So corpses are brought to the ritual room, minions work on them, and only then you get mana? Certainly interesting. One problem with it is that it stops your progress if you don’t have any enemies to kill at the moment. It’s also harder to balance, which was the reason why I removed mana gain from simply killing enemies.
Well, the mana-generation comment was just a minor thing; the main thing I was suggesting was to use the ritual rooms as factories so that this factory motif would be repeated more. I was also going to suggest (but I didn’t) that corpses, when processed, could liberate secondary resources called “humours,” (i.e., sanguine, choleric, melancholic, phlegmatic biles). (These could possibly also be easily convertible to mana, but maybe not; I was even thinking about making “mana” simply a composite value of these four humours). Anyway, different rituals would require different humours in various quantities. (These humours could also be liberated from mushrooms). I wrote more about how rituals could work here: http://steamcommunity.com/app/329970/discussions/3/305509857557053068/
The real point of all this is to get different systems of the dungeon interacting with each other in sort of a network-like fashion, not to change how mana is produced. Macro-strategy-wise, the mana generation system is not that big of a deal; I just wanted it to be corpse dependent so that waiting around was not the best strategy.
=== Rant mode (only read if extremely bored) ===
Here’s my mana-related rant, since you triggered me by writing “game balance.” (I’m just talking about campaign mode here, don’t really care about single-map mode).
If the game is “hard to balance”, I think it would be because the starting conditions are so extremely variable. In some games you can start next to four tribes that can kill you at the blink of an eye, and in others you can kill everything in sight. It seems to me like a tall order to balance a rogue-like when the typical power curve has such a high standard deviation. (And this is compounded by trying to extend the initial conditions to include the single-map mode). It’s not as bad as it was a year ago, but I still think the game is basically stomp or be stomped, rather than winning by a long sequence of perfect decisions as a Chess grandmaster plays his game.
So, there are often long periods where you just sit and wait, because that’s all you can do when your enemies are powerful. Ultimately, I’d prefer it if the game forced me to do interesting stuff; if the base construction were more interesting, like a puzzle a la Rymdkapsel or if it REALLY taxed your resource management skills, then I’d not be so insistent on this, but the base construction is just busy-work so it gets boring after the third time you play the game.
tl;dr: So, if we started on the left hand side of the world map and tribes got progressively more difficult, then there would always be something fun to do (i.e., killing something).
Okay, now on to mana. The way I think mana could work is like “action points,” and I think it should only be acquired from going out and “doing stuff,” either killing enemies, stealing things, or maybe solving those little mario-party mini games like sokoban. To me, EVERYTHING in the game should be dependent on mana (in addition to whatever other resource): building items, rooms, even digging tunnels. When you do this, then mana doesn’t become hard to balance, it becomes the rate-limiting factor; the currency of balance, if you will. It helps to put a crude, time-independent upper bound on how powerful the player can grow. (I previously noted that gold sort of acts like this because it limits recruitment, but mana seems like it could do this for all systems in the game. It was also sort of why I’d suggested that a constant supply of wood should be required to keep the dungeon torches lit: progress requires economy, economy requires imps, imps require mana.
tl;dr: Make crude limit on maximum, time-independent player progression easy to balance by ultimately tying every operation to one scalar value. Arbitrarily choose mana to be this value, and very tightly control the maximum mana which can be liberated in each sector on the world map.
Basically the whole point of this suggestion was so we don’t have to play the waiting game as much. But, I guess it’s not a HUGE deal. Just my 2c.
And just some other points
Telepathic connections: Yes, I mean shared vision. But in general I mean shared detection, so that if some unit can sense some property of another unit, then that information is also shared.
Re: coming outside of your base to defend.
Okay, what if some stuff was outside your base, NOT defendable by boulders. Like maybe there are just mines sitting in the middle of the map instead of buried in the mountain. To get the minerals out of the ground, you have to erect a mining apparatus (buildable at the workshop maybe, maybe not). Anyway, the point is that this thing is really expensive (in terms of the time it took to build) and you’d rather not have it smashed. You CAN hide in your tunnels, behind your boulders, but it’ll cost you.
Also recommend that boulders completely smash everything they roll over, turning whatever equipment is being carried into component resources.
I’m planning a new campaign mode that doesn’t have all the customization, and has fixed retired dungeons. This would have highscores and everything.
The current campaign mode would be called free play or something like that, and only here you’d download retired dungeons. There would be no score.
I think this solution addresses your issue.
