There is another idea to have a special creature with a giant bag on their back that can hold all captures, as a slightly unrealistic and humorous alternative to the annoying micro-managing of a group of prisoners.
That would be a cool way how to use imps in a raid. 😀
Being able to brainwash some into joining the army would be nice too.
Yes! I always very much liked how you could torture enemies in the original Dungeon Keeper until they either died, or joined you.
It would be great to see this in KeeperRL, especially if you could capture some of the more special villains that way – elves for their vision, dwarves if they retained their ability to dig and thus help your imps, etc. Maybe you could even capture, imprison and tame dragons? That would require “prisoner” to be something like a status effect rather than a generic NPC, though.
I guess I’ll add my feedback here. 🙂
Mana
I like the new mana mechanics. Before, the game was not really challenging unless the player made it so, because you could ratehr easily wait until you had enough mana to get every tech, then stomp the whole land. This current way of making the player fight for his progression is much, much better, IMHO.
I would really like, though, to actually be able to take and torture prisoners. The game tells me to do it all the time – yet I never managed it in all my games. How do you do it? Is there a pop-up window if you manage to injure enemies enough without killing them? What if you took inspiration from Dungeon Keeper and only beheadings would outright kill a creature and reaching 0 HP would instead make them uncounscious from blood loss, letting your imps gather them and bring them to your prison. If left without care, uncounscious creatures would still die in a short time. As no-one would help adventurers, they would also die. Maybe there could also be cage traps to get prisoners more easily, or a way to abduct prisoners with a raid into another map? Maybe you could also get offers of ransom for your prisoners?
Some form of sacrifices on the demon altars would be cool, but I’d much rather see corpses and bones used for leather and bone crafting than sacrifices. Maybe you could sacrifice prisoners, or your own creatures? Eg. if you sacrificed your own creature, the amount of mana gained would depend on how strong your creature was – so a new recruit would give very little mana, but an experienced creature with many kills would give a nice chunk of mana.
Both awarding mana for all vanquished enemies (even if it’s less mana for an enemy type already defeated, to maintain balance) and adjusting mana cost of tech so that some are cheap, others very expensive are excellent ideas.
Geology
I don’t mind current geology, but it might be interesting if you could buy some tech that allowed you to build a remote mine – it would create a new location on your worldmap (you don’t have to be able to physically visit it, it’s just there on the map) and you could send some creatures away, slowly gaining resources. Even if this would give you unlimited iron and stone, I don’t think this would be unbalanced in the long run, as it’s nicely counterweighted by the limited mana you need for progression.
Rooms
I would like to be able to assign chambers to my monsters, too. Building a throne room and accompanying suite for my keeper would be much more satisfying if he actually used it. 😉
Stone, iron, maybe even steel doors are great idea. If your enemies couldn’t get to you, they could still siege – maybe you could be blocked from [T]ravelling for as long as an enemy is sieging, thus you would need to get rid of them somehow. Or they could eventually just dig to you.
Monsters
Monsters being balanced and all useful would be ideal, IMHO. 🙂
Ghost could remain very weak fighters, but if they were able to walk through walls, they could become invaluable scouts, especially coupled with their invisibility.
Goblins also need a buff, but probably not in a combat way. Maybe goblins could be the only ones skilled enough to create some of the higher tech crafts. Thus you could make do with orcs for crafting in early game, but later some goblins would be needed. To make them useful even outside of crafting, what if goblins had the Ambush skill, so you could use a possessed goblin as a sneaky thief to get into enemy sites and steal from them without fight? They also seem to be skilled with traps, so giving them some beartraps or cage traps with which to hunt animals could work well, especially if you needed meat even before you had pigsty tech and leather for leather armor, not wood.
Speaking of pigsty, monsters actually eating would be great – I would like to use the animals corpses for more than just graveyard clutter. Adding meat and leather as resources would definitely improve the way you need to take care of your dungeon. BTW, adventurers should also be able (and required?) to eat. Some bread and cheese in the shops, maybe a way to butcher a wild animal into edible meat?
I would like a way for both doppelgangers and adventurers to learn spells. 😉
Combat
I don’t like how currently, your only concern abut your weapon if how high its + is. It would be great of you could specialize your fighter a bit. Maybe give them an option to choose from several styles of equipment, each with different strengths and downsides to balance them.
“Sword and shield” style (or any one-handed weapon and a shield) could give much better defense than the other styles, but limit you to weaker one-handers. Shields should give considerable defense, at least as much as body armor gives, to give a fair exchange for the limited attack power of creatures using shields.
“Dual wielding” is always cool and allowing creatures to wield two weapons and attack twice each turn would be a nice style to have. Maybe only give 50% chance to attack with the off-hand weapon, increased to something like 80% by having Ambidextrous trait (dark elves). This would probably be the style with best offense.
“Two-handed weapons” have higher damage than one-handers, but would probably still fall behind dual wielding. Instead, they could be given special attack effects – I think war hammers can already knock you prone, so maybe similar effects could be limited to two-handers to make them distinct from one-handers, plus each two-hander could be given a different effect to make them distinct from each other.
War hammers already knock enemies prone, maybe they could also stun them for some turns (or do they already do that?).
Battle axes could cleave through all adjacent enemies, attacking all squares next the the user at once. Cleaving should not work if any allied creature is next to you, though, to prevent annoying friendly fire. This would also make the weapon great against hordes, but less great when fighting with a group of your own allies.
Greatclubs (or how is the weapon called) could get similar knockback to Blast spells, occasionally sending your enemies flying backwards.
I would love to see spears added, with the ability to impale several enemies in a row, thus making them great in a tigh corridor fights (as opposed to axes, which would nicely cleave through enemies in open terrain).Maybe all of those special attacks of two-handers could be accessible to adventurers through the Ctrl+dir attack option (you would still need to wield a correct weapon, though)?
Misc
Trying to hunt down every last raven an enemy keepe had is really annoying – declaring them destroyed on killing the keeper would be much nicer.
Trading with allied creatures would be awsome. You could use your gold to buy equipment, scrolls or resources from them, and it would be especially nice if there were restocking shops. As I’ve already written in another thread (about adventurers, but this applies to both them and the keeper):
Shopping is fun. 🙂 I suppose the current behaviour of no one caring if you loot the castle treasury is only temporary, as is looting the town houses with no repercussions. 😛 (Related to above – being able to steal from towns as long as you are hidden would be cool.)
However, once you buy whatever you want from the shop, you have no incentive to ever come back. What if shops restocked their goods every day? Thus you would have a reason to come back and see if there are more potions or scrolls to buy. You would have a reason to haul the spoils of your quests back to sell and buy better equipment. As you would be still limited by the money you can earn, it wouldn’t hopefully unbalance the game by giving you too much consumables.
Thank you so much for your continued work with the game!
EDIT: A few more thoughts.
Maybe sacrificing on demon altars could also summon a very powerful but temporary demon ally, like horned reaper from Dungeon Keeper.
Goblins would also benefit from being able to wear armor. Even with it, they still lack the ability to train, so it would not make them powerful fighters, but at least they would be able to get some defense and maybe a ring or amulet if the player deems it necessary.
Other creatures that need balancing are animals. They are weak, and not even early game weak – you can get orcs so quickly you have no need for animals. What if animals didn’t count as part of your population (and wouldn’t fill your population limit), but instead if you fulfilled certain criteria and had free cages, they would come to you on their own? Eg. bats and ravens could join anytime you had a free cage, bats always at night and ravens always during day. As long as you had a vampire in your population, bats would join you much more frequently. As long as you had a werewolf in your population, wolves would occasionally join you. You would need a built pigsty for bears to start joining you. You would be able to amass huge numbers of animals with no limit other than the amount of built cages, but then again, they are weak so they could be used to rush your enemies in a swarm, no matter that many die.
I like that imps can carry anything. They’re like magical ants, carrying whole dungeon hoards on their backs! 😀 But something like an amulet of carrying that would allow others to do the same would be great.
Why are there no long bows to be crafted? I would like my harpies to have an upgrade.