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Triskelli
Sep 27, 2011

I AM A SKELETON
WITH VERY HIGH
STANDARDS


nvining posted:

Umm, so here's a stupid question for people to discuss and fight over: what do people *want* out of generational games?


It sounds like you guys have a pretty decent grasp on what a procedurally generated game needs, and what makes the games you are drawing from so addicting. But to reiterate, additional customization never hurts, both in terms of story writing and as a way to make notes for later players. Naming Citizens and Buildings are little things that really help for LPs. Hell, give us a chance to rename everything.

The other big draw of a game like Anno or DF is the simple joy of watching your citizens walk around and do things on their own. Like ants, completing jobs without your input, and every so often you get the chance to poke a stick into that anthill and to see them scramble in panic. You're the overseer, but exactly how in control you are is up to debate.

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Veinless
Sep 11, 2008

Smells like motivation

nvining posted:

Somewhat up in the air. The biggest issue here is how you render people who have lost their arms and legs without getting all Left 4 Dead 2 up in that.

Give me steamborgs. I want my injured military-folks to be half man, half cog.

Hello Sailor
May 3, 2006

we're all mad here

nvining posted:

Umm, so here's a stupid question for people to discuss and fight over: what do people *want* out of generational games?

The greatest thing I ever read about DF was back in the 2D version. I remember one player posting screenshots of screwing up an aquaduct system and flooding a large portion of his fortress. One dwarf was trapped on a small island that escaped flooding and went a little nuts on a steady diet of vermin and water while the player figured out how to get a bridge to the dwarf. Eventually the dwarf was freed and he raced to rejoin the survivors. Before long, he threw a tantrum, went out to the island he was marooned on, and destroyed the bridge.

We're fairly sure DF doesn't have any code for crazy river hermits. From a technical standpoint, this was probably just an intersection of the tantrum code spitting out a "destroy nearby building" result and the building removal code saying "try to stand on the <direction> side of the building first" that happened to combine in an interesting way.

I don't even know how you'd deliberately code a madness system where "crazy hermit" was one of many possible outcomes, but it sounds like you're trying.

e:

nvining posted:

(The big one is digging. It doesn't work in three dimensions. Multiple selectable height layers are a crufty, awful mess.)

Counterpoint.

Castle Story looks like a lot of fun and I'll enjoy the heck out of it... right up until the point when CE comes out.

Hello Sailor fucked around with this message at 14:56 on Aug 29, 2012

Zurai
Feb 13, 2012


Wait -- I haven't even voted in this game yet!

I also have to say that I really like the idea of an insanity spiral vs a tantrum spiral. DF's tantrum spiral really just makes me want to slap a dwarf and tell him to man up (dwarf up?). It just doesn't feel 'right' that all these prime-of-their-life industrious people will start throwing literal tantrums because someone they know died. But the insidious encroachment of insanity makes a certain amount of (setting-appropriate) sense. Once you've lost that bit of sanity, you aren't going to get it back, at least not easily. And once you've truly gone insane, it does make sense that you'd start doing insane things.

There's really no high-level difference between the two, but the presentation of the one irks me less than the other. :spergin:

aldantefax
Oct 10, 2007

ALWAYS BE MECHFISHIN'

nvining posted:

Umm, so here's a stupid question for people to discuss and fight over: what do people *want* out of generational games?

:words:

If you're referring to the type of generational games that are intended to have spectators such as the very popular DF LPs, then I'd love to see a hell of a lot of "ease of use" things. Exportable event logs, UI-less screenshots bound to a hotkey, UI-included screenshots bound to a hotkey, an in-gameplay Legends viewer, all sorts of stuff!

If you're talking about the wilder and fuzzier world of generational games, people like being entertained as players and as spectators looking at this type of stuff saying, "I want to see what happens next." Nobody really 100% knows what's going to happen! As a player, you don't have direct control over your citizens, and there are all these processes working in the background that you'll never see. That obfuscation of the greater game world engenders that feeling of exploration and discovery.

Maybe that makes sense? That's the general feel I get from having read through a pretty big portion of those DF LPs both current and past here on SA, and elsewhere.

Saint Freak
Apr 16, 2007

Regretting is an insult to oneself
Buglord

nvining posted:

Umm, so here's a stupid question for people to discuss and fight over: what do people *want* out of generational games?

A Holiday '12 release date :colbert:

Boggus
Mar 26, 2007

A yellow jumpsuit makes all the difference.
For round robin multiplayer games, will there be some summary of your predecessors rule before you start your career? Something like a continuation of newspaper headlines describing the founding of the city, interviews with scientists about some of the buildings and research made, breaking news about an infestation of elder things body snatchers and the like?

Iunnrais
Jul 25, 2007

It's gaelic.
What do I want? I want plenty of interactions between systems in order to cause sundry "chain of effect" rube-goldberg situations that were unplanned. The River Hermit thing discussed above is one such example.

I don't want it possible to be "safe". In DF, if you scale the learning cliff enough, the difficulty PLUMMETS, and there's nothing left to do unless you deliberately play sub-optimally. So, I want there to be external forces on the game that I have to react to, or tragedy will strike. (Or perhaps I can just let tragedy strike) Some outside force should be able to engage ANY defense.

Now, that doesn't mean there should be indefensible attacks. Just that there should exist an attack that can handle any given defense. Perhaps something Rock-Paper-Scissors style... having one kind of defense makes you vulnerable to something else. And you can shore up that defense, but it'll make you vulnerable to something ELSE. And so on, and so forth, always patching up new armor chinks but always leaving a tiny gap that something else can slip through, preferably triggering a chain reaction via the complicated interactions of multiple systems.


For LPs, the ability to import histories would be nice. For example, in our DF games, worlds are typically not stable to continue playing in the same world for long. So while we can narratively reference Boatmurdered, we can never actually have the game reference that history again, because it took place in another world that we can never get back, due to version differences.

From what your interview is suggesting, the "Legends Mode" of your game will not be QUITE as involved as DF's, and will mostly involve things like newspaper articles. It'd be neat if you could add in histories of other players to your own world. Splicing them together.

Brown Moses
Feb 22, 2002

I'd like to see socketable items for buildings and individuals under your control, especially if their properites are hidden until they are either activated or researched, with each item having multiple potential weird and wonderful effects. It would add an extra level of risk and reward, for example, a mysterious stone gargoyle that you could attach to buidlings, but could do anything from keeping ghosts at bay to coming alive once a month to feed. Maybe both.

Triskelli
Sep 27, 2011

I AM A SKELETON
WITH VERY HIGH
STANDARDS


Iunnrais posted:

For LPs, the ability to import histories would be nice. For example, in our DF games, worlds are typically not stable to continue playing in the same world for long. So while we can narratively reference Boatmurdered, we can never actually have the game reference that history again, because it took place in another world that we can never get back, due to version differences.

From what your interview is suggesting, the "Legends Mode" of your game will not be QUITE as involved as DF's, and will mostly involve things like newspaper articles. It'd be neat if you could add in histories of other players to your own world. Splicing them together.

Something I forgot to add. You mentioned that playing multiple colonies in the same game world would create little bits of history that would effect later colonies (i.e. aluminum and aristocrats). I would like it if that was embraced and expanded on so it might affect subsequent colonies in actual gameplay rather than confining it just to fluff in newspapers.

For example, you create a colony that exports a great deal of aluminum over its lifespan, but it eventually collapses. When the next colony is founded, have the Royal Steam Troopers arrive wearing aluminum armor, or have aluminum products brought by trading zeppelins cost less. That's been DF's missed opportunity for a few versions now; We have this vast extensive history with significant events occurring, but it has very little effect on fortress mode outside of what types of exotic animals or cloth you're able to embark with.

Fenn the Fool!
Oct 24, 2006
woohoo
I'd like to see random generation provide a different play experience every time. Dwarf Fortress, especially in the early phases of the game, can get a bit samey; having to really make choices (even if you don't feel the repercussions to them until later) would help in keeping things fresh. Things like buildings/farms requiring enough space that the local topography is an issue in placement, resources being numerous and varied enough that you have to structure your military and economy around them, and the enemies you face informing your tactics in some meaningful way would all be a great step in the right direction.

endlessmonotony
Nov 4, 2009

by Fritz the Horse
As far as gameplay aspects go, Iunnrais raises a good point. Dwarf Fortress loses challenge at a point, and then you just have megaprojects left, and quite a few of the Dwarf Fortress megaprojects are more tedious than difficult once you understand the game well enough.

However, I do like a few features to be present in all simulation games.

Adjustable simulation speed, windowed mode, and the ability to choose if the game pauses or not when it loses focus.


Also, I have a few gameplay questions.

Is the game going to be turn-based, real-time, or a hybrid like Dwarf Fortress? And how does this practically work?

And is the game going to be played in 2D or 3D? Apparently you don't like the multiple 2D planes Dwarf Fortress does, so what will Clockwork Empires do?

Zurai
Feb 13, 2012


Wait -- I haven't even voted in this game yet!

Iunnrais posted:

I don't want it possible to be "safe". In DF, if you scale the learning cliff enough, the difficulty PLUMMETS, and there's nothing left to do unless you deliberately play sub-optimally. So, I want there to be external forces on the game that I have to react to, or tragedy will strike. (Or perhaps I can just let tragedy strike) Some outside force should be able to engage ANY defense.

On the other hand, I do want it to be possible (if not easy) to get to a level that's self-sustainable. If I know that the city's doomed no matter what I do, or that I have to constantly micromanage defenses just to keep from getting overrun, that removes a vast amount of motivation to play the game and stands a good chance to ruin the fun.

Again, I'm not asking for easy-to-achieve complete and utter safety. I'm asking for at least the ability to believe I can achieve a stable state (one that doesn't require me constantly putting out literal or metaphorical fires) if I work hard enough at it.

HamSmoothie
Nov 17, 2007
The other white meat is now a tasty beverage!
I'd like to see events that let you inflict negative things on your own town/fortress/etc forcing the npc's to handle things without the player being involved. The player would select the severity of the event, but wouldn't know which specific one was going to happen, so you can't abuse the system by preparing for that one thing.
Of course, a random widget of some sort would be awarded if the town/fort/cardboard box/zeppelin/whatever overcomes the problem.

Edit: \/ That's even closer to Dredmor's Statues of Inconsequentia than what I was thinking. It'd work really well in a game like this, too. I'd still like a basic "foul something up" button because of the whole risk vs. reward aspect of it.

HamSmoothie fucked around with this message at 19:59 on Aug 29, 2012

Brown Moses
Feb 22, 2002

Those events could be part of an item system, find the mysterious scroll/puzzle box, read/open and see what happens.

Deki
May 12, 2008

It's Hammer Time!

Zurai posted:

On the other hand, I do want it to be possible (if not easy) to get to a level that's self-sustainable. If I know that the city's doomed no matter what I do, or that I have to constantly micromanage defenses just to keep from getting overrun, that removes a vast amount of motivation to play the game and stands a good chance to ruin the fun.

Again, I'm not asking for easy-to-achieve complete and utter safety. I'm asking for at least the ability to believe I can achieve a stable state (one that doesn't require me constantly putting out literal or metaphorical fires) if I work hard enough at it.

I think adjustible difficulty is the solution. Better yet, the ability to turn on and off certain features that might be annoying or too hard for an inexperienced or causal gamer would be great.

Atoramos
Aug 31, 2003

Jim's now a Blind Cave Salamander!


Iunnrais posted:

What do I want? I want plenty of interactions between systems in order to cause sundry "chain of effect" rube-goldberg situations that were unplanned.

This man knows the answer. Things like water and lava are fun to play with in sandbox games because they are a liquid system that has dynamic aspects to them. Things like cogs and factories sound like similar systems that could lead into great things (If you had complex factory connections that were moved around by a cog system, and that cog system manages to break down...)

So give us more systems. Transportation systems and Economic systems. What would be awesome? A system that creates custom inventions (see: Morrowind spell system). When one system breaks down and that effects another system, fun (or, perhaps, frustration) happen.

Also, the more dynamic a system is, the better. By dynamic here, I mean automatic adjustment to external forces. A gear system that you need to set up every gear's ratio and size is going to be a pain to put back together when it blows up. More fun may be a gear system that has some dynamic aspect to its nature so when pieces fall out the machine starts acting in unexpected ways rather than simply ceasing to work. A zeppelin system will be cooler if it automatically reacts to the weather. When systems work together, a change in one can end up effecting something unexpected.

I want my scientist to go mad from elder influence, create an invention that causes storms, that causes the zeppelin system to shut down and trade to suffer. I want my sausage machine to be struck by lightning and end up stuffing meat into pigs. These meat-bloated pigs will become insane themselves, taking to the forest and driving away land trade. With both land and air access down, and storms not looking to let ships through, I find the folly of my decision to allow the inventor to continue his work: his next invention turns the last of my metal into sand.

Atoramos fucked around with this message at 19:32 on Aug 29, 2012

Bruxism
Apr 29, 2009

Absolutely not anxious about anything.

Bleak Gremlin

nvining posted:

Umm, so here's a stupid question for people to discuss and fight over: what do people *want* out of generational games?


I think the things I would most like to see are features that strengthen the sense of continuity and the cooperation/competition between the generations of governors. A few ideas could be certain citizens developing loyalty to a governor (maybe you built him a big workshop or dispensed with a rival?) and having that loyalty turn to bitterness when a new governor takes over. Maybe a generational game mode where each governor is encouraged to build as large a monument to themselves in their allotted governing time? Maybe allow governors to put preservation orders over certain neighborhoods, buildings, or plots of wilderness that will last for the next generation? I don't know, it seems like there is a lot of potential to really play with the dynamics of the relationships between a past and present ruler.

Dr. Arbitrary
Mar 15, 2006

Bleak Gremlin
It'd be neat to be able to hide certain constructions. Maybe one bureaucrat solved the problem of vampire urchins by luring them into a specially designed crypt and sealed the entrance.

The responsible thing to do would be to clearly label the crypt, but that sorta implies the job was left unfinished. Better to just use bricks to conceal the entrance. After all, it won't be a problem unless some idiot decides to run a pipe through the building.

Carnalfex
Jul 18, 2007
Is this going to be on steam with modding hooked up to the workshop, as dredmor is?

I'm very excited about this, hope it is a bit more stable than dredmor. If a single player game crashes, I can load the last save game and keep going in a heartbeat. Mutliplayer crashes make multiple people cranky and tend to end up getting saves de-synced in some games, so you may not be able to salvage the game at all. Civ and Shogun had some problems with that sort of thing.

nvining
May 30, 2011

tunnels through walls with its odd, rubbery nasal appliance
General pile of answers:

- Yes, you can rename colonists. This has been an obvious thing from the get-go. Never looked at the X-Com LP's: am I missing out?

- Hadn't thought about Building Renaming, but why the heck not.

- Fallen London: Never played it, liked what I saw of it, not a direct influence.

- Holiday 2012 Release: Bwahahahah no. Not even close. That said, we're big believers in "test things early, test things often", especially as far as user interactions are concerned. Again, this was a huge takeaway from Dredmor - we went into the beta over here with a game that basically sucked, and we came out with a game that was, apparently, pretty good. So the sooner we can get everybody janking about with rsynclauncher and complaining about their firewalls, the better.

- Marriage: is in the cards.

- Castle Story as example of 3D and levels working: they do a good job of it, for sure - and they look *great* - but if you look at any of the videos, any time they have a pit larger than about 2 units down or so you spend a lot of time fussing with the camera control trying to dig deeper in a pit somewhere. We'd like to avoid that - in fact, the goal is to avoid fussing with cameras when at all possible, because nothing is worse than a camera getting in the way of gameplay.

I think they're also trying to be a little more Minecraftian than we are - which is totally okay! But it means that their user base is prepared to put up with camera jankery in a way that we don't think ours is.

- Turn-based or real-time: real-time. It's slightly jimmied; the renderer runs at 60 FPS, the in game simulation runs at, I believe, 10 FPS? The renderer then interpolates the missing action between frames while the simulation layer grinds away to compute everything else and pass it over the network. (Most RTS games do this, too. I think Starcraft 2 internally runs at a simulation/net tick of 10 FPS as well, which is where I pulled that particular number from.)

- Interactions between systems: Ohhhhh yes. You shall have them.

- 2D or 3D: It's sort of hybridized 2.5D right now; things may change.

- "Will there be a summary of your predecessor's rule before the start of your turn"? Mmm, vaguely. A well-meaning bureaucrat would do well to pick up a copy of the Empire Times before playing his turn, to better understand the state of the colony as reported by Unreliable Editors.

- Current state of the codebase: We panicked a bit about it last week, then we wrote out absolutely where we need to be and what we need to do in order to get to a beta, and then we panicked a lot less. So suffice it to say, a lot has been done and we're on track. At some point, though, you just need to shut up and announce your game already. :D

Basically, the renderer is about 85% done, the procedural building stuff mainly works and just needs debugging/a few extra features, the AI is currently running around harvesting resources, and I just got a first pass at the netcode from Ryan!

Anybody coming to PAX should stop by the Indie Megabooth and say hi. We're not showing CE, but come play some Dredmor and maybe see something interesting.

ToxicFrog
Apr 26, 2008


nvining posted:

- 2D or 3D: It's sort of hybridized 2.5D right now; things may change.

What does this mean? What parts of the gameplay take advantage of 3d and what parts don't? Or did you mean something completely different?

I've only ever heard "2.5D" used in reference to graphics before.

ToxicFrog fucked around with this message at 20:54 on Aug 29, 2012

Iunnrais
Jul 25, 2007

It's gaelic.
nvining, I'd like to ask again... merging histories (that is, failed colonies) from other players into your game?

John Charity Spring
Nov 4, 2009

SCREEEEE

Iunnrais posted:

nvining, I'd like to ask again... merging histories (that is, failed colonies) from other players into your game?

It would be cool if, say, you'd get news items about failed colonies of people on your Steam friends list.

endlessmonotony
Nov 4, 2009

by Fritz the Horse

nvining posted:

- Turn-based or real-time: real-time. It's slightly jimmied; the renderer runs at 60 FPS, the in game simulation runs at, I believe, 10 FPS? The renderer then interpolates the missing action between frames while the simulation layer grinds away to compute everything else and pass it over the network. (Most RTS games do this, too. I think Starcraft 2 internally runs at a simulation/net tick of 10 FPS as well, which is where I pulled that particular number from.)

And this leads to a followup question: What will happen if the system can only run the simulation at 5fps and the renderer at 30fps?

Because let's face it, people will try to make this game run on systems that have maybe seen quad-core systems at a glance through a shop window before running away in shame. And it would be nice if the game still worked - and the UI wouldn't turn into a jittery unusable mess.

Zurai
Feb 13, 2012


Wait -- I haven't even voted in this game yet!

Deki posted:

I think adjustible difficulty is the solution. Better yet, the ability to turn on and off certain features that might be annoying or too hard for an inexperienced or causal gamer would be great.

Yep, that's one way to handle it. And make it more granular than DF's, while you're at it; in DF, turning off invasions turns off all of thieves, ambushes, sieges, necromancer attacks, titan attacks, megabeast attacks, semimegabeast attacks, werecreature attacks, and forgotten beast attacks. The ability to pick and choose would be real nice (personally sieges bore me but the rest are interesting challenges).

Brown Moses
Feb 22, 2002

It would be quite cool if when items were discovered out in the game world the items story starts with the way in which the NPC that discovers reacts to it rather than it just magically appearing in your inventory to use how you wish. For example, imagine "a pair of demonic goggles" are discovered, and possible NPC reactions:
- NPC 1 is a wandering guard, who spots the item, and whose default action is to return any found items to a central location at which point the player has access and control over the item. How the guard actually reacts could be modified by various traits the guard has, so for example if the guard is naturally curious he might try them on before returning them, which could have a variety of effects, or he might fear demonic items after he saw his mother eaten by a demon when he was a child, so he avoids the item instead. A record of the event could be created in the guard's personal history for the players future reference.
- NPC 2 is a noble who belongs a faction of demon worshipers, whose default action is to take items with the demonic tag to the head of the faction rather than to the centre of town. By giving the item to the faction leader he increases his reputation within the faction and with the leader, so he has a greater chance of promotion within the faction at a later date. The player can spot this, and send guards to take the item from him, or the faction leader if he gets that far. This in turn could create problems between the guard faction and demon worshiping faction, so the player might just leave it alone to see what happens first. Of course, a urchin could pickpocket the item from NPC 2 before he reaches the faction leader and try the item on himself...
- NPC 3 is a farmer, who is brave enough to pick up a demonic item, and incurious enough not to try it on. He takes it back to the centre of town, allowing the player to use it. The player can decide who to distribute it too, giving it to a demonic researcher who would be happy to receive the item, that is until his research into demonic texts accidentally animates the goggles, which devours his eyes before running off into the wilderness.

There's all sorts of possible NPC reactions to the item which can be based off traits and rules for behaviour among different classes and factions, and I think it's something that could be a lot of fun.

It would also be interesting if your colony could split into different factions with their own internal structures and leaders who can ally or fight each other over different events. Maybe the miners decide to form a union, elect a leader, who then calls for a strike, which is broken up by the guards, leading to continual friction between the two factions.

AzMiLion
Dec 29, 2010

Truck you say?

nvining posted:

General pile of answers:

:words:

- "Will there be a summary of your predecessor's rule before the start of your turn"? Mmm, vaguely. A well-meaning bureaucrat would do well to pick up a copy of the Empire Times before playing his turn, to better understand the state of the colony as reported by Unreliable Editors.

:words:

What if the employees of the press bureau go insane? will that mess up the reporting of facts a bit? so instead of reporting a great success in mining unobtanium they would instead report a tragic accident at the mine or maybe report that a moderate amount of dihydrogen monoxide has been mined?

Also i did not know that gaslamp had goons in the dev-team. awesome!

nvining
May 30, 2011

tunnels through walls with its odd, rubbery nasal appliance
A FAQ post is going up on the website later today. In the mean time:

Iunnrais posted:

nvining, I'd like to ask again... merging histories (that is, failed colonies) from other players into your game?

Too early to tell exactly how this will work with other players. There's all sorts of interesting issues here - how do you handle merging, say, a colony from another set of geography and also *the future*? We do have persistent world generation, although nothing as elaborate as DF. Thank goodness.

endlessmonotony posted:

And this leads to a followup question: What will happen if the system can only run the simulation at 5fps and the renderer at 30fps?

It'll be fine. It will, however, kill everybody else's performance on the simulation layer down to 5 FPS.

(In answer to a question I failed to see and quote: The Empire Times is the unceasing journalistic engine of the truth! No madness can harm it. You may get headlines, however, like "We're All Going To Die")

AmericanBarbarian
Nov 23, 2011
Thanks for being so involved with this thread nvining. I've been thinking about simulation / managment games lately and a lot of my thinking has revolved around logistic functions (that is s-curves). An example of this could be the difficulty curve of a single game of Dwarf Fortress. There is a brief period of low difficulty at the beginning, ( digging out your first level of fortress, moving supplies, cutting down trees ) and then the difficulty increases. In DF the difficulty increases slightly as the first wave of migrants arrive, trade goods are produced and sold, crafts are made, the first farms and stills are built. Then there are times when the difficulty spikes like goblin invasions, cave-ins, tantrums, special moods, and the demands nobles make. After this difficulty spike, assuming the fortress doesn't collapse, the difficulty returns to a normal level and then ramps up again to the next difficulty spike.

I might go so far to say that games like DF are only good because of these difficulty spikes. The gameplay outside of the difficulty spikes is important and can be fun ( stuff like optimization or min maxing ) but it isn't the soul of the game. When you are building a sandcastle part of the fun is trying to see how tall you can get the towers, how large you can build it before the tide comes in and washes it away.

Some of the best moments of "fun" Dwarf Fortress has inspired over the years has come from the difficulty spikes from the steepest part of these sigmoid curves. I think this is basic on the most fundamental levels of any management or simulation game where the player doesn't have micromanagement or direct control of individual workers . Any feature of the game that increases the difficulty so the player has to pay more attention, or be more inventive, can cause a difficulty spike. There are many things to balance, so the difficulty spike isn't too steep, or goes on too long, or is too easy.

So I believe a sandbox, generational game should have difficulty spikes that are : memorable, recorded from game to game in newspapers (or whatever your mechanic is), don't happen to often unless a catastrophic collapse is reached, are foreseeable but due to the nature of the sigmoid curve difficulty to react to without planning.

Dr. Arbitrary
Mar 15, 2006

Bleak Gremlin
Non-Euclidean geometry is both appropriate to the time period and to the Lovecraftian genre.

I'd love to see my city do a Victorian Uzumaki.

At the very least it'd be neat if in areas near mad artifacts time got a tiny bit screwy. Not necessarily a huge problem, but people end up getting sad thoughts about their pocketwatch not keeping time correctly or missing appointments.

Deep Thoreau
Aug 16, 2008

Now, you talk about lovecraft-style stuff.


Here's the question: Will there be giant horrors from beyond human imagining? Because having your village rally together to try to push back a gigantic lovecraftian horror sounds AWESOME.

Mr. Giggles
Nov 4, 2009
Loved Dredmore. Played DF since ~2004 or whenever it originally came out. I think you guys can do it, and it's a beta attempt/first day buy for me!

If this game isn't PACKED with witty Zybourne Clock references, you're really missing a great chance to utilize The Best Thing to come out of SA in well, forever.

aldantefax
Oct 10, 2007

ALWAYS BE MECHFISHIN'
Now I can't wait for a Zybourne Clock total conversion mod for a game that isn't even out yet. Thanks!

nvining
May 30, 2011

tunnels through walls with its odd, rubbery nasal appliance

Bash Ironfist posted:


Now, you talk about lovecraft-style stuff.

Here's the question: Will there be giant horrors from beyond human imagining? Because having your village rally together to try to push back a gigantic lovecraftian horror sounds AWESOME.

This falls under the category of "things we are holding close to our chest until they become Awesome Surprises."

Deep Thoreau
Aug 16, 2008

nvining posted:

This falls under the category of "things we are holding close to our chest until they become Awesome Surprises."

I see. Well than maybe you can just tell me this: Will there be monsters of quite large size?

AmericanBarbarian
Nov 23, 2011

nvining posted:

This falls under the category of "things we are holding close to our chest until they become Awesome Surprises."

I hope you will be drawing inspiration from Jeff VanderMeer's Ambergris series. If you include in the game a race of enigmatic Mushroom people who speak an untranslatable language, I'll buy 10 beta copies.

AmericanBarbarian fucked around with this message at 00:34 on Aug 30, 2012

President Ark
May 16, 2010

:iiam:
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.

nvining
May 30, 2011

tunnels through walls with its odd, rubbery nasal appliance

President Ark posted:

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.

Too early to tell yet, but I know David is obsessing fervently over this. (the DF model is actually pretty good, though.)

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President Ark
May 16, 2010

:iiam:

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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