Thanks for the response. As I said, my intent was just to put out some potential ideas to spark new pathways.
Sorry, nope :P, this would open a huge can of worms in terms of implementation and game design.
That was my feeling as well as this would greatly increase the meta-strategy of the game. I think that it’s an overly complicated solution to a problem that I encountered in the game. That problem being, at times I find myself under attack from a force that I know will defeat me. However, recognizing and understanding that I’m strategically outmatched does not provide me any pathway to success. This is, in a very complicated way, an attempt to create a pathway to retreat, regroup, and retake a position that has been overrun.
Does the player place the stockpile on the map or is it an abstract thing? What’s the gain of having only one?
What I was thinking was that the stockpile would be a piece of furniture placed by the player. Each resource (wood, stone, iron) would have it’s own stockpile. The proximity of the stockpile to the workbench would effect the efficiency of production. One of the reasons I like this approach is that currently the most efficient layout for workbenches (as well as libraries and training dummies) requires floors on all four sides. This limits the way that they can be placed in a room. It’s inefficient to create interesting layouts with workbenches against walls in a way that may make sense in the real world.
I’ve thought about it before, but wouldn’t it make stone kind of useless in terms of gameplay? Why not just remove it then?
I can see this argument, but I think that the same can be said of wood. Currently, wood is more of a chore that eats up imps time. You will run out of things to build long before you exhaust the supply of wood on a map. Perhaps the problem is that wood is used for too many things that become trivial to make. For instance, I’ve found that cranking out leather gloves is good because they cost nearly nothing and have no upgraded variant in iron or steel. I think that this could be addressed, to some extent by requiring specific reagents for crafting some items. For instance, using mushrooms in potion crafting and potions or scrolls in traps. Then, the base components of wood and stone could be abundant without allowing for run away production. As far as leather armor goes, I think that a leather resource could easily be implemented as a drop from killing certain non-hostile and hostile mobs. Additionally (and I’m not sure if this is how it works now) the home zone would likely need to regenerate non-hostile mobs from time to time.
I can see this bringing us back to “why not just get rid of wood and stone?” I admit that it’s a difficult question. The answer, I believe is in providing goals that require large amounts of these materials to achieve. Essentially sinks that can be worked towards and will deplete large stockpiles. Boulder traps are a good example of this. If you are getting stone from digging, a boulder trap should cost the equivalent of clearing a large portion of a normal dungeon. More of these traps should require specific consideration to expansion for the purpose of generating stone. Wood could have an equivalent sink. Currently wood is used in so many things, but no one thing is a large investment (to the point that it’s even a consideration). Perhaps limiting the supply of wood, or increasing the price of producing some items could help with this.
Why such a change? Is it to add more structure to the game, and give the player a better guide on the difficulties on the enemies? Mob difficulties are not explicitly defined in the game right now, so there would have to be a lot of guesswork about which enemy is which tier.
Part of the idea here is to smooth out the difficulty curve when facing enemies while also providing more information to the player about what they should expect from enemies without necessarily spelling everything out. By placing low difficulty enemies in close proximity and high difficulty enemies at the outer reaches, the player is able to control their progression in an intuitive way. I do think that obscuring the most difficult enemies would make the end-game more interesting because you would have to prepare for anything. For the most part, choosing a map is more about setting up a good starting location than determining an end point.
Would the other tiers have different totally usages or just generate mana / teach spells faster?
The tiered libraries could unlock different levels of spells, similar to how workshops work, as well as speed up mana generation.
I’m not sure if this adds much over simply using your own minions to raid enemies?
Yeah, this would be a departure from the regular flow of gameplay. I’m not sure that it would work very well in that sense. My thinking is that this could create unique ways of infiltrating enemy keepers dungeons while rewarding that with items only obtainable by using strategy and subterfuge instead of just assaulting everything with a more powerful force. I’m sure that the same thing could be accomplished with minions. Perhaps some minions could have unique abilities that open up this kind of gameplay.
They already do move the camera (at least the ones with the ➚ icon).
Yes, I may have misstated what I meant here. This idea comes in two parts. First, by providing iconographic cues, the player can quickly assess what is going on. This is similar to games like Counter Strike where kill notifications simply, and quickly, inform the player of important events. The second part is an extension of the ➚ function, in that clicking on certain events could trigger appropriate UI responses. For instance, if a goblin produces a new weapon, clicking on the notification could open the production queue or perhaps an equipment screen showing which minions are assigned which weapons/armor, where the player can manage who has what.
I think you got this wrong. The leveling paths are independent, so you can level up first through training and the by combat, or vice versa. The effect will be the same.
I may have this wrong. I’ll test this again.
-Z
