Feedback and initial impressions (Alpha 6)

[LazyWizard]

I thought I'd give some detailed feedback on what I've played so far of the current alpha version. While I'm focusing on the negative here I'm actually greatly enjoying the game so far. It's incredibly compelling even in such an early state. So don't take this as me complaining about how terrible everything is. 🙂

UI

Not much to say here; this game's interface is already infinitely better than most roguelikes. However:

• The 'fetch items' order doesn't highlight tiles, making it tricky to cancel fetch orders when a faction attacks shortly after another is defeated. This tends to lead to your imps becoming arrow pincushions.
• I think a 'turns remaining' element for buffs/debuffs would be useful, especially for things like invisibility where their expiration in melee usually means instant death.

Balance

I realize this is still early alpha and almost everything is going to change, but there's a few things I wanted to point out.

• Beasts might be a bit too good. They are as powerful when first summoned as a humanoid is after being trained and equipped, meaning every dead beast can be replaced instantly with one that's just as effective. This makes beast cages at your entrance one of the best defenses in the game.
  I built a hardmode fortress consisting of nothing but storage, a library and some beast cages (nothing else, not even doors), then spammed Summon Insects, cave bears and wolves. Even with their random movement they easily conquered the lizardman and elves. I did have to go retrieve the Beast Mutation book and form a team before taking on the Duke (the only one to put up any significant resistance), but that was the only bump in that particular fortress's rise to power.
• Archery is definitely too good right now. I took an adventurer into the retired version of the same keep as above, and he was able to defeat five legendary beasts in a row without taking a scratch. He then died in two rounds of melee with a cave bear immediately afterwards. 😉

Traps

• As it stands you can easily win the game with nothing but traps. A sufficiently long line of blind boulder traps and webs at the entrance will take out the majority of invaders – including one-shotting the faction leader! Not to mention that even a single web+boulder makes a fortress impossible to defeat in Adventure vs Keeper mode.

Here's the kind of layout I'm talking about. You can extend this until it will take out the entirety of a raiding party, with any fleeing survivors weakened by the poison traps and forced to waste any healing supplies they have.

[miki151]

Thanks!!! Awesome piece of feedback. I'll definitely try to fix most of those things for Alpha7.

About the balance point, you didn't say which difficulty level you were playing. If it was easy, then it's pretty much as I intended, although some things still need a fix.

The boulders are intentionally very lethal, though I'm planning to balance them a little. As an adventurer, you should be able to use an “effugium” scroll to get out of the web, btw. How did you find the Adventurer vs Keeper mode? Few people seem to play it.

[LazyWizard]

I'm fairly certain the beast fortress was hardmode. I usually play on hard unless I'm trying something crazy like a keeper-only run (which seems impossible right now, sadly).

I have mixed feelings about Adventurer vs Keeper. I've played a few games and it's fun, but outside of a lucky shot against a wandering Keeper I've never even come close to clearing a fortress.

In Keeper mode your goal is to make your fortress impregnable against an entire high-level army, so playing in Adventure mode where you're level 1 and all alone seems impossible against any half-decent fort design. Even with plenty of scrolls/potions and max handicap I rarely make it past the entrance hallway. There's also no easy way to gain levels if the Keeper didn't focus on beasts since all other enemies stay bunched up in the fortress. Luckily equipment isn't a problem; even with aggressiveness turned off you're likely to have killed off most of the factions in Keeper mode before retiring so there's plenty of corpses for your adventurer to loot.

Maybe levels could be more statistically significant for Adventurers (and Keepers) than for regular creatures? That would smooth out the difficulty curve a bit.

[miki151]

Adventurers currently don't level up at all, actually. It's been my goal since way back to the design adventure mode without level-ups. The player would buff up through items and skills. In the future you will retire your adventurers so you can use a really buffed-up PC from previous games to attack a keeper fortress.

I agree that fortresses designed to take on large mobs are not particularly fun for adventurers. I need to think about it more. Maybe a Keeper vs Keeper mode will get more traction.

[Gnarz]

'lo there,

I thought I might also give some initial impressions. I really like the game, backed it on indiegogo, because I think this might become sth really neat 🙂 Also, I really love the fact that the game is going to be open source. I would have backed it for that alone 😉 Being in Alpha, there are some issues, obviously. I'll not repeat what the lazy wizard said, here's some more:

– path finding really has issues. I blocked a path with a boulder trap, but this seemed to be the preferred path of my creatures. Even though there was another way, they insisted on taking the blocked path. So, after a few turns, all of my imps were stuck on either side of the boulder trap, and I wondered why no work was getting done. Interestingly enough, when I made another path around the boulder trap, that one was then taken by most, but not all, of the creatures.
– I find the game's pacing is off. In the beginning, all of the factions would spam-attack me, sometimes even multiple factions at once. Then, after a while, this came to a complete halt. Since then, all I do is wait for my keeper to gather enough mana so that I can create more creatures, train them, and go beat the snot out of the next opponent. Which takes a while because of the keeper behavior LazyWizard mentioned. Also, there is no reason to keep expanding my dungeon. Plus, I am not even really able to do that because resources are quite limited, so from some point on, the game becomes … well, boring. This is on standard difficulty.

I would like it if there was either another way to get mana, or to somehow increase the mana I get from having the keeper study. For example, by scaling the received mana by the size of my dungeon? Also, I feel there should be more resources, and they should not be visible from so far away, to give more incentive to actually do some digging.

So much for now, this is after my second playthrough (the second one currently being in the wait-create-train-beat loop I mentioned earlier…). I'll watch out for more.

Edit: I forgot to mention: when a creature is on guard duty, it will ignore commands to do sth else.

[LazyWizard]

I think that beast fort I mentioned might actually have been on easy – I just tried another beast fort, lost handily. Twenty-two cave bears wasn't enough to take out even the lizardmen's shaman. Or maybe it was just terrible luck this time. Huh.

I have had similar pathfinding issues to the ones Gnarz brought up. The AI also doesn't seem to recognize the danger of fire. I had my Keeper torch a library with a Flame Sphere to ward off a tri-faction invasion. It worked, but the moment I released control of the Keeper he ran back into the burning library to study and died.

[…]

Expanding is worthless past a certain point. You can only have 40 troops total right now, so anything more than the tiles needed to sustain that is unnecessary.

You can obtain a massive amount of mana from killing things, and a smaller (though still significant) amount by torturing whatever prisoners surrender after a failed invasion. Try putting together a small team and raiding a village you've already conquered to kill the civilians for mana (you should be doing these raids anyway to get the final research tier unlock book for that faction).

Regarding pacing: the enemies don't seem to regenerate killed troops, so once you've survived a single invasion by that faction they are almost harmless (unless their faction leader survived). Mid-game is when you should be taking teams into the enemy towns to hunt down any survivors, raid shops and grab skill books. End-game is when you've killed every combatant in the elf, dwarven, lizardmen and one of the human factions. At that point you will be invaded by the Duke's incredibly powerful army (the other human faction).

[Gnarz]

Mid-game is when you should be taking teams into the enemy towns to hunt down any survivors, raid shops and grab skill books. End-game is when you've killed every combatant in the elf, dwarven, lizardmen and one of the human factions. At that point you will be invaded by the Duke's incredibly powerful army (the other human faction).

Hmmm… this Duke character and his army was actually the second enemy I took down, so no invasion from him. So I kinda skipped the endgame… 😉

[miki151]

Guys, big thanks for this thread, I've already fixed many of the issues that you mentioned. Being a one man team I often fail to notice many problems.

[Gnarz]

Guys, big thanks for this thread, I've already fixed many of the issues that you mentioned. Being a one man team I often fail to notice many problems.

That's what open alpha/beta is for, right?

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