I think the concept is to offer a source of housing that doesn't require food production - enabling a larger city without the normally required food infrastructure. However, like most things checked-in so far, it's not balanced, just a proof of concept.
[quote]Beginning of cleanup to the tech tree[/quote] What will be the general philosophy behind the technology tree cleanup? Are we locking in the general system? Subcategories too macro? Tree structures a given? Sareln has too many questions about technology systems and should go work on something else for a moment? [e digicons]:D[/e]
Agree with comments on early mob strength, city building is tedious, and that the tech system needs to be looked at. Tech system suggestions such as typed research buildings and subcategories have their own subposts in the Elemental Ideas subforum, but we definitely need to refine those ideas more. My biggest peeve right now from a graphical issue is the borders/influence system. I don't see a very intuitive way to understand how influence circles interact with each othe
I'd like to keep the city build screen as simple as possible, personally. Too many clicks to accomplish things can get tedious after a while. If we wanted to organize the buildings in a more direct fashion, I would organize the buildings by rows. The problem is that there are some subcategories right now (metal) which don't have enough buildings to justify either a row, column, or tab. If we're worried about potential color, we could color code the menu, eg.
Play count on impulse incremented by about 20. This is actually only about 5 - 6 hours of playtime, it was a busy weekend.
I think it would be helpful to have the buildings marked with the resource they produce. Could extend to also mark (in red or something) the resources consumed. Edited screenshot attached to show the rough concept.
Road is built with caravan traffic, units move faster along them. It takes a long time right now to establish the road. Road has two levels, dirt and paved. Picture for fun:
Characteristic: With typed breakthroughs, you could push higher chances of better breakthroughs in particular subcategories. You'd want to shift the odds in such a manner that the player notices the change. Eg. my faction trait is seafaring, so when I'm researching in the seafaring subcategory of civilization, I am more likely to have moderate and dramatic successes. Another way to do typed breakthroughs are to only
A change to the typed breakthroughs and then a diagram. Success - 1 Green Technology, 1 Gray Moderate Success - 1 Green, 1 Yellow (Orange in Diagram), 1 Gray Dramatic Success - 1 Red, 1 Green, 1 Gray The idea is to always keep moving forward in the lines. Things which are grouped in a column all have the previous column as a prerequisite. Eg. Hybrid Crops & Advanced Irrigation bot
Dedicated farm cities work quite well. Especially next to that wild game slot in the middle of the map. I don't know if that's the intent, but you can indeed form a breadbasket for the empire. Trade will also enhance the amount of resources produced (at least gildar and materials, I don't know if food is included in that.)
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A possible tweak to outposts is to have the produce resources, but have to carry them back to the city before they're added to the pool. Obviously this means you can't pioneer non-stream resources (like food). This would be an automatic route, like the caravans, and produce a road, as the caravans do. This will lead to more roads, but gives a good graphical representation of where resources are going. Naturally, we would need to figure out a good low-resource way for
Fixed map won't be with us forever, but here is an idea on ramping up the early city game: +1 Materials / Turn from City Squares (Per Level Perhaps?) I find materials to be the major limiter in getting markets and libraries up quickly at the beginning of the game, which allow me to start researching and growing. Perhaps a small tweak to what generates points would help this along? I'm worried about giving too much from city centers since then we encourage more city
Summarizing the General Philosophy: Research with subcategories is supposed to reflect the player telling his research minions to solve a particular problem, and his minions coming back with a solution. It may not be the best solution, but it will help solve the problem the player asked them to solve . The system falls apart if it doesn't, because players become frustrated at their lack of control, or at least, I wou
Bettick, I didn't mean to ignore you: a wildcard might work, yes, but really, we do want the player to put some thought into which subcategory they want, and I think including a wildcard would be a touch clunky.
Alright, I've finished running around the park at night with a light up frisbee, time for me to take a crack at this. Beric01, it seemed like a good idea at the time to split the threads between name brainstorming and actual functionality. Maybe that's a bit overkill, but oh well [e digicons]:grin:[/e] . If there's one thing this subcategory system reminds me of, it's the undirected research of Alpha Centauri. This was interesting, but I don't re
[quote who="Kantok" reply="4" id="2650013"] Quoting Sareln, reply 3 Yeah, I wanted to break it out of the thread and flesh it out some more. This is for names and flavor, the other thread I just started (with a huge block quote of you) is for the idea itself. Have to run! Hell, I wasn't looking for credit. Just wanted to make sure you'd seen the other discussion.[/quote] Hah, I try to read as much as possible before posting, so
[quote who="Kantok" reply="2" id="2649889"]This is similar to what we are talking about in a beta thread on the tech trees. Here I'll be back to post more in a bit. This is an interesting topic and idea. [/quote] Yeah, I wanted to break it out of the thread and flesh it out some more. This is for names and flavor, the other thread I just started (with a huge block quote of you) is for the idea itself. Have to run!
So, saw this: [quote] Kantok: Instead of selecting your research category, waiting X amount of time, and then being presented with an array of psuedo randomly chosen technology choices I'd have the Sov. select from subcategories and then have the researchers just discover something in that category. All of prereqs and technology relations would still exist, they'd just be invisible to the player. You'd still be choosing how to specialize your society.
If we are attached to not revealing the tech tree, we definitely need to give the player finer grain control over the randomness. A suggestion I saw that I think has merit is the idea of subcategories that the player would focus on. Eg. the player directs his researchers to research Civilization, focusing on Economics. With that said, we should brainstorm both flavorful and informative sub-categories. I broke out the Civilization and Warfare trees since that's what w
Right now units scale with the zoom level so that they are easily identifiable. This is good for gameplay. Could you give us a check box in option to disable this scaling behavior so we can take epic screenshots of our empires? I think it'd be pretty neat, especially combined with playing with the strategic zoom threshold slider.
Windowed mode works for me: Win7, Core2Duo 2.33, 6.0 Gigs RAM, NVidia 8800 GTS List your system specs / link your DXDiag to give them a better idea of what the problem could be.
But does it work in multiplayer? [e digicons]O:)[/e]
[quote]In fact, I'd dig it if, while researching magic (or some such thing), something goes terribly wrong (as research does) and I hit a dead end and lose the points I spent or I get the tech but the inventor dies in a related explosion.[/quote] Sword of the Stars had an implementation for this if you were "hurrying" technology. Not such a problem if you were researching something relatively benign like lasers. A huge problem if you were researching, oh, AI. Edit:
[quote]magically induced weather.[/quote] I'm inclined for there to be tactical battle considerations for weather, but it can only come about through magic. If you want to make it an attacker's choice sort of thing, do what Total War does and give the attacker 3 chances to "wait" for weather they want.
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Finishing the quest, the finish text is blank (2 popups).