[Alpha 13] Feedback

[Vordrak]

Ok – I played and won a land in Alpha 13.

The Good!
Animations!
Stability!
A second dragon!
No crashes!
Nicer UI!

The Bad!
Still ran out of gold! (Yes I robbed the gnomes and dwarves. Indeed I looted the ruins of EVERY civilisation)
The beard! (Really want the option for a beardless robe with a formless darkness like in the earlier versions. Want to play a younger or ageless character)

Observations!
This running out of gold thing is really getting annoying. How about reduce the payday rate by a factor of ooh, say, 25 and introduce respawning caravans with resources and loot like we discussed?

I like levelling the Keeper and reaching Sauron levels of power near the end is good. More spells though?

[miki151]

Thanks for letting me know. I'm glad that things are working for you. I added some more gold to the villages. Caravans are definitely an option. I'll add a female keeper at some point, if you don't like the beard 😛

I had a thought that maybe minions that aren't paid should just get very low on morale. They would be 50% less efficient at work and flee from battles more often. I need to try this idea, it's pretty simple to implement.

[Kiren]

Yea. Honestly the whole gold system is kind of a bummer because no matter what you eventually run out. Have you thought about tying it to a renewable resource? like food? that way you can keep growing it to feed your troops but you still can't expand your forces to quickly because you'll have to make sure your food production keeps up? If you wanted maybe you could even do something like have gold be for buying the seeds. That way you still need gold but gold transfers to a renewable resource.

[miki151]

I thought about making it a renewable resource, but can't figure out a good way to do it in the game.

[Kiren]

Well another idea, the keep from having to go into a whole food system or whatever would to be have gold itself as a renewable resource. Have it to where you can lay some sort of special 'mine' tile down over the gold ore, kind of like a workshop tile. And make it to where if you have someone working it like they would a workshop it steadily produces gold.

[Vordrak]

I like the idea of having a male keeper with no beard. That is all I am going to say.

As for renewable gold, how about alchemists being able to produce it in a special alchemy lab where they turn mud into gold or something? The trade off being that creating the room requires mana like the ritual room and that you have to expressly allocate workers.

[Garrette]

I picked up the game yesterday after wanting it for awhile. I've been playing it quite a bit since then. I'm having a lot of fun with it.

I think gold is a difficult issue balance properly. The game is built with an ending in mind. You build your dungeon, destroy the other civilizations and sort of win the game. At least that's how it seems to me so far. I ran out of money during a couple of games, and had a tough time finding more to mine. I found out that fortresses or villages have some, but sometimes my minions just aren't strong enough to take them on. Dungeon Keeper 2 had unlimited gem seams that could be mined endlessly for gold. I don't think that would work here, since you could just turtle up, build up an unstoppable army, equip and train them and basically just win the game.

Maybe a create gold spell that exchanged mana for hold like DK2 had. Or a gambling hall, where your minion can spend their gold, and basically generate it for you. The downside is that they could win and cost you gold, and that it basically wastes their time and keeps them from doing something more productive.

I know the game is early in development, and I think it's great so far. I'm looking forward to seeing it grow.

[gooddecision]

I love the randomly generated terrain, but it would be nice to see a little less of the underground lakes.  Personally, I feel one of the best aspects of this game is planning your dungeon out, getting all the rooms and hallways just right, then unpausing and watching it all happen… very satisfying.  However I'm finding that I run into a lake almost immediately every time I start to dig, making planning anything impossible.  The only way I have found to avoid the lakes is to build on top of clusters of resources, which is ok I guess, but that can get messy too.  If lakes had some sort of function it might change my opinion, but as it is now, the lakes are a bit of a hassle.   

Love this game!  Kudos to the developer.

[miki151]

I agree with you that lakes can be annoying, on the other hand they can be used strategically and mix up the game nicely. Maybe they need to be visible from further away.

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