Gnomes are interesting in their robot combinations but IMHO lack the diversity of monsters:
A. You want all or at least most of your robots with legs (to go into dungeons, exploring or even adapt to the enemys that atack you by positioning in the most favorable environment/trap/place of your dungeon) and that limits the slots from 3 to 2.
B. There is no incentive to go for “lesser” materials like wood (or iron) if you can evade it. They straightly give you lesser benefits without some kind of advantage.
I propose 2 changes that can bring more interesting mechanics and combinations without that much work:
1. The ability to “turn on” / “turn off” robots (turned off robots wont do a thing and dont count as population): This way they will be far more different than monsters as you can create robots for different situations and turning them on / off depending on the situations. Example: you can build “turret robots” that are inactive until you need them.
2. Letting materials have different propertys instead of being upgrades. Wood materials could bring up the robot speed and give decent KG capacity, iron its burning and magical res + the best KG capacity and adamantium is the only one that gives you both the max HP and def while being the slowest and having the worst KG capacity. Whatever you like… heck even you could have a bad stat material (gold maybe?) that gives you 4 slots instead of 3.
Please, dont think that Im bashing the Gnomes (or the patch!), i like them, but imho they have more potential to be interesting. And for me the game has been “complete” for a few patches by now, so except for bugs I think that what you are trying to do is polishing it: to make a good game into one thats awesome and stands out from its inspirations.
I also have some feedback, so I’ll piggyback onto this thread:
– Guard zones and automatons don’t mix well: pure miner automatons, with 0 damage, will idle in a guard zone if one is available. My expectation here is that creatures that are not capable of dealing damage should not bother with guard zones.
– Gnomes are very vulnerable, but there’s no way to tell them to sit back and enjoy life and let the automatons do all the work for them. They’re useful for bootstrapping the production chain, but once it’s up and running, there’s no point in sending gnomes to die while exploring. Mining jobs should be performed solely by mining automatons if they’re available, or, ideally, the player should be able to toggle jobs on and off on their units. Some extra hands surely help, but literally all gnome games I’ve played so far, one gnome died right away to a cobra, or to a bandit, or a lizardman, or whatever. So I’d rather keep them safe and bottled up at Z-1, while the automatons explore the overworld. In a sense, this would be like when you’re playing as a Keeper, letting your imps do the dirty work for you.
Anyway, I really like the idea of weak automatons made of gold that get one or two extra slots. Three slots is very tight, but at the same time I can see how adding more slots might make things too unbalanced. Maybe a designated material would help with that, by balancing utility against stats.
After playing with gnomes for a bit longer, I must say that I really enjoy them, perhaps even more than keepers and knights. I really like the resource-oriented progression, and I like how the early game is particularly challenging and how the drilling automatons let you snowball to adamantine. Here’s a few more thoughts:
– Finding the hidden golems is essentially a requirement for unlocking the first technology, which is gonna be either iron working or advanced automatons. This is because wooden automatons with four arms and two legs are too weak as fighters, but maybe I haven’t used them properly, or maybe I’m expected to fit the gnomes in wooden armor and send them to fight the bandits? Either way, I’ve been sticking with finding the golems right away, because it’s safer and at most you’re sacrificing a mining automaton by digging into the wrong pocket.
– Automaton paint is great and I love it, but I often find myself forgetting to apply it and having to disassemble the automatons. I also think that having it take up a temporary body part slot is a bit counter-intuitive. I think that a good alternative would be having a separate “paint jobs” slot, where the paint is temporarily held and then consumed once it’s available (so you can recolor automatons after they’ve been built; I think that making paint a consumable is fine since it’s free).
– About disassembling: now I’m not entirely sure if you get 100% of the resources back, but from what I’ve seen you lose the automaton body and have to build it again. This is, in general, a bit of a hassle: sometimes I accidentally click on the wrong part, and I can’t cancel that even if the part hasn’t been installed yet. So my idea here would be to add a little red “X” next to a grayed-out part, so that you can cancel that order without having to dismantle the whole thing.
– Regarding gnomes vs gnomes: How do you even damage an enemy sentient adamantine automaton fitted with a full set of adamantine armor? I’ve had situations where my entire team was effectively deadlocked in combat against a single enemy adamantine automaton, because their 40ish damage is not enough to scratch their 70ish defense. But I’ve only just realized that adamantine automatons with double crafting arms are legendary craftmen, so maybe there’s something that I’m still missing.
– I think there’s a bug with adamantine automaton costs? The costs for the adamantine automaton corpus and adamantine drilling automaton seem switched.
– Can you even take prisoners as a gnome? If not, why are gallows and prisoner heads available?
– One final thing, it would be really cool to have blueprints. I just lost like 10 green light archer automatons…
