RTesterI’m glad to learn about the rework of dreadful geology (though in all honesty, since I was one of the players not happy with it, that’s not a surprise). Certainly it’ll help a bit with planning and provide nice risk/reward feature for rapid dungeon expansion. I’m unsure about there being just pockets of enemies. Maybe said pockets could be semi-rare but at the same time digging out enough of certain resource could provoke off-map attacks the way gold does for bandits?
Steel change I am ambivalent towards – it may be good, it may be bad. I certainly see your reasoning, as it was kind of additional task gobbling up plenty of time and resources. At the same time, however, I liked the fact that it made iron ore relevant even late-game. There was still a point in acquiring it at the pinnacle of one’s power and it had value. Now, it won’t be so anymore.
I do like the harder rock feature, though probably I’ll try to mine it just for the immersion/head-canon reason of it making my dungeon more secure. And who knows, if you’d consider making ants have hard/impossible time digging through it, maybe it really could make a dungeon more secure (at least in case of newbie players as anyone else will likely attack and then completely wipe the ants out without letting them counterattack).
Looking forward to prisoners all the same, as well as to improved pathfinding (here’s hoping it won’t mess with my somewhat dated PC).
RTesterI’m eager to hear your thoughts!
Sure.
First, the systems presented. I think the first system is a good way to go about it. Yes, prisoners tagging with the raiding party may be a problem, but they may be passively just hanging around without participating in the battle itself and turning back into who they were should the raiding party be wiped out. If player wants to keep on raiding after acquiring some, I don’t see why they shouldn’t at the risk of losing those prisoners nor why would it be bad to have the troops return with their spoils if one’s concerned about prisoner safety. Seems like a very believable thing to do.
If anything would need to be added here, maybe a way to split an unit from the party (as long as the party is bigger than one creature) so then they can be sent back with the prisoners, letting the rest of the force continue the assault.
By comparison, while it may be simpler, capturing village and turning people prisoners that way would probably have issues in practice. At least till the village is captured, the villagers are counted as enemy combatants and that means that many of potential prisoners would be slaughtered. Unless one would combine both methods and be able to capture villagers – turning them into static/tied/chained props who then can be collected once the village is secured in about one in-game day or they can free themselves.
As for usability of prisoners, I threw a few ideas regarding capturing people in general in some huge thread I’ve made in the past (which I don’t know whether you read or not) but in general, prisoners would be already quite essential with mana system as it is where even at the very end of the game player rarely has enough mana to invent and build everything and it’s where prisoners come in. Being able to brainwash some into joining the army would be nice too, as could be sacrificing them on the altars as per some creatures’ praying activity – possibly thus making shrine-dependant creatures to not be available for recruitment merely on the basis of one having a shrine and some luck, but also on the favor of the divine.
Also, many of the creatures one acquires seem to be coming from nowhere. What if some of them, like werewolves, some types of undeads like vampires or ghosts, magical creatures or one created through mutant-making projects would require live humanoids to be subjected to some transformation? That’d make acquiring better troops somewhat more demanding also making them worth more. Currently there’s no point to have some of them if the better version (and as I’ve mentioned in the past, some creatures are objectively much more capable than others despite not particularly greater requirements in acquisition) is available, now creating and army of better-class minions would be harder, making the prospect of keeping core group of lesser monsters more tempting despite severe population limitations.
I am kinda skeptical toward making dungeon expansion dependant on them. It’s already quite bad one has to limit their digging tendencies due to questionable geology mechanics (which I also addressed in aforementioned thread), to have it restricted even further would only drop additional restrictions of one of the main features of the game – dungeon building.
RTesterI think this should be in development subforum.
As for your question, capture chance seems to be dependant on health of the creature being captured and/or possibly its morale. In newest version I only captured one creature and it didn’t yield much mana anyway.
Fully completing research tree is impossible without capturing prisoners, at least on default “number of enemies in campaign” setting (which can be adjusted outside of the game I believe) but you can make a throne nearly straight away at the price of the mana you’d otherwise put into some technologies.
RTesterWon’t really comment much on likes/dislikes themselves as it’s just feedback and it’s natural players will have both similar idea regarding some developments as well as different wishes regarding others. I also won’t make awall of text bigger by agreeing with you agreeing with me – but I will comment on the ideas that would really detract from enjoyment for me and possibly add to the game IMHO (a very subtle, but important distinction!) :P.
As far as question goes:
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?
There’s a chance an enemy will surrender when at a very low health and/(or?) at wretched level of morale. Recently I only had one creature in a whole finished campaign give up on me – a single dwarf attacked me (apparently I’ve killed all others and just missed that one) and shortly after reaching my dungeon gave up when I carefully injured him somewhat with my weakest minions and then left him to wander around scared. After that I tortured him for 16 mana which frankly, didn’t make a difference for anything anyway so you didn’t miss much for now, with chance of getting prisoners as low as it is.
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.
What has to be mentioned though that you cannot really block anyone completely anyway since enemies can dig through walls already so there would be no risk either way. Maybe if one could make reinforced wall unbreakable by any but the naturally digging enemies like ants and minor bosses like dragons, hydras etc, it could work and still be balanced. But either way, yeah, I’d reiterate that doors themselves that are a bit sturdier would be nice.
The monster ideas are interesting though I’d go against forcing player to have certain creature or risk having whole production blocked. Maybe down the development path there’d be a way of training minions, so actual orc shaman and orc warrior would be both upgrades of regular orc, with things like blacksmith being another alternative. Same with goblin crafter that stems from regular crafter as an alternative to goblin rogue, mixing a bit of both melee and ranged fighting abilities, stealth and the skill to spot and disarm traps.
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.
There is a difference. Maybe it’s just my imagination but I’ve noticed that with swords and axes it’s far more probable that the enemy will have some limb chopped off. But yes, aside from that the weapons don’t really differ and certainly monsters themselves just choose whatever will add most to damage when equiping things.
I am wary about making any particular equipment style/mix “the best” for either offense or defense. Combination of quality of equipment and traits of the creature should be much more important so properly trained ogre with a huge magical maul he’s able to wield efficiently due to already great innate strength should be able to knock an elf with puny knives around, dual attack or not.
But having the effects of different weapons more pronounced would be nice.
Maybe sacrificing on demon altars could also summon a very powerful but temporary demon ally, like horned reaper from Dungeon Keeper.
I am unsure about that since it could lead to serious balancing issues and dungeon builds where fodder is kept for reaper’s summoning. I’d prefer just costly way to acquire such through research and whatnot, the way it is with mutated (bio-engineered) humanoids/beasts.
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.
I’d risk saying that the same way every creature should ahve some ability to increase their fighting capabilities if only through practice, so every creature able to put some armor on and knowing how to – should be able to wear it if it’s available. It’s just not everyone would be able to wear the same pieces, with goblins for example being too weak for heavier armor or two-handed weapons.
But if I had plenty of amulets, magical swords and whatnot lying around I don’t see it’d be unfair to be able to spread them around my sentient servants. After all it’s not bonus from nowhere, it’s something I crafted and fought for.
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?
That wouldn’t work. While I do believe population limits could be adjusted (increasing the cap in general but have different creatures take different amounts of pop-points) so animals are cheaper to acquire, having them just pile up as long as one has cages would completely destroy balance in the opposite direciton. After all, nothing is stopping me from building 400 cages, side by side, thorough the dungeons and then literally flood any and every danger with angry bears. Amusing, but makes all other creatures pointless since animals are ready to use as-is, no need to train or equip them so they are capable of fighting (even if it also means that they’re weaker compared to sentients who ARE trained and equipped).
I’d leave animals as they are. Or maybe instead of adjusting pop limits in general, one could have separate pop limits fo sentients and beasts? Not sure how well it’d work, I am brainstorming at this point.
I like that imps can carry anything. They’re like magical ants, carrying whole dungeon hoards on their backs!
But it does lead to two weird things – the first being me wondering why upon mining/timber-felling activities each imp just picks up some of the resource when I can possess one and carry whole forest to my storage in one trip; and the second being the situations when the player can simply possess an imp, go to faraway map and then quickly steal whatever isn’t nailed down (in enemy dungeon or whatnot). I did that to very easily defeat the default NPC keeper. One minor attack, then sending in imp to pick up everything it could, then sending the same attack force again well-knowing that whole NPC dungeon is paralyzed and any new monsters the keeper will get will be both unequipped and badly trained.
Why are there no long bows to be crafted? I would like my harpies to have an upgrade.
Lack of longer-range bows I can understand since on the scale most fights take place even short bow carries far enough (as it should be). But sure, some more powerful, magical and so on bows would be nice. After all one doesn’t need separately new technology to make iron weapons AND to work iron – the latter covers production of better melee weapons. But archery only allows creation of basic, simplest wooden bows.
