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Oh my god I love Dredmore and I love city-builder games, I am going to be all over this poo poo.  quote:Late 2013  Please tell me the beta will be sooner rather than later.
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Aug 28, 2012 00:18
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I see Diggles in this setting as more of something that would undermine a building by digging out the foundation (or digging out the underside of the foundation), necessitating some maintinence or perhaps rounding up some men from the constabulatory to kill the little buggers in their nests.
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Aug 28, 2012 03:29
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Something occurred to me and now I'm curious. You've compared this game to both Anno and DF, which is nice - both games I love - but I was thinking and these games really have dramatically different crafting models. In Anno, every thing you can make has a specific crafting path (tools always need iron/coal and two specific workshops to process them, for instance) and items are produced in large amounts - having one of a high-end material isn't terribly useful because your citizens/workshops will eat that in about 20 seconds and you'll need more. DF, meanwhile, has a very open-ended crafting system - you can make almost everything out of almost any other material, and items tend to be easy to craft (I think the most complicated thing to make is a traction bench) - and yet has an immense diversity of items because the different properties of each material gives the end product different characteristics, from weight (silver is a lovely weapon material for everything except bludgeoning because it weighs a ton) to heat resistance (certain materials can't be burned by magma, so if you want any work done with it you have to make those workshops/devices out of those materials) to skill of the crafter. At the same time, this doesn't become frustrating because unlike Anno small quantities of items are very useful - 10 weapons in Anno is nothing; 10 weapons in DF supplies an entire military squad and they'll last forever. Very few things in DF really need to be produced in bulk. So what I'm wondering is - is production in this game closer to Anno or DF? These first articles definitely give the impression of something more in-line with Anno, but I could still definitely see some more DF-ey things coming in in some way - choosing different materials at a factory to use changes the quality/usability of the output; high-end machines (something that you'd only have a few of, like the engine running a big factory) might have different components causing different effects to the factory (faster/slower production, more/less raw material consumption, etc). President Ark fucked around with this message at 18:35 on Aug 28, 2012 |
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Aug 28, 2012 18:30
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Triple-Kan posted:Have you guys begun working on how combat and damage will be handled? Will it be super-detailed DF "you have split the flesh and torn 3 layers of muscle tissue" or "this unit has lost 24 of 50 HP" or somewhere inbetween? The interview mentions soldiers losing an arm and being limited to one-handed weapons, so it's not completely arbitrary HP values.
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Aug 29, 2012 03:59
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Can you go into more detail into how the military is controlled? Probably the number-one thing that I hated in the old Impressions city builders (caesar I/II/III, pharaoh, zeus: master of olympus, etc) was how lovely the military controls were - they were slow, they were unresponsive (you had to issue orders from the barracks which might be on the other side of the city), tended to ignore anything that wasn't actively trying to stab them in the face (meaning they'd even ignore archers standing ~20 feet away), and gave very poor indication of being wounded/damaged. Dwarf Fortress' military controls I actually liked once you got past the brick wall that was the scheduling/uniform interface - the dwarves were intelligent, fast to respond assuming they weren't in one of the endless series of parties or drinking, and aggressive about attacking nearby hostiles. Basically I don't want something like in Pharaoh where I had 5 units of spearmen attacking 3 invading groups of enemy troops and all they did was beat the everloving poo poo out of the one guy I clicked when I told them to attack and ignored the rest of the army which merrily burned down my city.
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Aug 30, 2012 00:59
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nvining posted:Too early to tell yet, but I know David is obsessing fervently over this. (the DF model is actually pretty good, though.) That's good to know. Probably the thing I hated the most about those games was having an army I knew could crush the invasion I was facing but losing or taking an unnecessary amount of damage because the AI/controls were so loose I wasn't able to bring those forces to bear against the enemy; to the point that when the option to bribe invaders was introduced in Zeus I never fought again, I just bribed everyone. e: Talking about Pharaoh reminds me - one of the things I liked about that game was how, when building a pyramid, you'd actually see workers running around digging out the foundation and leveling the ground and laying bricks and so on, as opposed to most RTS games having the building just magically assemble itself or rise out of the ground. It's not huge, but you've mentioned having megaproject/wonder-esque buildings and having that sort of animation on big important buildings under construction would be really cool. President Ark fucked around with this message at 01:10 on Aug 30, 2012 |
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Aug 30, 2012 01:06
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BigSexyWill posted:You mentioned earlier a mad architect building a mad building that makes everyone a bit mad. Is it going to be so that it's only noticeable at a glance once you've reached a point of no return, so to speak, or will it start off obvious enough that someone who isn't actively hunting for signs of madness will be able to stop it before it starts spreading? This makes me wonder if it'd be possible to 'fake' the whole impossible geometry thing by making buildings look different from different angles, shifting and warping as you move the camera. Kinda like this video of a hypercube rotating. That's probably way above the scope of this game, though. I don't even know if that's possible.
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Aug 30, 2012 02:33
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Basically what we're saying is that if you haven't already, nvining, you should probably play Pharaoh and make a note of how its military system works. And then don't do what it does because Pharaoh's military system is terrible.
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Sep 12, 2012 05:09
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A race of extradimensional horrors that can break in and mess things up. If left alive long enough, they worsen the tears through which they intruded on our reality through, opening the way for more/worse invasions later on.
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Sep 12, 2012 16:27
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There should also be a Zybourne Clocktower. 
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Oct 2, 2012 00:47
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GruntyThrst posted:As dumb as most of Zybourne Clock was, a giant steam "hologram projector" thing would be kinda cool as a megaproject/wonder. Bonus points when the Others from beyond the veil take it over and now you have a giant screeching steamhologram eyeball demon informing everyone what time it is. AT THE SOUND OF THE SCREAMS OF THE DAMNED, IT WILL BE SIX OF THE CLOCK! YOU SHALL LIE IN ETERNAL TORMENT WHEN THE RED CROW COMES FORTH! 
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Oct 2, 2012 01:03
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quote:a list of otherworldly entities (“Invisible Geometer”, “The Body”, “Cthonic T’orb”) and a brief description of the terrifying Mythos contained therein, most of which is best left to your imagination, So I've had this idea floating around for months of an alien race which appears as weird, mishappen lumps of flesh with no apparent means of survival or movement which nevertheless do and can appear and disappear at will; which are all actually portions of one four-dimensional being intersecting our three-dimensional universe, with most of its body outside of what we perceive as space-time. What I'm saying is if this 'body' winds up being that I'm going to
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Oct 17, 2012 01:48
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Hello Sailor posted:Maybe for the short-lived humans that only experience linear time. The Squamous Crater Beasts award prestige for things you haven't done yet. Woe to those who fail to live up to their expectations. It'd be pretty great if getting any favor with the friendlier cosmic horrors made them start giving you special bonuses - the sort of thing other factions would give you after completing a quest sort of thing - and then make you do the quest or else they attack you.  Adds an extra layer of risk to dealing with cosmic horrors.
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Oct 25, 2012 02:16
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Dr. Demon posted:On the other hand, being given gifts you didn't ask for and then being expected to do another faction's bidding, whether you want to help them or not, or be punished could easily be frustrating if not done properly. If something like that did make it into the game, either there should be a way to weasel out of your obligation (you should at least be able to decline the gift when it's offered), or it should be something that only happens after you've already shown some willingness to deal with cosmic horrors and that you know what you're getting into. You could limit it such that this sort of interaction only happens if you make deals with them within a particular game, whereas more conventional interaction ("give you a quest -> you did it, here's a reward") are tied to reputation which might carry over from game to game.
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Oct 26, 2012 04:00
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Gormless Gormster posted:Will there be space-age clockwork robots? No, but there may be outbreaks of SCP-217 causing much the same effect. 
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Nov 5, 2012 06:57
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Speaking of SCP, 882 seems like a very Clockwork Empires kind of thing. It's an enormous metal gearbox which, if it's not rusted over, spins up with apparently infinite torque. Sounds great, infinite power! Except- 1. Anything of the same metal that comes into contact with it gets pulled in and integrated into the design as yet more gears. 2. People who stay near it for any length of time start hearing the grinding noise it makes all the time, no matter what's in between them and it. 3. People who can hear the noise it makes start getting compelled to add to the structure with any metal they can find. And hey, did you know what percentage of the human body is metal?
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Nov 5, 2012 22:17
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My opinion on pipes vs. no-pipes is that waiting for the walkers to finally decide to deliver x good which is holding up my entire metropolis was probably the second-most annoying aspect of the Impressions games. Pipes get approval from me. If you're dead-set on not piping things, I could see certain items which are too large/fragile/cthonic requiring manual labor to move them around. If nothing else, we need pipes for the possibility of a pipe-based organism which invades and overtakes your city's own pipe network. Maybe it optimizes things so it runs smoothly, or maybe it replaces the outputs with... wrong things. I could also see a 3-layer system for building pipes - pipes/roads/power axles/etc can exist on one of 3 layers, either "aboveground", "elevated", or "underground". For an interface for that I'd either look at Rollercoaster Tycoon's path-laying system or SimCity 2000's alternate views for underground vs. aboveground. e: Also for pipe organization, there's the minecraft mod Redpower which has cables and bundled cables. Normally in minecraft signal transmission involves one material (redstone) so if you want two signals running near each other you have to do a lot of shenanigans to keep them separate. However with this mod you can make colored cables - they act like normal but won't bond with differently-colored cables, only same colors and uncolored. On top of that you have bundled cable, which only binds with itself and colored cables. Bundled cable cannot carry a signal on its own; rather it propagates the signal it gets from any particular colored cable to all other connecting cables of the same color - so you can use it to effectively run up to 16 cables through the same tile and branch off outputs where you need it with appropriately-colored cables. Basically I could see a system where you have large pipe network structures which let you build 'pipe highways' which can carry up to some arbitrary number of pipe's worth of contents and you can then selectively split off outputs where and when you need to. e2: Really I'd advise taking at least a cursory glance at the more industrial-oriented Minecraft modpacks (technic, FTB, etc) because they involve a lot of automation and ferrying things around in pipes and tubes, and a lot of people find that really fun on its own- designing systems which are capable of processing X inputs into Y outputs with minimal player interaction. President Ark fucked around with this message at 22:37 on Nov 23, 2012 |
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Nov 23, 2012 22:29
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Markovnikov posted:That was probably the whole point of walkers in the Impression games: you either designed your city well, or it all went to hell/took too long to get done. It was a deliberate design choice, not an unintended consequence. I agree, it'd just be really annoying when my city would run fine and then suddenly the flow of one good would be interrupted for whatever reason (AI fuckup, hippo ate the deliveryman, sandstorm/typhoon/military invasion) and then I'd suddenly be in a catch-22 situation where that good being interrupted made me lose population which made me get underemployment issues which impacted my services which made it progressively harder to get back to that same point, and solving these things a lot of the time boiled down to changing Stockpile permissions - generally the least fun parts of those games. e: And if the pipes making things impossible to see vs. needing to see pipes for gameplay reasons dilemma gets too bad, then implement a Pipe Transparency option which makes pipes see-through. Bonus points if you can see what's travelling through them while that's on. e2: Bonus bonus points if you can set pipes to be completely transparent while still being able to see things travelling through them so it looks like there's just a bunch of bricks/pigs/urchins/iron bars flying through the air from factory to factory. e3: Make that a megaproject. President Ark fucked around with this message at 22:52 on Nov 23, 2012 |
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Nov 23, 2012 22:40
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nvining posted:If I learned anything from Gemclod, it's that people's avatars should be allowed to run around in the city after their turn is up. So I don't know entirely how well this will work, as I'm not sure if the bureaucrat is an in-person entity; it might be as simple as your bureaucrat joining the common population after your year is up with a sign saying "Retired Bureaucrat" or something. First migration once the save trades hands has the retired bureaucrat of the previous leader?
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Nov 26, 2012 02:26
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nvining posted:Hopefully that situation will be resolved by the end of our current internal milestone next Friday, at which point I will have a somewhat clearer picture of what's going on in my head. I imagine a picture of you with a little cartoon thought bubble with this in it.
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Jan 24, 2013 03:59
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Markovnikov posted:Didn't he also "invent" a couple of earthquake machines, that would pound the ground hard until an earthquake was produced? Or I just made it up/it was another mad genius that came up with those. I don't even know why you would want tho invent that He had a device that was basically an actuator (think a jackhammer without the hammerhead) which vibrated back and forth, and claimed he was able to tune it to a building's resonant frequency to shake it apart. This should be one of the animations that plays when you demolish buildings.
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Feb 5, 2013 02:16
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This conversation just makes me want enormous flying electric squidmonsters in the game. A captured specimen of the Aetheric Squid can provide power to an entire city for a year, but beware- Aetheric Squid anger easily and never forget a grudge. 
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Feb 5, 2013 04:19
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Daynab posted:The game will furiously yell at you if you have something written the wrong way in your mods, etc. I really want this to be literal - the game blasts a message straight from the developers at maximum volume telling you that you're a moron. 
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Feb 19, 2013 22:44
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nvining posted:I kind of like this. We'll see. Whatever random name generator you have in the game better have a combination that can make your town randomly be named "Achewood".
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Feb 28, 2013 03:10
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Have you played Bastion? The landing craft there look extremely Bastion to me.
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Mar 5, 2013 22:42
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nvining posted:The camera rotates freely - but only to one of the four preset angles. Basically, this is because we use a true isometric projection for everything, and isometric projections don't look... right? ... if you don't have the Y axis at 45 degrees to the rest of the world. If you do a perspective projection, or you start free-rotating the camera, a lot of the building stuff becomes a nightmare. You can't judge the relative size of buildings, etc. Make the things looking wrong bit a feature. As more people in your colony fall to worship of Things From Beyond the Veil of Reality, have the camera start automatically tilting a couple degrees off that perfect 45-degree angle - not a lot, but juuust enough that it nags at the back of the player's mind when they look at their town square and suddenly go WHAT THE gently caress THIS LOOKS HORRIFYINGLY WRONG BUT I CAN'T TELL WHY
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Mar 20, 2013 20:01
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I think I mentioned this before, but I think this ties into something I've been thinking about - buildings in your settlement having 'slots' that you can slot various things into which impact the building's output in some way, like increasing output speed in return for increasing power demand or increasing quantity of output per time unit in exchange for a slightly-out-of-proportion increase in input requirements or something. Most things would be generic items like "High-quality factory gearbox" or whatever which you could buy from the mainland or manufacture locally, with 'special' slotted things either being Eldritch Artifacts From Out Of Time or things made by madmen. Special items would all do Fun™ things with Fun™ consequences, like a brickworks getting an obelisk that allows it to take pigs as input for construction materials, except all buildings built with materials from it are now 10% more insanity inducing. Manufacture of special items could also tie into something I mentioned earlier in the thread - most production being abstracted production of generic items, Anno-style, but with the option to order specific items. So you might have your machinist factory manufacturing L-joint widdershins widgets for use by the general populous, and you can order it to make some bit that'll improve your factories - except its usual work is slowed/stopped while doing so. Slotted items could just be a generic set for most factories so that equipment can be swapped around while some other buildings might have their own set, like the Constable might have slots to give the local lawmen special laserguns or something.
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Apr 6, 2013 22:35
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quote:Character 'slots' is a bit confusing, mainly because we don't want you to be micro-equipping everybody. There is a notion for military units - discussed in one of Daniel's blogposts - that you can equip a unit with 'a cannon' or another thing in a military slot, and individuals currently have 'the tool they have' and 'their currently picked up item' (so that you don't actually have people having to go pick up a hammer to do hammering; it stays with them until they need a different tool) Still playing with this; most of this week, annoyingly, has been spent on 'the logic of picking things up and putting things down'... Not character slots - more like a slot at the police HQ that lets you adjust, say, what the standard weapon your constables come equipped with.
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Apr 7, 2013 23:01
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At Gaslamp, "Code's compiling" is secret devspeak for "I have left the previous lead developer bleeding on the floor and have implemented my own changes". e: quote:Watch for announcements soon. Define "Soon".
President Ark fucked around with this message at 05:28 on Apr 8, 2013 |
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Apr 8, 2013 05:00
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Wait, we're not fighting to the death to get into the beta? poo poo. I already killed like four people. They didn't even mention clockwork empires, I just want to improve my odds.
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Apr 9, 2013 00:38
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I'm confused - why is the presence of a hole in reality through which one might gaze infinity a bug in this game? In fact, it seems an excellent solution to the recent issues with regard to the disposal of hazardous wastes.
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Apr 25, 2013 02:36
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Having multiple noble families move into your city, each of which hates the other, has their own wants in terms of how they think you should run the city, and provide benefits if you suck up to them (while the ones you didn't suck up to sabotage you) seems like it could be pretty hilarious.
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May 17, 2013 00:02
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nvining posted:Straw Poll. I'm not saying we are going to do it, but a quick informal show of hands would go some ways towards influencing corporate policy: a) Yes. b) Whenever you can pin down release date down to say, about a month either way. c) The game, maybe a soundtrack if the music is good, beta access would be neat, d) It'd be neat but I'm poor so I doubt I'd do anything but get the very basic preorder. 
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May 23, 2013 19:54
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Deadmeat5150 posted:I may have accidentally let a shogoth into the bipedal rig. Sorry. Quite possibly because 'shoggoth' has two g's in it. 
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Jun 13, 2013 00:27
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I could see child labor as some kind of background toggle "turning this on will make your factories x% faster while increasing citizen unhappiness by y" type thing like tropico's mandate law things, and also under some kind of euphemistic victorian name like "Early Youth Mandatory Apprenticeship Program".
President Ark fucked around with this message at 22:37 on Jun 23, 2013 |
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Jun 23, 2013 22:35
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Have you guys listened to Welcome to Night Vale? While not the exact same setting as CE it seems very similar in terms of tone, in that it's a sort of darkly comic setting where common people are aware of both eldritch horrors and secret government institutions and are too busy worrying about next week's ball game to really care much about either. Also, the shots in that article made me wonder: To what extent can we modify the terrain in CE, if at all? Seeing that little hill with the straight edges made me want to carve a path through it and raise some walls around to make a fort using the environment for part of the defenses.
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Jul 26, 2013 01:37
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So what I'm getting is that properly constructed factories can have multiple input/output slots you create and can have a mini-stockpile near each input/output slot for the appropriate doodad. If that is correct, loving excellent.
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Aug 14, 2013 19:08
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Also, hovering Civilian Transport Cubes which emit a soft screaming as they deliver goods through means unknowable should totally be an Eldritch Artifact From Out of Time What Causes Insanity type of thing.
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Aug 15, 2013 00:27
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Ghostlight posted:A great many games have made it to zero - the real challenge these days is getting below zero by putting crates in the intro movie, the menu or the company splash logo. Have the game be sold in a giant wooden crate. e: Like, not to the stores, to the end user.
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Aug 16, 2013 01:03
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| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 04:29 |
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Avast, an update about pipes and energy supply. Interesting stuff, although it made me wonder - will there be tools in place to retrofit an existing building to have different input/output ports at some expense of money/building materials/precious factory time spent shut down? Also, will there be an optional intermediary thing - say, a station someone can plug in a steam orb that feeds it into the community steam pipe service, or a hookup for people to grab them from the network and take them the last bit of the way to its destination? Say, for those instances where you have a good pipe network but the particular placement of a factory near certain other things (other factories, rivers for a waterwheel, unusual terrain, President Ark fucked around with this message at 18:43 on Aug 21, 2013 |
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Aug 21, 2013 18:39
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