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Hello,
Thanks Miki151 for making this awesome game. I just discovered it & I hope I can help support it at some point in the future. I like it better than the original DK because I can see everything that is going on and easily take control of emergency situations. Making it a RL was also just inspired genius. Very well done!
I've been beating my head against the hard mode with aggressive enemies once I won a few games on easy. I find myself assuming things and doing things that seem to make sense yet I'm not sure if the game works like this or not, so I wanted to try and articulate what I think is going on and how I'm trying to handle it – particularly in regards to designing a dungeon.
First of all – I like old school weird-ass dungeons with lots of freaky rooms and winding passages – the kind I remember from original D&D adventure modules like Keep on the Borderlands and Tomb of Horror. These old designs made no sense from a logical point of view and were designed to be interesting from the perspective of an adventurer. There is no rhyme or reason to them but I love them. The thing about this kind of design is that it rewards exploration – but in KRL the “good guys” know exactly where the Keeper is without having to explore first, leading to the necessity for a different kind of design.
KRL DESIGN:
With KRL I find myself drifting towards building more of a bunker design. My current standard is an entry hall, an ambush room, a central area and the keeper's lair.
1. Entry Hall: This consists of a long, winding, 1-square wide passage with lots of boulder, web, poison and terror traps. I never use any other kind of traps (see explanation later)
2. Ambush Room: This is a large room with no features. It is where the entry hall terminates and has multiple exits to the central area. When I get invaded I make a group of all available minions & park them there in front of the entrance hall so as to try and get a 3:1 advantage in combat as the invaders come through the door.
3. Central Area: This is basically everything except the library, which is in the keeper's lair.
4. Keeper's lair: This consists of another windy passageway with the same traps as the entrance hall which leads to the library where the keeper is chillin' like a villain.
Now, so far this seems to work pretty well as long as I have superiority in numbers. I have all of my minions milling around in the central area and can immediately group them and respond to a threat. What it amounts to in practice is a dungeon with only four major areas and no way for the heroes to get lost. every expedition into my dungeon is really more like an assault on a bunker with a single door.
OBSERVATIONS:
1. Do walls matter? Is building a small 5×5 room full of just training stations more effective than having a 10×10 room full of beds, training stations, storage and whatever else? I can't tell. Efficiency would dictate having my central area be just one giant cave full of all the room types besides the bookshelves mixed in together willy-nilly to keep my minions flowing around unimpeded for when I need them in the ambush room.
2. Traps I never use: I never use alarms or surprises because a surprise is just sacrificing a random minion when I'm not paying attention while an alarm isn't needed because I am always going to take charge of my large melees in the ambush room anyway. Barricades – can they be used as cover for archers?
3. Beds for Minions: Do I need 40 beds? I notice that I start with a pop cap of 40, so do I need 1 bed per minion or do they “hot-rack” as needed? Same with gravestones & animal cages.
4. Utility saturation point? Is there a way I can tell when I have enough “utility” room components? i.e. workbenches, labs, bookshelves, etc.? At what point is building more bookshelves useless? Without knowing I shoot for about 100…
5. Minion jobs: Starting with humanoids. My gut instinct is to believe that gnomes are good at crafting, ogres are good at melee and goblins are kind of a mixed bag – maybe good archers? Without knowing, however, or if there is no difference except initial cost – then it seems to me that just spawning ogres seems to be the way to go – if ogres can fight, craft and shoot arrows then why hire gnomes and goblins?
The same kind of logic can apply to the undead – vampires seem useful – so why bother with zombies & mummies? In animals I get the impression that they are sort of self-reliant skirmishers & troublemakers which I like – I also like scouting with the ravens (nice touch!!!) – but why would I ever spawn wolves instead of cave bears?
DESIGN IDEAS:
So, if I had to guess – based on my dim memory of DK & my gamer's intuition – encouraging a more traditional dungeon design might consist of establishing a rule such as: a room element's “efficiency” is based on the fact that a single room / enclosed area separated by doors and containing nothing except one room utility item type (workbench, bed, training post, etc.) is x% more efficient than a room with multiple utility items. So, an ogre training in a room with only training posts, say, trains 125% faster than the same ogre in a room with both training posts and beds mixed together.
In addition, this efficiency bonus would be higher for rooms with at least x amount of natural stone between them and other rooms containing utility items. This would encourage the construction of the traditional “graph-paper sprawl” types of dungeons where individual rooms are connected by twisting 1-square wide passages.
Exploration: What if each separate enemy faction had to “discover” the keeper's lair on it's own by exploring the dungeon & locating it before sending in a full blown assault? This could be countered by having “fake” libraries & dummy keepers at dead ends with lots of traps, or tempting treasure rooms also with traps… This would require a new unit – like a scout / adventurer for each enemy faction that could reasonably be expected to infiltrate a dungeon using stealth to hide / escape as needed.
Anyway – long post. I hope it shows that I have been enjoying this game very much! I hope you continue to expand on it! Great job!
miki151Great feedback and ideas, thanks! Room efficiency modifiers (light, shape, size, etc) is on the list, the only problem is explaining to the player how it works. I don't want the players have to read manuals (most wouldn't bother anyway). So it needs simple rules and be apparent during the game.
Making the heroes have to discover the dungeon is a cool idea, although hard to implement, I'll think about it.
In the future your retired dungeons will be attacked by other, player-controlled keepers, so there will be more incentive for complex designs.
TcheyHi,
If you don't want players to have to read manual, then don't write a manual, just make gameplay. Other players will write something, give tips, create wiki, and so on. Let them (let us) discover that a 5×5 workshops room is less efficient than a 4×20, and a 9×9 library is not enough for maximum research but 15×15 is too much… It works good with many good games, like Dwarf Fortress or Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead. You make the game as deep as you wish, and the players discover the rules.
Hi,
If you don't want players to have to read manual, then don't write a manual, just make gameplay. Other players will write something, give tips, create wiki, and so on. Let them (let us) discover that a 5×5 workshops room is less efficient than a 4×20, and a 9×9 library is not enough for maximum research but 15×15 is too much… It works good with many good games, like Dwarf Fortress or Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead. You make the game as deep as you wish, and the players discover the rules.
Well Dwarf Fortress is *really* hard to understand if you don't read wikis or manuals or tutorials. I think that's not what miki151 is aiming for. I played DF a bit, and though I could enjoy it and get a nice preview of the gameplay depths, I found the entry barrier was really high, even if I'm a relatively experienced gamer.
miki151Ok I just added room efficiency. It depends on number of neighboring tiles of the same type and amount of light. Inefficient tiles are simply highlighted red. Thanks for pushing this, it was a good idea 🙂
Wow! Very cool! That is an excellent way to handle that. Glowing red things are always bad!
Time to whip the imps and get remodeling! ;D
