A few assorted ideas

[owen]

Just some more of my thoughts.

More balanced progression
I think that the game SERIOUSLY needs some rebalancing in terms of large-scale progression. I think that it is often the case in this game that you’re either totally screwed or your totally safe. For example, if I find a legendary humanoid, then I’ve won if I can just level it up a bit on some weaker enemies (i.e., tree spirits). On the other hand, a level 40 monster or a band of humans might decide to attack me in which case there is no possible way that my units can fend off the attacker, unless I have researched traps, then I’m perfectly safe.

Anyway, I think a lot of this stems from the open-world concept; you can always attack anything, and much of the time, things that are far more powerful than you can handle can attack you. Personally, I think that if you went across the map from left to right (or maybe from the edges to the middle), and you fought increasingly powerful enemies, the game would be more balanced.

I also think it would be easier to balance the game if recruitable allies couldn’t train to infinity.

Game needs more legendary items:
I never experience any momentous excitement when I play this game, the way that I haven when playing Brogue or FTL. I think the reason is that, in KeeperRL, you can’t stumble upon any life-changing items around which you can build a game.

You mentioned in the podcast that you would add more items, but I think it needs to be more than that. Specifically, I think that there should be many different powerful items that are hard to find. There might be a couple hundred of them, say, but you’re only likely to stumble across a dozen or so (if that) in a single campaign.

I don’t know how you could do this. Maybe certain items are required to progress through the tech tree instead of just mana, or maybe there could be a crafting system. Maybe there could be more minor enemies in mini-dungeons that have interesting items as rewards.

Try to force the player to use smaller parties
I’ve mentioned before that I think there are two main styles of playing the game. The first is to train up a giant army of greenskins and then to deathball your foes at turn 10,000, and the second is to find the legendary humanoid and allow him to bash in everyone’s skulls. (There might be others, but I don’t think you need any other strategy to win the game).

Anyway, my point is that I’ve had far more fun using the legendary humanoid approach. Maybe this is because you don’t need to wait until turn 10,000 to do anything, but the way the game is controlled, which is through the vision of a single character, is more conducive to fighting with a small party. It also seems like there are more opportunity for tactics when you only have a few specialist units.

Greenskins (and other minor recruitable allies) shouldn’t be able to carry so much stuff
This is just my opinion, but Greenskins are so numerous, and yet they can have such a complicated loadout. The way I see it, the more numerous an enemy is, the less complicated its inventory should be. They should act more like pawns, because it becomes overwhelming if the lowliest ally has a giant inventory.

[owen]

This is specifically about the construction of bases and how it could require more cerebral input than it currently does, because right now, base-building is just a chore. All you need to do is to dig a serpentine path into the mountain and place a few boulder traps at the corners. From there on, whatever design you create doesn’t really matter, so long as it’s well lit.

I suspect that a lot of people would play this game for the zen-like experience of designing their own dungeons, which I get, but it really does make the game a lot easier. Maybe there could be two keeper modes, one “competitive” and one “zen” mode? Other games that feature some base-building aspect have this (OpenTTD and Rymdkapsel, to name two that I’ve played).

Grievances:
– I really hate traps. They let you hold pretty much any attack. There are so many situations in which you’d die without them, but you’re perfectly safe if you have them. And they’re easy to get, on top of that. Personally, I think it’s a bad idea to allow the player to create any defensive funnels. I get that people like to dig impressive dungeons, but from a strategic perspective, when you let the player make any formation that he likes, it’s incredibly boring, because the player will always find a way to exploit the AI.

– I don’t get the point of placing torches. They don’t cost anything; you literally just put them there to make your facilities run at full efficiency. This limits the size of a facility that you can create, but torches might as well place themselves automatically. Maybe they could cost wood to burn? Maybe they could present a fire hazard if gas builds up?

– The actual act of mining is rather pointless. I guess in the old days, you had to travel far out on the map to get minerals (well, not really), but now, all of the minerals are just in your home square.

Aspects of the game that I like, and which could be exploited further:
– In terms of strategic building, the game forces you to spend resources on facilties. You can’t refund this purchase, either, so whatever you build, you’re stuck with. That’s a decent starting point, I think.

– Facilities become more efficient as they grow larger because the fraction of border tiles to total tiles decreases. Combined with the fact that you can’t get a refund for anything that you’ve placed, this becomes a potentially interesting game mechanic. In Rymdkapsel, for example, rooms and corridors are built out of tetris pieces, and once a corridor is placed, you can’t refund it. Because certain types of rooms are more efficient when placed in proximity to other types of rooms, the game is a big geometric puzzle. (KeeperRL has a lot more stuff going on than Rymdkapsel, of course, so it’s not really appropriate to make it such a complicated geometric puzzle, but it’s a neat idea for a construction game.)

– The type of facility you build influences the type of unit that is recruited. This is potentially quite interesting because it gives facilities the dual purpose of making stuff AND recruiting different units.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 5 months ago by owen.

[owen]

Idea: Get rid of digging out tunnels for mining.

Instead, the player gets minerals from nearby zones that are under his control. The player needs to allocate imps for this, and each imp can only bring back so many minerals per day (possibly at diminishing returns). The benefit of doing this is that a) the player doesn’t have the tedious task of mining, and b) the game designer can more easily tune the number of resources gathered per imp per time period. Mountain zones could have minerals, wood zones could have wood.

[owen]

Tesselated production: the mechanic to save base-building

I think this one idea that could make for interesting geometry puzzles that synergize with the “griddiness” of the game. Best of all, it doesn’t try to rework the game, but it combines the base-building mechanic and the permanence of facility construction with the way workers randomly hop around manufactory tiles. Here’s how it works:

– Items no longer spawn completely randomly, but according to the last n tiles that the worker walked on.

– For example, for a sword to be built, the worker has to walk on a forge-tile, then a workshop-tile, and then another forge-tile (and then roll a dice check to build the sword). On the other hand, to build an axe, the worker needs to hop on a workshop-tile, then a forge-tile, then a workshop-tile (and then roll a dice check to build the axe)

– Thus, by altering the PATTERN of factory tiles, you alter the types of items that you produce. The idea relies heavily on the feature that resources are finite, and facility costs cannot be refunded

– Because manufactory types affect the recruitment of unit classes, introduce several sub-types of each manufactory. Instead of alternating workshop and forge tiles, for example, alternate WorkshopA (W_a) and WorkshopB (W_b) tiles in a checkerboard pattern. Manufactory sub-types are upgraded from the manufactory base type on a tile-by-tile basis. In the beginning of the game, for example, you would only have access to the base workshop (W_o) tiles (researchable at the cost of mana). By conquering some minor foe, for example, you might gain the knowledge of W_a construction. It’s important that the world map somehow restricts which tiles you can produce. It’s no fun if you can just make the exact same pattern every game.

– This idea supplants the simple “production efficiency”

That’s the basic idea. How can we play around with this further?

– This idea requires the existence of rooms, which are continuous areas of one tile type (and all subtypes). For example, one W_a tile touching one W_b tile is a 2×1 workshop room, but a forge touching a workshop tile is two 1×1 rooms. Workers will now need to be assigned to rooms instead of just tasks like “laboratory.”

– It’s not limited to building things. It can also be applied to training and rituals. For example, an orc could learn a multitude of different skills depending on the patterns of tiles in the training room, instead of getting a generic and comparatively boring “experience level.” Personally, I don’t like experience levels for minor allies like orcs, ogres, or anything else that isn’t “legendary.” I’d be much happier if these sorts of creatures were defined by which abilities they could learn. But that’s just me.

– Instead of upgrading tiles into subtypes, perhaps they can be (reversibly) modified by dropping items atop them. For example, a laboratory tile with a dead rat on top of it functions differently than a vanilla laboratory tile.

– Alternatively, the item itself could be modified; for example, if a sword is dropped on top of a jeweller’s bench, then the sword itself might be modified if the jewler happens to land on top of it at the end of a particular movement sequence.

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