Darkodinplus

Join Date 03/2006

+20

Darkodinplus’ assessment of the beta version 0.299 (Long Post)

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For the purpose of convenience I will be breaking this post into four major categories.

Current condition of Beta 1Z
Aspects of the game I’ve found enjoyable
Aspects of the game I’ve found un-enjoyable
Suggestions for improvements / expansion

1. Current condition

The beta definitely has a lot of problems most of which are technical problems such as crashing. The first 19 or so games I’ve tried to play ended with a hard crash (blue screen & reboot) with the occasional soft crash (CTD). Fortunately I found a way to stop my hard crashing problem. It seems I only have hard crashes when the full screen option is checked in the video portion of the options menu. I no longer have any hard crashes and the stability of the game has increased dramatically. I still crash if I queue up too many buildings and of course the random crash is always a concern but a soft crash is far easier to deal with than the non-stop hard crashes I was having.

I’m hoping the stability update estimated to be here sometime this week will allow me to complete a game at my open pace instead of rushing to get things done before a crash. The save gamed functionality has so far worked perfectly for me so no complaints there.

The way text is layered is a minor problem. Currently some text in the background is appearing in the foreground thus making the text you would like to read somewhat difficult. There are also some path finding issues and the like that I’m sure everyone is already aware. Overall Beta 1Z isn’t a total quagmire and from my point of view once the crashes are dealt with 1Z will be in pretty good shape.

2. Aspects of the game I like

Even though the graphics engine is disabled and the AI doesn’t present any challenge whatsoever I’ve found equipping, training, and naming soldiers extremely entertaining. Now that I don’t hard crash when I try to open up the unit designer I’m spending probably about 1/3 of my time in game designing units. This will be ridiculously awesome once the graphics engine is turned on and the AI or multiplayer enemies can send large assault forces against one another.

I also like how the current resource system is working. I haven’t had the chance to get any metal or gems but this aspect seems very solid to me game-play wise. Quests are progressing nicely. They still need a bit of work both technically and polish wise but their potential is really visible. I haven’t had the pleasure of trying out any dungeons yet but I’m 95% sure I’m going to love them if they are like (loosely) entering an instance for an MMO.

3. Aspects of the game I didn’t like

4. Suggestions

My first suggestion is really more of a wish but I’d love to see some kind of “challenge to duel” option in the diplomacy window. That way sovereigns could have an epic one on one battle to decide the fate of the world or perhaps something less dramatic. More on that can be found here.

Have you considered making gardens and farms produce so much food per turn which would go into a global stockpile and population would consume this food? Now the total population of your nation is dependant on how many people you can feed while the player could decide where he wants to build shelter to increase a specific city’s population. I like the idea of population being based on food as well as how much shelter you can provide.

Of course you would need to make food storage limited if this was done otherwise a player could just stockpile a huge amount of food. During a siege a city would stop receiving food from the global supply and could be starved out if something isn’t done to break the siege. You could even make housing not only cost gold and material but require the player to be producing X amount of food so you don’t end up with more people in your city then what you could feed.

I’d really like to see more options for sovereign and race customization at some point in time. I’d like to see a variety of hair, beard, and clothing from various cultures made available so not everyone has the typical medieval european look. I’d also like to see the options to adjust height, weight, and eye color of a population and or sovereign.

Would it be possible to include armor (damage reduction) and evasion (avoid attack) in the stat system opposed to just defense being the catch all? Having armor and evasion is preferable to just defense in my opinion.

The ability to assign quests to troops would be cool as well. Since the sovereign is essentially king it is slightly absurd for him to always go and deal with quests himself. Being able to send a party or company of soldiers to complete quests should also be an option. Perhaps there could be a prompt after a quest is accepted if the sovereign will handle the quest personally or delegate it to a squad.

The monsters roaming the world could use a notable increase in aggressiveness. If a player is several tiles away I wouldn’t expect a troll to come charging but if you moved within one tile instead of a troll or black widow just standing there I would expect it to attack.

I hope I didn’t go on for too long but I wanted to give as detailed feedback as I could for this game.

elemental

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Quoting ,

quoting post

I’m not a huge fan of the current housing / food model. I don’t mind food being a global resources but it feels unnatural for a garden or farm to essentially provide a one time increase in food. I’m also rather disappointed that defense is a catch all for armor and evasion. The diplomacy was also pretty bare bones although I suspect this will be corrected in the days to come.

Have you considered making gardens and farms produce so much food per turn which would go into a global stockpile and population would consume this food? Now the total population of your nation is dependant on how many people you can feed while the player could decide where he wants to build shelter to increase a specific city’s population. I like the idea of population being based on food as well as how much shelter you can provide.

Of course you would need to make food storage limited if this was done otherwise a player could just stockpile a huge amount of food. During a siege a city would stop receiving food from the global supply and could be starved out if something isn’t done to break the siege. You could even make housing not only cost gold and material but require the player to be producing X amount of food so you don’t end up with more people in your city then what you could feed.

You kind of covered why the food stockpile thing isn't done on your own. Food is a "perishable" resource, it's got a limited shelf life. The current model for it is that the food resource you see at the top is excess production. It's food you can grow but don't need. So to "use" it, you're just increasing the size of your population to eat that food. The last line in particular that I quoted is exactly how the current system works. If the food number is > 0, you have excess food and can grow your cities.

It takes a bit of getting used to, but it actually works pretty well.

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I too like the new food/housing system, although I wish my games would last long enough that I could research Civilization heavily and start testing out how complex high population economies work.

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Accidentally double posted.

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Yes they explained it the food and housing is already explained by poster above me. And race customization and clothing etc. is for later when they enable the empire as well as make more touches.

Also their considering reequipping the sov to change appearence *armor weapons etc.* so yes oh and of course you can customize your entire empire/kingdoms people from races to colors etc.

Also their going to allow high moddability.

The A.I isn't on fully yet this is why creatures are not aggressive.

One thing to note when beta testing this is an EARLY Beta do not expect so much so quickly.

Finally to address one last thing your mention of MMO style dungeons...I sure hope not I hope they do it old school RPG like Baldur's gate style MMO games lack depth and feel when you compare them to the older RPG's and even to newer one's.

I mean no offense to you with my reply and i know i may have misunderstood or seemed to be mean when stating things such as the A.I i know you mentioned the A.I i'm simply reaffirming that that is the reason indeed why creatures are not aggressive.

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I don't really like how they handle food and population too. Using food to support housing is kinda lame as you could have a ton of empty houses that are using up food?!? That doesn't make any sense. Also R&D increases the amount of people that can fit into a house so you magically get more people for less food? Does housing tech included a diet program? Must be cause their getting thinner they can fit more people in the same space hehe.

I do like the global aspect of food though but I think it should be used to support the population not the amount of houses which are two different things. Food production and population would actually be more closely linked as right now many population buildings such as huts, houses, and villas all have the same food cost. Which doesn't make much sense as usually nicer and larger houses hold people who prefer to eat more food. But that's just some of my ideas which I'll go more indepth in a later post.

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Here is my quintessential problem with the current housing / food system.

In this game I built 4 farms thus giving me a total food amount of 12 (3 X 4). I then built 3 houses and destroyed 3 of the 4 farms. My population however continued to increase despite my food amount being -9.

As you can see my starting city was able to go from LV 1 to LV 2 despite clearly not having enough food to feed everyone. If food was the limiting factor for the population of my city I would have had a negative growth rate to the point where my city’s population was within the number of people the solitary farm could feed.

The current system just makes gardens, farms, etc seem pointless since after you get your cities to LV 5 or whatever LV you want you can go back and destroy all the farms & gardens thus freeing up tiles for structures that provide a constant bonus. One would think farms and gardens in a post apocalyptic world would be extremely valuable and high priority targets. In the current system however if someone had a city with essentially nothing but farms / gardens losing such a city would have no real impact on the player unless they hadn’t spent their food supplies yet.

After thinking about this a bit more and reading some of the responses I think it might be a good idea to remove player built housing all together. By this I mean the player would only be responsible for designating X number of tiles (and their locations) per city LV which could only be used as residential land. Farms and gardens would provide X amount of food per turn (which wouldn’t stockpile globally) and your city's population would be directly controlled by how much food was available with the citizens themselves building and upgrading their homes to match their income (AKA have logically placed low, medium, and high income housing within the residential tiles).

A few alterations would have to be made to some building such as the granary. Instead of increasing a % of the food it could increase food production. The research of improved housing really wouldn’t need to be changed just a visual graphic to show more people can now live in the same area of land. Some type of food storage building might need to be introduced to allow a city to keep so much food on hand in case of emergencies like sieges or the destruction of a major food producing city.

At any rate this is my opinion on the subject.

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Well population should eat food i do agree.

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It's pretty obvious that population loss due to negative food isn't implemented yet.

As to the other point... yeah, it would make more sense if food worked on population instead of housing instead, but at the end of the day the results are similar. If you can build houses, your population will grow. The feedback is just faster this way. If you tie it to people instead of houses, you'll build houses, and the food level won't change until those houses fill with people (which takes some time). So you might go build more houses, then discover you built too many and the last three are going to stay empty.

It works out the same if you do it both ways, but tying it to housing just tells you where you stand more quickly. So in that sense it's pretty nice.

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As brought to my attention by another topic (found here) I believe changes should be made to prestige and population in addition to food and housing. I understand your point Tridus but I feel a significantly more meaningful system could be implemented that would both feel natural and provide greater strategic depth.

Population- Population should control the total productivity of a city. With the base population for a city’s LV used as 100% (AKA no penalties to production). A city let’s say needs 250 people to reach LV 2 if this LV 2 city’s population falls below 250 the current population (170) divided by 250 would give you the total productivity (170/250 = 68%) of this particular city. Now the city would produce things 32% slower then a city that was 250/250. No positive bonus would be introduced for having more than the base number of people required.

Housing- Housing as I suggested before shouldn’t be directly controlled by the player. The player should assign tiles of his choosing to be residential land. These tiles could house X number of people with research available to increase how many people can live in a given tile. As population moved into the city people would construct their own homes. The player would have a major decision about how many tiles he should flag as residential each city LV since that would be one of the limiting factors on a city’s population.

Food- Food as stated before should have a per turn income which controls how many people your nation as a whole can support. Food would be a global resource but it wouldn’t stockpile globally. If a nation is producing more food then what its population consumes the population can increase. If on the other hand you have more people than what you can feed the nation’s population will drop. A building would be added to allow individual cities to store a reasonable amount of food for emergencies like a siege or the loss of a major food producing city.

Prestige- Prestige should provide a productivity bonus to a population in addition to controlling how many people want to move there each turn. For an example let’s say every point of prestige granted a 1% productivity bonus to every 200 citizens to a max of 20%. So if your city had 5 prestige and 1000 citizens everything produced, built, or earned in the city would increase by 5%. I also think prestige should be harder to increase.

City Level- I’m pretty sure this will be changed eventually but I’ll say it anyway. The city levels should require more population to advance in level. The last level should also have a soft cap where your total population can continue to increase to a point. So in my proposed system if you got a city to LV 5 that city’s final population would be equivalent to the number of residential tiles X 1000 X prestige at that moment (to a max of 20). Example, if one my LV 4 city just advanced to LV 5 and I ended up having 9 residential tiles and a current prestige of 11 this particular city’s maximum population would be 9 X 1000 X 11 which equals 99,000. Perhaps once you get a city to LV 5 your residential tiles could automatically support this soft cap limit leaving the player to only be concerned about having enough food.

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Good work on sticking with the beta so determinedly. I wouldn't have been able to discover all these issues because I get worn out and discouraged by all the crashing and restarting. I need a working autosave, or else I can't even begin to express how I think things are progressing.

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"Population- Population should control the total productivity of a city. With the base population for a city’s LV used as 100% (AKA no penalties to production). A city let’s say needs 250 people to reach LV 2 if this LV 2 city’s population falls below 250 the current population (170) divided by 250 would give you the total productivity (170/250 = 68%) of this particular city. Now the city would produce things 32% slower then a city that was 250/250. No positive bonus would be introduced for having more than the base number of people required."

This could create some situations where a Productive City, special Built, that supplies other Cities their special needs, that then needs to be tapped for Armed forces and thus butchers that Cities Productivity and defeating the reason it was specialized in the first place.

We don't want to face a game play mechanic that directly offsets the building of Specialized Cities, for 3/4 of the game, only to have to burn them down, suck the productivity out of them, in order to defend the Realm.

I don't totally disagree with the premise but would urge caution when coming up with the math, if it gets implemented.

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Quoting John_Hughes,

reply 11

"Population- Population should control the total productivity of a city. With the base population for a city’s LV used as 100% (AKA no penalties to production). A city let’s say needs 250 people to reach LV 2 if this LV 2 city’s population falls below 250 the current population (170) divided by 250 would give you the total productivity (170/250 = 68%) of this particular city. Now the city would produce things 32% slower then a city that was 250/250. No positive bonus would be introduced for having more than the base number of people required."

This could create some situations where a Productive City, special Built, that supplies other Cities their special needs, that then needs to be tapped for Armed forces and thus butchers that Cities Productivity and defeating the reason it was specialized in the first place.

We don't want to face a game play mechanic that directly offsets the building of Specialized Cities, for 3/4 of the game, only to have to burn them down, suck the productivity out of them, in order to defend the Realm.

I don't totally disagree with the premise but would urge caution when coming up with the math, if it gets implemented.

I would say that if you need to tap for Armed Forces in a city that is specialized, then you have not well played. You want a really productive city ? Just prepare yourself for that : you should do whatever you need to avoid building units in that city.

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Frogboy

Join Date 03/2001

+2415

Great stuff. I'm pleased to see that we're starting to get far enough along that we're moving towards the game itself.

Just remember, until beta 3, everything is up in the air. Beta 1 and 2 are about putting in the plumbing for the features and making sure they work without formatting your hard drive.

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Quoting vieuxchat,

reply 12

The original poster didn't really define "productivity" - what if it includes "speed at which you train units"? I think that's the problem John foresees; if your unit production is tied to population, but training units drains population.. well, we've got a problem. Now your best unit producing city shoots itself in the foot when it actually trains soldiers, and quickly loses its production ability. I think that's the opposite of the direction we want to go in - it would punish players who take some effort and planning to create a specialized unit production city, and rewards players who just build a ton of generic cities that can each slowly train a few units, thus spreading out the population/production loss.

By the way, I do agree that population should be more meaningful; right now it doesn't seem to do much aside from bumping your city up to the next level occasionally and giving you warm bodies to convert into soldiers. I would like to see population provide some kind of direct benefit, but you do have to be careful what kind of benefit that is - linking gold production to population would be great, you could create specialized tax-generating cities that boost their population as high as possible and never need to train soldiers. But linking unit production to population would be frustrating, for the reasons already mentioned.

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Well Austinvn, Brad has already said population will be tied to unit production so it only seems natural to me that if you go crazy recruiting people there should be a major penalty incurred for the city. I believe Brad already has something in mind in regards to this but he hasn't said what exactly.

The only real problem I see with a system like this would be coming up with reasonable math to support it. I concede that having 100% of a base population for a city to be 100% productive might cause problems. Mainly in a situation where a city just leveled up but you need to immediately start training a legion or something. So making the 100% city productivity mark at 97% of the base population or maybe even lower could be a good idea.

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Darkodinplus’ assessment of the beta version 0.299 (Long Post)

Darkodinplus’ assessment of the beta version 0.299 (Long Post)

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