Post by Commodore Shawn in Some ideas and thoughts,

Viewing post in Some ideas and thoughts,

Hi, thanks for the suggestions.

Long term, I like the idea of ruins from long-dead civilizations that could be reclaimed. I'm not sure a Civilization style "goody hut" would make much sense in Bronze Age. I could see some discoveries leading to story events, though.
Right now combat feels like a major weak part of Bronze Age. I feel like an arena mode would just make that more obvious
Yeah, upgrading can be a bit tedious right now.
The enemies used to have limited knowledge, which resulted in them often not finding player settlements and totally ignoring you. There's a balance that needs to be hit. In the diplomacy update (2.5) the AI will get a rework and hopefully be less cheating.
More enemies are planned, a couple varieties of humans, and at least one more non-human race. I'm not sure there's much room for different types of Masklings, they're pretty basic.

I found that AI definitely knows where you are the minute you build, even though they've not seen your settlement. Especially with other maskling tribes. It seems they share knowledge with eachother, and from thereon it's just relentless attack.

Commodore Shawn6 years ago(+1)

The AI has total knowledge of the world right now.

NickLunna6 years ago(+3)

ah thats stupid

SKUNKSTUFF226 years ago (5 edits) (+3)

I've been thinking along the lines of this:

In terms of the masklings finding you, once the diplomacy update comes out there could be alliances formed between tribes, and some conversation could be exchanged about where you are. Also, I like the arena idea as a potential game mode for just practicing your strategic ability. super-small (10-hex wide) maps and placing in warbands would be a neat little feature. Also:

There should be some really advanced abandoned settlements laying about. You can capture them by simply building admin centres in the region, and it all is then yours. It can present a whole new side to "resource discovery based progression" if there are super advanced resources like Iron that can only be gotten from this one set of ruins, whose buildings are non-replaceable. Also, I feel like at the next opportunity to redo the maskling AI, it would be neat if you reworked it so that if they took control of one of your settlements, they would actually use it. Instead of just sitting there being confused, they could use your barracks to deploy archers, and use your towers to shoot your units as they attempt to reclaim your settlement.

Another potential side to this is; what if after capturing a different race's settlement and owning it for a while, you start to learn how to replicate their buildings? Say you added a new category, Experimental. If you've captured a maskling village and owned it for a while, you might get an alert saying "Your wise men have had an idea regarding Rat Riders and believe they may be able to breed them!". You will then have access to a high cost building in the experimental section, that may or may not work after you build it. Regardless, you can try again and again until you have a successful prototype, and from there can rule the map with maskling rat riders.

But the same could be true for the masklings. If they invaded your city for long enough, you could drive them out, only to discover they've begun to replicate your technology, upgrading their totems for more administration, building brickworks, and after that, walls, slowly growing to become the same kind of empire that would be capable of defeating you. I feel like this would be a neat change for the masklings. They would be far more sinister this way, going from the annoying tribal people to the annoying tribal people who will learn your technology and use it against you.

Sorry if this comment is kind of long, I just started typing and wrote a lot. Enjoying Boats and looking forward to Nobles!

P.S. (There's a small texture bug in 2.3.0 where if you place a wall at the edge of the map, it connects off to the infinite emptiness at the edge. It looks like this:

Commodore Shawn6 years ago(+2)

There are some really good ideas in here, it might take me a bit to process fully.

NickLunna6 years ago(+2)

I too agree with the abandoned empires; after having to abandon one of mine, I thought of the idea of ruined empires. It's rather cool.

Commodore Shawn6 years ago(+2)

The idea of learning technology from captured settlements got me thinking. When you capture a Maskling settlement, shouldn't it stay as a Maskling settlement? Just because you own the place doesn't mean that the Masklings forget how to train rat riders.

So idea: settlements are tied to race. The majority population of a settlement determines its race, which determines what structures can be built in it. So when you capture a Maskling camp, it stays a Maskling camp and you can build Maskling structures in it. Over time the population will get used to you ruling them, and will loose their slave status, then you can create settlers to found new Maskling camps.

This would be similar to the way the ancient Persian empire functioned. Conquering people, and just replacing the ruler, leaving other aspects of the society intact.

Or, if you're so inclined, you could migrate humans into the newly conqured camp, until the population flipped the race of the settlement. That'd be a more Roman approach.

SKUNKSTUFF226 years ago(+1)

Sounds interesting. I'm still thinking about the idea of learning other races' technology and adding it to your own, but your train of thought also seems pretty neat. What if, you had to do things to keep both cultures happy? Monuments would quell the human morale needs, but maybe the Masklings would want mini-totems all over the place? Those would be the negatives of a 2-race settlement, but maybe if it allowed you to use both structures, it would have some rewards too?

Also, maybe the more masklings you have in your empire, the better diplomacy will be. It would be neat if that was represented in the world map sidebar. It would show population, then individual race's population (If there will be more races added in the future) and the percentage of your population they make up. It could effect their opinion of laws, diplomacy - even trade could be affected if the new races brought new resources and structures to the table.

Then when the AI empire comes in, your main advantage is really that you have the technology and resources of multiple races forming one large empire, a borg-style utilization of everything you can use to bring down the enemy, who would probably just be busy destroying anything it comes into contact with.

Huw2k86 years ago

Awesome idea

itch.io

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