suggestion | ||||
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...and there would go half the goals in the game. Definitely no. |
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Well I'd like to know what you consider the goals of the game then? Are Powers a goal of the game? surely they are a means to an end? In both theory and practice you can play through the entire game without using a Guardian Power. |
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All of the below is said with the understanding that you have no way of reading our minds or knowing where we are headed with this. So no criticisms implied: You have two main avenues of power progression on a continent, and both will be something you have to balance against one another: 1. Acquisition of arcane ingredients. 2. Acquisition of guardian power scrolls. At the moment, sure, you can play through the game without any scrolls... maybe. If the overlord is on an island, you'll need buoys for sure. But as we continue to develop this out, especially post-1.0, the scrolls are going to become increasingly vital on later continents as the overlord will be more strategically active and you will need to muster your NPCs and scrolls to beat him. Having unlimited-use scrolls is basically like saying "just take out resources from building ships in AI War, it's a pain having to gather and spend resources on ships all the time." The fact that you have an excess of shards at the moment is more a factor of the early state of the strategic layer, rather than of anything else. Hope that helps clear things up! |
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Thanks for the response at the very least. Well to me, cover the strategy game comparison, the scrolls are the equivalent of saying "We are going to let you easily get all the buildings and tech required to get a unit, but then force you to find a randomly spawned resource to actually build anything" But that's what differences of opinion are. Dropping it now. Again thanks for the explanation. |
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I appreciate your understanding. And not to belabor the point, but let me explain just a bit more so that perhaps it will make more sense. The RTS analogy can only go so far, because this is more like a turn-based game in how we design it than an RTS. In Chess, for example, you only get one move per each move your opponent gets. Even more than that, your valid moves are limited by what your opponent have done. Some things you literally can't do because of your opponent, many other things would be absurdly stupid to do because of your opponent. So that leaves you with many fewer valid options on this particular move, and then they move, and your options shift, and repeat. That's Chess, looked at from a certain direction, anyhow. With AVWW's macrogame component, we don't have literal turns. At one point we did, but that was confusing and un-fun, and so we took that out. This in turn leads to a need for some way to limit what the player can do at any given time compared to what else is happening in the world. That led to "mission time," which was also confusing and un-fun. Add in the fact that this is not _just_ a turn-based strategy game, but also an adventure game with a skill component and a few RPG trappings, and you wind up with a need for players to be able to "over-level" the overlords or any other challenge. Hence secret missions, and diluter enchants, among a few other mechanics. But when it comes back down to the core conflict, you're limited in your guardian powers and your tier orbs such that you have to choose a subset of things to do. You can't just push the wind off the whole continent by getting a single wind shelter scroll and then grinding shards -- wind shelter scrolls are precious, and so you have to place each one with care. True, if you choose to grind secret missions you can find a bunch of wind shelter scrolls then you can achieve the same effect -- you can "grind" secret missions to basically circumvent most of the strategy of the game, if you wish. That's the whole "need to be able to over-level" thing coming into play, which is common to adventure and RPGs rather than strategy games. But therein lies the difference in winning against the overlord, and winning _well_. Secret missions are actually needed even if you are trying to win well, because the random number generator is not all that kind on the world map missions all the time, but even so there are certain things that need to remain fairly rare in order to maintain the proper flow and feel. The ability to fill up your map with wind shelters and buoys are two of those, and the ability to fill your settlement with dozens of NPCs or buildings is another. In fact, most of the guardian power scrolls are intended to be of such a scope that you really need those to be kind of a semi-rare thing to be able to use. What we're trying to build isn't a true strategy game, and it's not a true RPG or adventure game, either, in the classical sense. It's kind of a fuzzy mix of all of the above, and some of that is going to need some balancing as we get more into it. But having guaridan power scrolls be a limited resource that are precious is absolutely at the core of everything we hope to do with the macro-game. Otherwise there's nothing to prevent you from just spamming them repeatedly as much as you want, all over the continent. After you found your first buoy scroll, you could remove every last turbulent water patch on your whole continent, for instance -- well, granted, you still have to get shards. But as you pointed out, the shard cost for these is not particularly high. Some later scrolls that are more powerful and less central to general gameplay will have higher shard costs, but we're not there yet. |
| Date Modified | Username | Field | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mar 1, 2012 6:38 am | Terraziel | New Issue | |
| Mar 1, 2012 6:44 am | Terraziel | Description Updated | |
| Mar 1, 2012 7:42 am | tigersfan | Internal Weight | => Feature Suggestion |
| Mar 1, 2012 7:42 am | tigersfan | Status | new => considering |
| Mar 1, 2012 8:02 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0020066 | |
| Mar 1, 2012 8:02 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Status | considering => closed |
| Mar 1, 2012 8:02 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Assigned To | => Chris_McElligottPark |
| Mar 1, 2012 8:02 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Resolution | open => won't fix |
| Mar 1, 2012 9:51 am | Terraziel | Note Added: 0020068 | |
| Mar 1, 2012 9:56 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0020071 | |
| Mar 1, 2012 10:03 am | Terraziel | Note Added: 0020072 | |
| Mar 1, 2012 10:19 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0020073 | |
| Apr 14, 2014 9:30 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Category | Suggestion - Gameplay => Gameplay Idea |
