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Tuxedo Catfish posted:If your game isn't balanced enough that different approaches are viable, throwing a layer of randomization over that only disguises the problem. Viable =/= optimal. SotS is actually pretty fun in how different approaches can be used in order to make up for the lack of techs. IE: run into The Swarm, no Point Defense? Use light emitters (which are somewhat more effective than PD in that particular situation). No PD or Emitters, or can't afford to tech them just yet? Send a couple suicide tankers and clear the wave with their explosions before sending your ships to clean up and take the queen down. It's also kind of stupid to argue against randomness on the loving roguelikes thread, since it's a genre based around making do with the tools you're given. It's also kind of stupid to keep arguing a 4X game on the loving roguelikes thread. Nephilm fucked around with this message at 23:04 on Jan 27, 2014 |
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Jan 27, 2014 22:59
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:If your game isn't balanced enough that different approaches are viable, throwing a layer of randomization over that only disguises the problem. Not that I've played SotS, but my guess is that the goal of randomization is not to change the optimal strategy, but rather to push players outside their comfort zones. Sure, different approaches may be viable, but odds are most people are just going to find one thing that works and then do it over and over again, because people gravitate towards what they perceive to be optimal play even if it bores them.
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Jan 27, 2014 23:00
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Nephilm posted:Viable =/= optimal. A distinction that changes absolutely nothing about my point. Ditto for "entertaining" vs. "balanced." Nephilm posted:It's also kind of stupid to argue against randomness on the loving roguelikes thread, since it's a genre based around making do with the tools you're given. It's not stupid, roguelikes as a genre are massively over-reliant on randomization in places where it does little to no good. Half my posts in this thread are about that subject in one way or another.  edit: well, the last iteration of this thread, anyways. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 23:08 on Jan 27, 2014 |
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Jan 27, 2014 23:04
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Not that I've played SotS, but my guess is that the goal of randomization is not to change the optimal strategy, but rather to push players outside their comfort zones. Sure, different approaches may be viable, but odds are most people are just going to find one thing that works and then do it over and over again, because people gravitate towards what they perceive to be optimal play even if it bores them. Like he said though there's a difference between 'comfort zone' and 'the only viable way to play'. If most of the game is poorly designed and doesn't work well then players will gravitate towards the parts that aren't broken and now you're forcing them to play half-baked, half implemented poo poo. Full disclosure I have not played sword of the stars so this is just a general point.
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Jan 27, 2014 23:16
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Ditto for "entertaining" vs. "balanced." So how do you suggest encouraging players to keep trying to find other viable strategies after the first one? This is not a minor problem; if your game has multiple paths to victory, odds are that many players will just play the same path over and over again unless you take active steps to get them to try the other ones, even if they're all equally viable. I'm not saying that randomizing the tech tree is necessarily the right thing to do, but it's far from obvious that it's the wrong thing to do. EDIT: ^ well yeah, if playing your game involves navigating around all the broken bits, then you have bigger problems, because you're playing SotS2 My statements were based on the assumption that the game was not fundamentally broken in any way, though.
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Jan 27, 2014 23:19
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:So how do you suggest encouraging players to keep trying to find other viable strategies after the first one? This is not a minor problem; if your game has multiple paths to victory, odds are that many players will just play the same path over and over again unless you take active steps to get them to try the other ones, even if they're all equally viable. I would like to think I could trust the players of my game to figure out what viable strategies are, and if they don't want to pursue them, or they want to pursue one at the expense of others then fine. For a while now I've been playing exclusively MiBe in Dungeon Crawl even though I'm well aware there are shitloads of other viable builds. I intend to try those at some point but for now I want to win with that. It seems like you think your players need to be forced to play your game the 'right' way and I don't really understand that. I don't think it's actually a problem. Dungeon Crawl, for example, doesn't suffer as a game because it doesn't force you to play multiple builds in my opinion. icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 23:29 on Jan 27, 2014 |
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Jan 27, 2014 23:23
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Not that I've played SotS, but my guess is that the goal of randomization is not to change the optimal strategy, but rather to push players outside their comfort zones. Sure, different approaches may be viable, but odds are most people are just going to find one thing that works and then do it over and over again, because people gravitate towards what they perceive to be optimal play even if it bores them. Yeah, I got wind of this while playing SMAC more than ten years ago. I kept blind research on (you pick between 1-4 branches of science for your researchers to work on and deal with the results) because going for optimal techs each playthrough just sounds really boring and arbitary. I would frequent a SMAC forum, and most people would turn that off, so they could optimize their play and go for what they called "Infinite City Sprawl," cramming as many cities in as small space as possible so they can steamroll the underpowered AI faster or something. In my mind, this turns a game about building a civilization in space into a puzzle game, or a tower defense. I think that's a large part of why I walked away from Crawl and eventually FTL, because too much of the game is about targeting this specific build for this specific situation, and not so much coming up with a novel approach to unpredictable situations. Crawl covers this up by having just a shitload of variety, but even still, you pretty much go the approved handful of builds unless you're a master at the game. I'm not saying that randomization will fix a busted game, only that optimizing for a predictable outcome that doesn't change from game to game is boring to me.
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Jan 27, 2014 23:24
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:So how do you suggest encouraging players to keep trying to find other viable strategies after the first one? This is not a minor problem; if your game has multiple paths to victory, odds are that many players will just play the same path over and over again unless you take active steps to get them to try the other ones, even if they're all equally viable. In a strategy game? If you have a healthy system of soft counters, playing predictably should make it very easy to beat you. Making AI clever enough to put that into effect is a tough hurdle, I admit, but that's just all the more reason to play with humans. In a roguelike I can't see how "I like to play fighters all the time" is even a problem to begin with, unless your entire playerbase thinks the same way in which case you should probably figure out why nobody's playing mages and fix it, which brings us back to the beginning of this whole argument. doctorfrog posted:Yeah, I got wind of this while playing SMAC more than ten years ago. I kept blind research on (you pick between 1-4 branches of science for your researchers to work on and deal with the results) because going for optimal techs each playthrough just sounds really boring and arbitary. I would frequent a SMAC forum, and most people would turn that off, so they could optimize their play and go for what they called "Infinite City Sprawl," cramming as many cities in as small space as possible so they can steamroll the underpowered AI faster or something. Yeah, but the problem here is SMAC is an unbalanced game and horizontal growth is drastically more powerful than vertical, a problem mostly fixed in Civ 4 (which not only has a pre-determined tech tree, but a great UI for planning your way through it to boot.) Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 23:36 on Jan 27, 2014 |
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Jan 27, 2014 23:30
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:I will never for the life of me understand why people cite this as a positive. You like to have lots of control in your gaming experience, and that's fine. Some of us like to roll with the punches and try to make the best out of a unique and difficult situation. I love not knowing what my next step will have to be and I have to scramble adjust my strategy, so a random tech tree sounds like a lot of fun to me.
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Jan 28, 2014 00:14
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Farquar posted:You like to have lots of control in your gaming experience, and that's fine. Some of us like to roll with the punches and try to make the best out of a unique and difficult situation. I love not knowing what my next step will have to be and I have to scramble adjust my strategy, so a random tech tree sounds like a lot of fun to me. Maybe, although I'd say it's more that I like for there to be a hostile intelligence behind the uncertainty I face, rather than not liking uncertainty at all. More to the point, my main gripe is that this philosophy doesn't seem to exist in roguelikes at all, with the small but notable exception of Angel of Max Carnage in DoomRL. And maybe Hydra Slayer, I guess, by reputation; I couldn't get past the Engrishy documentation enough to want to play it.
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Jan 28, 2014 00:22
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So i picked up dredmor in the recent humble bundle. i see why it's so popular, but gently caress is it slow. You can crank up the animation speed at least, but the progression itself is such a loving slog. Does the "no time to grind" option increase XP gain and limit level size? if so I might have to give it a shot.
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Jan 28, 2014 05:45
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andrew smash posted:So i picked up dredmor in the recent humble bundle. i see why it's so popular, but gently caress is it slow. You can crank up the animation speed at least, but the progression itself is such a loving slog. Does the "no time to grind" option increase XP gain and limit level size? if so I might have to give it a shot. That's exactly what it does, Dredmor is unplayable without it on imo.
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Jan 28, 2014 05:50
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uPen posted:That's exactly what it does, Dredmor is unplayable without it on imo. good, I have a melee character that is stomping level 2 with no difficulties but I might scrap him to try that option. melee is a bit of a drag too, induvidual fights are fun but it just took me about half an hour to wade through a monster zoo. I might look into something with some crowd control nukes next time.
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Jan 28, 2014 05:59
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andrew smash posted:good, I have a melee character that is stomping level 2 with no difficulties but I might scrap him to try that option. melee is a bit of a drag too, induvidual fights are fun but it just took me about half an hour to wade through a monster zoo. I might look into something with some crowd control nukes next time. Promethean Magic is your friend.
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Jan 28, 2014 06:00
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andrew smash posted:So i picked up dredmor in the recent humble bundle. i see why it's so popular, but gently caress is it slow. You can crank up the animation speed at least, but the progression itself is such a loving slog. Does the "no time to grind" option increase XP gain and limit level size? if so I might have to give it a shot. It doesn't up the item drop rate, though, so you'll have worse gear and you'll never get enough ingredients to craft anything worthwhile.
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Jan 28, 2014 06:41
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Sil status: died at 150' by running into Gorgol in a dark hallway and not running away properly
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Jan 28, 2014 07:15
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RPATDO_LAMD posted:It doesn't up the item drop rate, though, so you'll have worse gear and you'll never get enough ingredients to craft anything worthwhile. It seems to be a bit more generous with good loot in my experience, it's where I netted my first victory, fifteen floors and all.
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Jan 28, 2014 07:25
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oiseaux morts 1994 posted:Crawl does have a wacky flavour, but I think what MrBims is trying to point out that a lot of (bad) *bands just throw wacky poo poo into them without concern for balance, gameplay or rough thematic consistency. PosCheng looks to follow in that noble lineage. Actually lately thanks to marvinPA there has been a no fun or wacky things movement in crawl thats getting really annoying.
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Jan 28, 2014 13:55
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It doesn't really matter either way with Crawl, it doesn't have any kind of lore or canon really. The flavour is just a dress-up for a particular gameplay element or idea. Like, Octopodes are absolutely ridiculous but they were created for the purpose of having a new way to play the game, not because Octopodes are part of the rich history of Crawl's universe. I dunno if people are against fun, certainly people like to comment on suggestions if they seem tedious, but it's hard to balance FUN with NOT BROKEN a lot of the time. It's always hard with an open-source project to get the things you'd like to see in the game. Like right now it really gets on my nerves that the branch weightings are skewed - you get sewer_kobolds over 20% of the time, but the developers are either not interested or like the branch weightings to be spread like 40 30 20 10 instead of 30 30 30 10. I can't understand why, but I wish all this cool content was reviewed so we'd see more variation in places. o.m. 94 fucked around with this message at 14:45 on Jan 28, 2014 |
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Jan 28, 2014 14:39
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brainwrinkle posted:Sil status: died at 150' by running into Gorgol in a dark hallway and not running away properly This is like 90% of my Sil deaths. The other 10% tend to be "hey there's a guy I can kill quickly to get rid of him...oh poo poo there are a lot more enemies around here than I thought oh gently caress better run oh gently caress suddenly I'm surrounded because I swear the game can tell when you're in a vulnerable position and spawns enemies to block you and get you trapped and then you're fuuuuuucked
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Jan 28, 2014 15:42
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andrew smash posted:So i picked up dredmor in the recent humble bundle. i see why it's so popular, but gently caress is it slow. You can crank up the animation speed at least, but the progression itself is such a loving slog. Does the "no time to grind" option increase XP gain and limit level size? if so I might have to give it a shot. This is my big problem with Dredmor. It's a fun game with surprisingly deep systems but goddamn dying on the fourth floor or whatever just makes me not want to restart like I would in most other roguelikes. If they ever make a sequel to the game I hope the floors are much smaller but the dungeon deeper.
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Jan 28, 2014 17:03
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Lawman 0 posted:Actually lately thanks to marvinPA there has been a no fun or wacky things movement in crawl thats getting really annoying. I dunno, Vine Stalkers are a pretty cool and fun species added recently! In fact, the last couple have been interesting. I'm not sure how they'll eventually end up on the balance end of things, but their gimmicks are neat+interesting enough to pull me back in. e: Oh, and the new god that lets you pull off cool shadow-based poo poo like having a clone of you pop up now and again to mimic your actions while you belch shadow everywhere and step into the shadows of others to teleport to them. Johnny Joestar fucked around with this message at 17:25 on Jan 28, 2014 |
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Jan 28, 2014 17:22
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All gone, thanks for playing!
TyreForHyre fucked around with this message at 01:51 on Jan 31, 2014 |
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Jan 29, 2014 21:58
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What is the deal with the new Vine Stalker race, anyways?
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Jan 29, 2014 22:36
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Arcturas posted:What is the deal with the new Vine Stalker race, anyways? Awesome for stealth hybrid melee types. No potion/wand healing, but regen 3,spirit shield and an auxiliary bite attack that is antimagic and refills your mana. Super fun to play.
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Jan 30, 2014 05:57
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Their regen improves with levels and they have an innate -30% to HP, making them pretty drat fragile early on.
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Jan 30, 2014 17:38
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Picked up SotS: The Pit a bit ago and been playing it the last week. This game is so frustrating. I love it. I swear I got killed by Adaptoids 5 times in a row the other day.
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Feb 2, 2014 01:11
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Today I was visiting my friendly local game store, checking out the board games and new comics. There was a MTG tournament going on, so kids were spread out everywhere beating each other up with tapping and manas and the like. Overheard, one kid was telling his friend about Rogue Legacy:Little Game Store Jit posted:Yeah, it's a type of game called a "roguelike", it means you jump around a whole bunch and then the game throws a whole bunch of weird things at you.
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Feb 2, 2014 23:34
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 It made me cringe a little bit. Anyway, enough post, time to go back to jumping around in Angband
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Feb 2, 2014 23:39
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Well...I guess Step One is getting the youth savvy to a completely wrong definition to trigger their inexorable destiny to yell at others about it on message boards and get challenged on it towards a better tomorrow. Step Zero, on the other hand, might be somebody busting out a highly polished Roguelike actually based on that to the literal extreme to cash in on that ephemeral mindshare! "BouncePitRL(or whatever the hell those inflatable jump around dealies are called at fairs)---Rocket Launchers, Eldritch Horrors, Flaming Swords of Magic Missiles, Lou Rawls: Can you survive?!" ExiledTinkerer fucked around with this message at 00:23 on Feb 3, 2014 |
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Feb 3, 2014 00:20
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madjackmcmad posted:Today I was visiting my friendly local game store, checking out the board games and new comics. There was a MTG tournament going on, so kids were spread out everywhere beating each other up with tapping and manas and the like. Overheard, one kid was telling his friend about Rogue Legacy: Excellent, phase 1 of operation genre switch is complete. Now we just need to convince people that games with procedurally generated elements, permadeath, an item IDing minigame, and intricate tactics/character builds are called "bullet hell shooters".
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Feb 3, 2014 00:27
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A type of game where you jump around a whole bunch: A "Roguelike" Thread
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Feb 3, 2014 00:29
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That could make an excellent title if a new thread is elected in future.
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Feb 3, 2014 00:57
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DalaranJ posted:Excellent, phase 1 of operation genre switch is complete. Now we just need to convince people that games with procedurally generated elements, permadeath, an item IDing minigame, and intricate tactics/character builds are called "bullet hell shooters". Shooters now refers to fps games instead of the horrible 'shmup' for the original japanese shooters  Granted, 'roguelike' is just as horrible as shmup, so I guess thats ok (seriously roguelike is a terrible terrible word for a genre)
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Feb 3, 2014 01:16
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Are any estimate dates known for Ultima Ratio Regum ?
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Feb 3, 2014 01:36
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victrix posted:Shooters now refers to fps games instead of the horrible 'shmup' for the original japanese shooters That's because the genre was created and named by hackers in the 80s whose culture was so impenetrable they created a slang dictionary for it.
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Feb 3, 2014 01:37
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My favorite roguelike is Mario Bros. They got way too far away from the core mechanics in Super, in my opinion. What were the devs thinking?
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Feb 3, 2014 02:07
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kalstrams posted:Are any estimate dates known for Ultima Ratio Regum ? He does a release about every 3-6 months but it's not much of a game yet.
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Feb 3, 2014 02:11
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victrix posted:Shooters now refers to fps games instead of the horrible 'shmup' for the original japanese shooters The games were clones and/or modifications of a game called rogue? How is that a terrible name? It's not a super great name no but it's not like it doesn't make sense.
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Feb 3, 2014 02:25
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 poo poo is getting real. e: $0.99 real money to id items at vendor -> new Ferrari. Unormal fucked around with this message at 02:53 on Feb 3, 2014 |
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