This used to be possible, but I didn’t like the UI for it so I removed it temporarily. Do you think it even makes sense in campaign mode? You wouldn’t be able to do that on sites other than your own anyway.
I was thinking that you might want to have several teams at different locations in a hostile sector, for whatever tactical purpose. Maybe you want to draw the main army away while you go around murdering peasants, stealing gold, or something of the sort. Or you send out an advanced scout while the bulk of your forces stay at the edge of the map. (Hopefully there will be more situations such that combat can benefit from the use of several teams at once).
Anyway, if forces are automatically commanded to go home when they’re not under your control, it would make this sort of tactic impossible.
I’d also like to see leader-only classes.
I don’t think that you need too many player-controlled units, if you can make them interact in interesting ways. Hundreds of types of player-controlled units would be way too much, for example.
On the other hand, there can be many different types of enemies.
Dunno if it’s possible, but 2×2 enemies or emplacements would be neat. Like, siege engines that can be used to bombard enemies.
Would it be possible to give our teams the order to rally at a way point when they’re not under our control?
Attacked on a map you aren’t currently playing.
Complex and tricky. For alpha18 AIs and players might have to take it in turns to attack squares on the overworld.
This means AI cant interupt until an invasion has ended. Then it is the other forces who attack while you must defend. It is their turn. etc.
Yeah, I thought that something like this might work. There are a couple of scenarios that I imagine:
The problem with all of this is that you need some sort of indication of the start and the end of a battle. In the current single-map system, you can control and release units at will. I would suggest that, in the campaign mission, any time there is a hostile unit in a square that is owned by the player, or vice versa, that the player should be forced into unit control mode
On strategy:
On tactics:
Currently, battles don’t involve much more than dancing your keeper back and forth while minions bash each other over the head (or shoot arrows, if they’re clever). I mean, it’s fun for a while, but it really doesn’t offer the sort of tactical game play that XCOM or even Final Fantasy might. Basically, you just use your spells and items to keep the keeper alive and hope that you have a big enough army. If SHTF, then run your keeper back to the dungeon where your traps can kill inordinately large numbers of enemies.
Well, that begs the question, how can this game be more tactically interesting? I guarantee you that simply marching around an ever-increasing death ball of orcs and ogres while it auto-attacks the enemy will not make for an exciting game.
Hi,
I need to say that if you decide your campaign mode is achievable, I’d still like to help.
In fact, I am offering to make you a selection of 1/4 size dungeons that you can install with alpha 18. You would find this especially helpful if you are unable to convert any of the alpha 17 dungeons cropped to the right size.
This is a good idea if there are going to have prefabricated dungeons. The developers of Xenonauts, an XCOM-like, had the controversial idea to use prefab maps instead of randomly generated ones, but I think it’s a good idea. Handmade dungeons are always going to look more interesting than automatically generated ones (although there’s no reason why you can’t have a mix of both), and it’s easy for the community to step up to make more maps.
I suggested a rating system for dungeons, but why not have someone who is willing to make the maps do it himself? It’s one less thing to program, and you’ll probably get better dungeons in the end.
Posting a few more of my thoughts and questions about campaign mode and the game in general.
Secondly, do you think that this game will be increasingly enjoyable as the campaign length increases? I think certain genres (RPGs, for example) obviously benefit as the playthrough length increases; however, three two-hour rogue-like sessions might be more fun than one six-hour session, because a lot of the fun in a rogue-like is dealing with variable conditions early on, and how the choices that result from these early decisions affect the late game. In other words, the more the player starts a new game, the more fun he has (to some extent).
In some ways, this game is becoming more and more like fantasy XCOM, heh.
Given that the dungeon carving is a such a big part of the game, I wonder if designing dungeons could involve more strategy than it currently does. For example, some regions of the mountain could provide certain production boosts for different types of minions, the mountain could become more difficult to mine the deeper you go in, and so on.
I’m drawing on inspiration from Faster-than-Light and Convoy, games in which <b>every transaction involving resource allocation is important.</b> I believe that every mechanism that a strategy game introduces should be developed on as extensively as possible. In Faster-than-Light, for example, rooms can catch on fire. Fire also interacts with the oxygen and crew mechanisms, because fires can be extinguished by draining oxygen from their immediate vicinity or by sending a crew member to deal with it. This results in somewhat interesting decisions that involve extinguishing fire. In the heat of battle, he has to determine how the fire should be extinguished, either by sending crew or by purging oxygen, and who should be sent. If the doors are damaged while there is a fire, the response becomes more complicated if large sections of the ship are evacuated.
Secondly, there are certain types of crew members (rockmen) who are immune to fire (as well as those who are not), and there are certain types of weapons that can start fires. There are also augments that can suppress fire or mitigate low oxygen. The point is, though, that <b>all of these systems are intertwined.</b> And this is just one little mechanism of the game.
I don’t really see such a network of concerns present in KeeperRL. Such a system exists to some degree, but it’s not very well balanced. For example, the minerals are just sitting there in a cache within the mountain. You mine them and then you spend them. Does mining have any costs to it? Well, it occupies my imps, but that’s not really a big deal because they generally don’t have anything better to do. It also exposes my imps to danger, but they’re usually enough that they can run away, and there’s generally an alternate way to grab the minerals if I really want to get them quickly. Gold attracts bandits, and tree stumps spawn tree spirits, but neither of those are big threats.
Yay, developments!
What about a rating system for dungeons so that the best ones are more likely to be kept?
Dev made like a Green Day song and went on Holiday.
Winning in under 10,000 turns.