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Easy naval fix, every map must have tons of canals, inlets, and fjords. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lL60NUGrOFw
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Apr 17, 2023 06:32
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moot the hopple posted:Easy naval fix, every map must have tons of canals, inlets, and fjords. Alternatively, desert planets with no water.
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Apr 17, 2023 06:38
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Hiveminded posted:Alright. First: still disagree. To clarify explicitly, I think your suggested system of a new, separate production pool for naval has negligible opportunity cost and introduces by default a strong pressure to use that extra production. If there are things that need to be taken or objectives achieved on the water, sites or missions that provide energy/gold, then having a dedicated production queue for water units means there will be far more water units in circulation for every faction -- because, of course, more units means more clearing means more rewards means more units. (Unless the water is so completely barren and useless you wouldn't want to make any naval units at all in the first place, in which case it might as well not exist.) If there are tons of naval units on the waters and free production to spam out more, there will be a lot more naval poo poo going on across the board. This what I'm getting at by saying "forced to engage in the naval side-game." And the naval game is just inferior to the land one, on both the tactical and greedy-imperialist-that-wants-to-open-the-goody-hut/indie-site-lootbox strategic layers. I'm not trying to completely fix things and make everything perfect though. My goal is, better that what came before in some specific ways while not being significantly worse in others. I agree with you re: richer map and so on. I'm not sure what any of the bashing of water areas has to do with anything so I won't address it. I want to keep the AoW navy game mostly intact, this is really just a tweak to balance out some player choices in a few specific situations - you built a navy for some reason, now that reason is done, what do you do? Disband, keep clearing, or invest more and clear? Right now disband is a poo poo option and I think there's room to make it not a poo poo option without upsetting much else. I don't even need these options to be equal, I just want them closer together. Make the poo poo option not poo poo, give the player interesting choices, this is bog standard 4X design stuff. So, unlike ground units - naval units can be refunded if the player chooses. Now disband is not a poo poo option and the two other options are still good too, mission accomplished. If we consider PvP without any PvE considerations, navies are just... weird. Building a navy is a counter move to... the other player building a navy. Unless your navy gets bypassed, in which case it's a completely sunk cost and having it could cost you the game, because that's investment you can't get back and spend on non-naval units. Solution: you can get that money back and spend it on something else. Complete perfect fix? No. Better? I think so, and you've yet to give a good reason why not. Then there's the decision to build a navy or not. If you do, you're building a unit that is restricted to where it can go and what it can do in a way no other unit is, so all things being equal no player would do this. On the other hand, what if navies were extremely cheap? Now it's not a real choice again, but in the other direction. We saw this play out with AOWPF at launch vs right now. Solution: if you no longer need a naval unit, you can remove it from the game for a refund and replace it with something else, like a ground unit. The refund and production decoupling system I have proposed solves all of these issues, I believe. Spamming naval units? No, ground units and naval units would both still cost energy/gold, changing naval units to a deposit wouldn't change this, nor would different production resources make naval unit production free, or opportunity costs negligible. You deposit money to use that special naval production, that's money you can't spend on anything else. It's literally an opportunity cost. You can get that money back, but only by disbanding the unit - that destroys the production, which is fine - there is a reason that production is special and can only be used for naval units. The players aren't being given anything they need to use or waste, they get a choice of what to spend their energy on. I'm just making that choice a little more interesting by turning one specific sunk cost into something you can divest and pivot onto something else with, if you choose to. Once the cost systems are decoupled in this way then the energy deposit cost is free to be balanced until it feels right, probably roughly to where it was before they made PF navy units extremely cheap compared to an equivalent ground unit.
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Apr 17, 2023 07:45
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Lowen posted:Spamming naval units? I'll spell it out more directly. There are of course two primary costs to every unit -- production and energy/gold. (Cosmite and more abstract costs too, but they're not relevant to this point.) If you're giving a separate production queue for building naval units that doesn't detract from other forms of production, then that's literally free production, leaving energy/gold as the only cost for naval construction. And if the only cost is energy/gold, that means there's an incentive to be building these free-production navies to clear sites for more gold, items, city bonuses, etc. That is the basic more units-->more clears/rewards-->more units loop. If there are still sites to efficiently clear on the water, it is counterproductive to not be building more naval units. And if you happen to take out any enemy heroes or amphibious/land units on the water with your disproportionately cost-efficient navies, that's just pure gain. Spamming out ships/aquatics for as long as you have the energy surplus to support it would be the mandatory move. This directly leads to a lot more activity on the oceans for everyone, and it's especially exacerbated by the full refund element. If you have no objections to the current implementation of naval combat and related mechanics, then I guess that particular aspect of more naval poo poo happening isn't really a downside. But I personally don't find naval combat as engaging as land battles, so more of that particular naval side-game in campaigns is pretty much a downside to me. More generally, I'm not a fan of that kind of non-choice being shoved in. You *must* build your free-production fully-refundable ships and auto-lob them at the space whales, or god forbid you'll miss out on *profit* (unless again there is no profit in the water in which case this entire tangent is pointless and we might as well replace every tile of sea with sandy space Sahara instead)
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Apr 17, 2023 08:59
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Age of Wonders 3 did a decent job with water stuff. There were mermaids, Kraken's and those weird Davy Jones ghost things. There were dwellings and treasure sites. I think it was pretty serviceable all things considered. I'd have loved to see a dedicated "maratime" expansion for AoW3 with an underwater layer. I think they could've pulled it off. What Amplitude did with Endless Legend was great though, they made those sea fortresses so good that you had to engage a bit with the naval stuff, because otherwise you'd miss out big style. I think what is clear is to make the naval stuff truly integrated with the ~ main game, it needs a lot of heft behind it that small additions here and there can't deliver on. The 4x games that have done it well imo have all basically had to devote an expansion towards it. (Tempest and Rising tide are my favourites). I am definitely a bit of a sucker for the occasional naval focused run on whatever my current 4x of choice is, so I'd really like to see AoW4 take a few steps into the water in the future. Based on all Triumphs previous expansion's and DLC, I feel pretty confident whatever they deliver will be good though, Eternal Lords was one of the best drops of all time. Necromancer, Frostings and Tigrans. Amazing.
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Apr 17, 2023 09:11
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The world generation settings shown with the ability to generate barren dry oceans seem appealing to me as a way of generating buffer terrain which units can still traverse and contest to some degree.
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Apr 17, 2023 09:12
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Lowen posted:I'm not trying to completely fix things and make everything perfect though. My goal is, better that what came before in some specific ways while not being significantly worse in others. And that's ignoring that you can load most land units up on a (literally?) magically spawned ship anyway while squids on hoverboards are criminally underrepresented. Making the water a rich font of easily accessible resources to feed back into the more important land combat is fine and dandy, but from a strategic point of view that's still just a gameplay sideloop whose output is more and better land units. The more attention the player needs to put into it the more fun it has to be and the more tightly integrated it has to be into defending/improving/taking cities. And unfortunately "fun" is highly variable, so one person's "rewarded for investing in naval combat" is another player's "being pulled away from the good bits to baby the non-optional big blue gold mine". I should say the latter is not my actual attitude toward ocean combat, and I think a separate ocean build queue isn't the worst idea in the world. But just dropping that into Planetfall, AoW III, and (probably, based on what we've seen of) IV would make naval play mandatory*, no matter how you fiddled the numbers, which without better integrating naval units into the rest of the game would make things much worse for a lot of players if they're already not hugely enthused about the naval game. *unless you made it so unproductive that even complete dominance was only a minor advantage which entirely defeats the purpose, and there's no real middle ground. It could maybe work if the whole game had separate build queues per production source - maybe building a spearman or a horseman is 5 + 20 progress a turn but if you have both buildings in the one city you can build both at 15 production to each. But then you have to have some way to prioritise certain buildings over others when you want to... ahh, neat idea but probably not worth the effort. Splicer fucked around with this message at 11:34 on Apr 17, 2023 |
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Apr 17, 2023 11:29
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You know what fuckit, just go the pokemon route and make the sea units hover over land, make that kraken able to join the underground siege! Just slap a penalty on them like land units heading over to the sea gets and boom done. Next make sea cities a thing, either just floating on weird inflatable islands or plain on the bottom. Or make seabottom cities a civic and floaty cities the standard slightly worse option like subterranean races vs non-subterranean races. If you invest in sea-based units they can later help with land invasions, and land based units work as they already do. Amphibians still have a niche not getting penalized anywhere. I just hammered this out on lunch so there might a be small issue or two I haven't considered in this otherwise foolproof design, hire me Triumph studios. (I just really want a floaty baby kraken being adorable  )
Noir89 fucked around with this message at 12:01 on Apr 17, 2023 |
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Apr 17, 2023 11:48
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Obviously, what's needed here is a half-track fish tank with guns. 
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Apr 17, 2023 11:56
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my dad posted:Obviously, what's needed here is a half-track fish tank with guns. Whales inside giant water balloons than bounce across the land and pop when the unit is killed.
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Apr 17, 2023 12:03
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Hell yeah we do, now were talking! Make it the "landship" of sea based cultures and get an embark penalty when heading out to sea! edit: Bouncy whale suicide balloons would be awesome as a necromancer synergy. Pop them on a unit for massive damage and spawn a bone golem instantly from it!
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Apr 17, 2023 12:03
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Noir89 posted:You know what fuckit, just go the pokemon route and make the sea units hover over land, make that kraken able to join the underground siege! Just slap a penalty on them like land units heading over to the sea gets and boom done. Next make sea cities a thing, either just floating on weird inflatable islands or plain on the bottom. Or make seabottom cities a civic and floaty cities the standard slightly worse option like subterranean races vs non-subterranean races. And again I really want sea units that reinforce into land battles. Oh hey you've got a war whale offshore? That's a random crab tail-shot onto the battlefield every round starting round 2.
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Apr 17, 2023 12:21
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Being a bit more serious something like that would be something I would love, but I am a bit biased since I have always found sea creatures fascinating and really cool and they are usually relegated to very minor roles in games for reasons already brought up in the thread. So anything that makes them more relevant is more fun for me, but I can also fully understand that for a lot of people having to care about the seas can be really annoying and it doesn't help that they often are the worst/most slapped on design of these types of games(Looking at you Total War series). I was mostly joking but having the sea be a mirrored land would be fun for flavour but is a lot of extra work and risks for balance issues as a cost. Ideally in my idea the sea would be roughly the same value as land, and you have sea-based civs that have "landships" that are roughly as good as normal land units and normal land civs boats etc are roughly as good as a sea based unit if that makes sense? The embark/float on land penalties for being out of the prefered type for a unit would be so that even if they are suboptimal they can be used everywhere, so you don't end up with eg sea-locked units not being able to do anything anymore. Sorry if this is rambly!
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Apr 17, 2023 12:34
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Attach a bunch of water-to-land options to a bunch of tomes and civics. Tome of Rock? Swim in the ground. Tome of Cryomancy? Swim in the air. Tome of Souls? Real easy for your turtles to get around when they don't need to breath or use muscles. Tome of Water (which doesn't exist yet)? Big water bubble. Tome of Beasts? Grant Lungs. Tome of Roots? Summon Seaweed. Tome of warding/enchantment/evocation? They're literally just tome of <magic>, pretty much anything fits. Industrious civic? Exoskeletons. Mystic? See tomes. Etc etc etc. You can build an empire with no way to get your water units onto land, but that's really a personal choice by that point. Noir89 posted:Being a bit more serious something like that would be something I would love, but I am a bit biased since I have always found sea creatures fascinating and really cool and they are usually relegated to very minor roles in games for reasons already brought up in the thread. And yeah making the sea too much of a mental investment is risky, especially when water is often used to focus areas of conflict rather than be one. Which is again part of the problem - there's not a lot of ways to give the water's surface meaningful "terrain" at the overworld level, so if ocean has equal importance and exploitability to land then a map with a lot of water is basically a map which is mostly flat plains, so no pinch points or ambushes. Though I suppose you could simulate mountains with surface currents, rough shallows, reef and rocks chains (or economically useless island chains depending on scale)... but again, you're losing the biggest tool in the "big map with small conflict areas" toolkit. I think sea cities could definitely work though. Just make them only economically viable in areas with a lot of clustered resources so spamming the ocean isn't viable. Give them high upkeep or little to no passive production but dropping one beside 3+ nodes is a no brainer. Even dropping that wholesale into AoW III with no other changes would have made the navy game more fun for me. Splicer fucked around with this message at 13:05 on Apr 17, 2023 |
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Apr 17, 2023 13:02
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Splicer posted:Attach a bunch of water-to-land options to a bunch of tomes and civics. Tome of Rock? Swim in the ground. Tome of Cryomancy? Swim in the air. Tome of Souls? Real easy for your turtles to get around when they don't need to breath or use muscles. Tome of Water (which doesn't exist yet)? Big water bubble. Tome of Beasts? Grant Lungs. Tome of Roots? Summon Seaweed. Tome of warding/enchantment/evocation? They're literally just tome of <magic>, pretty much anything fits. The terrain is a good point, and it would be hard to make it be more impactfull than tiny areas and still look good, maybe something with currents like the gulf stream could be used to simulate it? Underwater volcanic activity, kelp forests, drifting flora like algae or kelp?
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Apr 17, 2023 13:21
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Hiveminded posted:I'll spell it out more directly. There are of course two primary costs to every unit -- production and energy/gold. (Cosmite and more abstract costs too, but they're not relevant to this point.) If you're giving a separate production queue for building naval units that doesn't detract from other forms of production, then that's literally free production, leaving energy/gold as the only cost for naval construction. And if the only cost is energy/gold, that means there's an incentive to be building these free-production navies to clear sites for more gold, items, city bonuses, etc. That is the basic more units-->more clears/rewards-->more units loop. Stop giving the status quo special treatment! Critique the way things are, using the same standards you use to critique changes! If you do not care to ask WHY you "don't find naval combat as engaging as land battles" and how that might be improved - then you can't contribute anything to a proposed change without being muddled and contradictory. Alternatively, just play on land maps. Lowen fucked around with this message at 17:35 on Apr 17, 2023 |
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Apr 17, 2023 17:17
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I like the naval units can go on land with the same penalties as when land units are on water option. It's a bigger penalty than it is the other way around, so I think it might be enough to make the units balanced as is (for Planetfall in particular, since we haven't seen enough to judge balance in AoW4). I wonder how hard it would be to make a mod that does this...
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Apr 17, 2023 17:21
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It would probably be pretty easy to mod, at least for basic functionality. Tag all naval units as amphibious, nerf their base stats, and give some sort of buff on Ocean terrain. I can't agree tho. We already had 'naval units go on land' in Planetfall - the Psi Fish were the naval minor faction and all their poo poo floated for this exact reason. We don't need it *all* to be amphib. If anything, thats less interesting, since to be balanced you will then need to increase the costs or debuff the stats of naval units compared to Planetfall, where they were very strong for their cost. Water zones as strategic terrain and adventure areas is just fine. It was not difficult to reap enormous Water Profits in Planetfall with 5 basic naval units and a floating/flying/swimming hero. Water zones had lots of loot sites that were close together and easy to access, and anything in range of a city was typically more profitable than equivalent land sites. But it wasn't so good as to be mandatory, like it was in say Endless Legend, whose water system i found irritating for this reason.
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Apr 17, 2023 17:32
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A series of tutorial videos have been going up on YouTube. The broader strokes are probably all pretty familiar for series vets, but there's some interesting new stuff about the details, at least after the first video. Faction creation - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRTXwMeejg4 Realm setup - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qpy46hYlASM Tomes - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sww0qewO2gg Units, unit enchantments and transformations - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Af1K5UOFkw0
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Apr 17, 2023 18:05
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Lowen posted:Stop giving the status quo special treatment! Critique the way things are, using the same standards you use to critique changes! Nothing I've said has been contradictory. It's a pretty straightforward chain of cause-and-effect that just giving the player a bunch of extra naval production will lead to more naval interactions without actually doing anything to make those interactions more interesting or significant in terms of strategic choices. I don't think the game is improved by increasing the sheer quantity of unit movements and battles you have to get through in a single turn, irrespective of the actual quality of the implementation of water stuff in planetfall. I already know why I don't find naval combat as engaging as land battles, and it's plainly enough the case for everyone that I didn't see it as needing elaboration. The effective unit roster is smaller (and by extension, there are fewer abilities/mechanics in play), there is less diversity in terrain and an associated lack of significant mechanics like cover, and the rewards and stakes for winning the combat are relatively trivial. The system you've suggested worsens the status quo, it doesn't improve anything unless navies doing things on the water for the sake of navies doing things on the water is seen as a good thing by itself. Making those things more interesting and relevant, tactically and strategically, is the ideal for making naval construction a more interesting and appealing choice to the player. Or, as has been said already multiple times, fix the status quo by axing huge bodies of water and navies entirely, instead of diverting development resources to an inferior side space.
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Apr 17, 2023 19:21
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TheDeadlyShoe posted:It would probably be pretty easy to mod, at least for basic functionality. Tag all naval units as amphibious, nerf their base stats, and give some sort of buff on Ocean terrain. Fair enough to this. Agreed on the balance issues involved with making everything amphibious. I didn't have the same experience with water in Planetfall; it often felt to me that attrition on water clearing stacks was more frequent than for my land stacks, and frequently I found myself with the preference of just expanding towards another faction and rushing it down instead with the tempo provided by an extra land stack. But I've also sunk far more hours into certain species/secret techs than others, so if other people have had different experiences on the profitability and "reward feel" of interacting with water, it could very well just be an emergent difference in playstyle and faction strengths/weaknesses. I found myself liking Endless Legend's implementation of water because it complemented EL's focus on faction playstyle diversity and exploration, and as a continuation of the quality (for the most part) of the mechanics, events/rewards, and map relevance of land zones; it never felt half-assed, and I also didn't feel punished in the games where I did neglect it in favour of focusing more on killing poo poo on land. But I'm also probably disproportionately fond of it in the more abstract sense of it feeling like a successful implementation of a relevant mid-game "colonialism" phase, which 4x games in its mold have been struggling for decades to manage.
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Apr 17, 2023 19:53
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Hiveminded posted:Nothing I've said has been contradictory. It's a pretty straightforward chain of cause-and-effect that just giving the player a bunch of extra naval production will lead to more naval interactions without actually doing anything to make those interactions more interesting or significant in terms of strategic choices. I don't think the game is improved by increasing the sheer quantity of unit movements and battles you have to get through in a single turn, irrespective of the actual quality of the implementation of water stuff in planetfall. You keep flip flopping between saying things like land vs naval balance is best when water provinces are worth a lot, and then in the next post you say players should not be incentivized to build navies because they just might not want to. That's one contradiction I keep seeing, there are others. But never mind that, I don't care. You can sort that out yourself. ... You can just play land maps. You can do that now. What is there to fix from your perspective? The fix you say you want is already in the game. Why do you care what happens on a map with water, you can just not play them. It is entirely up to you what you enjoy or don't. But it could have saved both you and me some time if you just simply stated: "I personally do not want naval units in the game and want some way of removing them" Instead I got a lot of rambling contradictory posts claiming to find substantial flaws with my idea and had to figure out what the hell you were talking about.
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Apr 17, 2023 20:18
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Having naval units their own production line and fully refundable removes any strategic choice from the equation. You'd pretty much always want to build them and if you ever need the money back you just disband them. Strategy games aint interesting if there is always one good choice. Having water be rewarding if you opt in but not required isn't necessarily contradictory. Also, give people the benefit of the doubt and assume the issue is with communication and not them flip-flopping, being intellectually dishonest, or contradictory.
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Apr 17, 2023 20:46
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Look, the clear solution is to make Age of Wonders: Seafall. The player lands on an oceanic planet that’s about 10% land on the surface and 90% water. You bring back the many z-levels (sea-levels) of AoW1, the orbital (or cloud if you go fantasy) layer of Beyond Earth, and make land combat the afterthought. And as a bonus, you bring in the Fallen London writers for the world building (but not the sunless sea combat and eco). I’m mostly being a smartass, but I think approaching a 4xof sorts/TBS from the sea up has potential, like your food source being half sustainable and half nomadic schools of fish, sonar, sunlight shallows vs geothermal energy from the depths, Homeworld-style combat… if you wanted something more AoW-style, I suppose there’s the Terror From the Deep angle, but I really lack the imagination. From the fantasy angle, controlling the land would be about controlling the birthing grounds for your turtles and dire penguins, or fortress cities for humanoids. Worst case scenario is actually Anno 2205, not Total War, imo
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Apr 17, 2023 20:52
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KPC_Mammon posted:Having naval units their own production line and fully refundable removes any strategic choice from the equation. You'd pretty much always want to build them and if you ever need the money back you just disband them. Strategy games aint interesting if there is always one good choice. Re: game design, you aren't saying anything that hasn't already been said, so why are you even posting this? Obviously I do not agree that it removes strategic choice, but If I start arguing with you from the exact same point, then we'll just end up in the same place. So I'm just not going to. If someone has something new to say about the idea, then feel free to share. I promise that I'm acting in good faith and just want to know if someone can point out a flaw to me, or if they like the idea and think it might work. Or everyone can just ignore me, that's fine too. Also, I would appreciate it if you took your own advice and did not assume that *I* am acting in bad faith. I believe Hiveminded is completely honest in their critique, and that we're just grappling with some complicated issues that require really nailing down what you want, what your goals are, what you like and you don't like. It is very easy to talk about game design and end up saying things that are flip-floppy and contradictory when you haven't spent the time to figure things out for yourself, which I think is why I've been so uhh.. Harsh recently, responding to them. Am I responding in a constructive way? That's my goal, and I think I made the correct move, you may disagree.
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Apr 17, 2023 21:25
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I never build boats in pf because it's very disruptive to tempo for mild economic gains over investing those resources into land. I don't know if that's necessarily a bad thing as getting established in the sea should probably require a heavy upfront initial investment, but when the reward is +20% better economy 20 turns later it's hard to want to do that, especially as I tend to play more rush-focused. If you want players to go in the water, you gotta give them a compelling reason to be there. Water cosmite nodes in pf giving +3 cosmite over regular nodes was a good step towards considering going out into the water due to the high value of cosmite as a resource (the few times I have built boats were for this reason, though ultimately I have always regretted it). I kinda think the solution is to make limited resources much more plentiful in the water (maybe water cosmite node spawn rate could have been doubled?) or, potentially, giving water unique resources or unique access to particular war assets (like the water dwelling in 3 giving you unique and powerful units you could then bring onto land to improve your land conquest). Some kind of way to better burn resources to get in the water fast would also be nice. Rush buying already exists but is prohibitively expensive to utilize heavily, maybe some kind of doctrine/spell that gives you substantial prod discounts on boats?
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Apr 17, 2023 21:26
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I am not of the belief that making ships easily refundable would result in interesting gameplay, for the record, though it would certainly get me in the water
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Apr 17, 2023 21:27
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Lowen posted:~~~ "...land vs naval balance is best when water provinces are worth a lot..." Yes, because then there's more weight to the choice of building water vs land units. Planetfall, in my experience, really favours spending production on the latter, and the current spread of sites and combat diversity on water doesn't feel very interesting or rewarding even if the "better" choice of land expansion is disregarded. "...you say players should not be incentivized to build navies because they just might not want to." No. Maybe I used the wrong wording with the initial mild description of the effect as an "incentive", but the point was that free production on navies (esp. with full refunds at player discretion) so overwhelmingly encourages naval production that you'd never not be spamming out navies to vacuum up as much of the resources and sites on the water as you could, as doing so would pay for itself unless the water is so poor as to be pointless. Some people would just make the water barren and pointlessly poor as a solution to avoiding the need for ship spam in this framework; maybe it would even be an attempted fix from the devs. And that's the part where the question becomes "if the water is pointless and barren, why not just replace it with land desert?" There's an idea that's been circulating in the background regardless for a long time now, not just in this thread or for Planetfall in particular, about removing naval stuff entirely if it's worthless and uninteresting and inferior and just implementing water as a traversed desert terrain with no combat or mechanics whatsoever. And so I also touch on it as the alternative in the end of a couple of my posts when the current naval/water system implementation is not satisfying to anyone, or at least apparently not so to a vocal segment -- is the system of free naval production with full refunds to make naval things happen actually better than no naval mechanics at all? "I personally do not want naval units in the game and want some way of removing them" I don't hate water or naval units. I said from my first post that I think AoW3's execution of water overall was done well, and EL's implementation in particular was something I liked. It's okay to have a side space with a more limited, less complex implementation of the game mechanics and unit roster if there are important strategic choices/trade-offs involved in interacting with it, and rewards that make it feel rewarding for having made the choice to build and move in that direction. I'm averse specifically to changing the game in a way where this oceanic side space suddenly becomes inundated with far more units and map movements, especially without an actual underlying change in the rewards or any other aspects of this space (which *incidentally* feel lacking in Planetfall's case) and at the expense of the strategic choice involved in "do I want to dedicate production to start clearing and exploiting this side space?" Also, to state it explicitly, I don't think the change in game pacing and tempo this causes would be positive. Large numbers of functionally costless naval units scrambling around each other to gobble up the water sites doesn't imply any important choices on the player's part and doesn't improve the overall game experience unless you really like naval combat. More units on the map, more battles, longer battles aren't good things to aim for in and of themselves, and this is without considering knock-on effects to game balance elsewhere. Which, hey, I won't get into either because that's a much more speculative headache.
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Apr 17, 2023 21:46
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Have they showcased/talked about water at all in the new game?
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Apr 17, 2023 21:49
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Hiveminded posted:"...land vs naval balance is best when water provinces are worth a lot..." So navy, good. Flip. Hiveminded posted:"...you say players should not be incentivized to build navies because they just might not want to." That's what an incentive is. You used the correct wording. Now navy bad. Flop. Hiveminded posted:"I personally do not want naval units in the game and want some way of removing them" Last post I responded to, you said navies could be fixed by either expanding their unit variety, or axing them from the game entirely, and you said the second option was your favored option. Now you're saying you actually favor the first option. Flip. Are you starting to see why I think arguing with you about this could be a little infuriating?
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Apr 17, 2023 21:58
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I will be honest I've kinda given up on trying to follow or parse hiveminded's argument. Perhaps a concise summary of their position, some manner of basic thesis statement, would be helpful
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Apr 17, 2023 22:03
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My interpretation: "'Free' naval production combined with high rewards for naval activity is effectively not a choice, but mandatory. Lack of choice is contrary to good game design. Additionally, it would arbitrarily add numerous fights and micromanagement in a game where the number of fights and stacks to manage can already be exhausting." TheDeadlyShoe fucked around with this message at 22:26 on Apr 17, 2023 |
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Apr 17, 2023 22:10
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I liked playing the original Age of Wonders with lizards and maxed out water spheres. There was a spell in there that let you flood the map, and depending on the one you were playing you may well have locked down every other side while your amphibians ruled the soggy land. It was neat.
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Apr 17, 2023 22:10
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Mass terrain manipulation stuff is my favorite in games like this. Makes you feel extremely powerful to change big masses of land like that.
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Apr 17, 2023 22:18
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TheDeadlyShoe posted:its pretty straightforward That makes sense, thank you!
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Apr 17, 2023 22:20
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Lowen posted:So navy, good. Flip. I want naval systems to be good, or at least "better" if and where such a thing is possible. Naval combat and rosters can be worse than land combat/rosters without being worthless; it's okay to have a more constrained roster and mechanics for a side space (i'm just going to start saying "theatre" from now on for this) built on side systems, *if* there are still meaningful choices or important strategic decisions involved with interacting with that space. Lowen posted:That's what an incentive is. You used the correct wording. Now navy bad. Flop. There's a difference in degree between "incentivised" and something so heavily encouraged by mechanics that it becomes "obligatory" or "mandatory." Navy and the water theatre in current implementation would be made worse if it's mandatory like this. Lowen posted:Last post I responded to, you said navies could be fixed by either expanding their unit variety, Navy not inherently good or bad. Again, just want things to be better. Planetfall water theatre/naval system's "status quo" not ideal, not interesting to me personally. But I still want navies and secondary theatres and so forth. "axing from the game entirely" is the extreme alternative, brought up because from a game design standpoint it might well be better than a Planetfall where the oceans are crawling with free naval stacks. The question of "why does this system exist?" needs to be asked when you introduce an overhaul to the system in such a way that you're forcing players to engage with it instead of improving its shortcomings or adjusting something else in such a way that it will at least be a choice and not an imperative to interact with that system. Water sites and resources could be more rewarding and diverse, incentivising investment into the water theatre and providing an alternative strategy to high-tempo land expansion towards enemy cities. This improves overall water/naval system implementation. Navy could be more mechanically interesting from a tactical standpoint with a larger roster or range of combat mechanics; doesn't balance the choice of "land or water units?", but at least makes the water theatre more interesting within the core focus of this 4x wargame. This improves overall water/naval system implementation. There could be a broader selection of operations that offer economically- and tempo-viable entry into the water theatre, opening a strategy for a limited but cost-effective interaction at the player's discretion. This improves overall water/naval system implementation. Free production queue for naval units with full refunds obligates naval unit spam and a scramble for every naval resource if playing "optimally." I don't think this improves overall water/naval system implementation. I do not think you've been interpreting what I've been saying in a very charitable way. I apologise for any shortcomings and indirectness or lack of clarity in my own communication style. TheDeadlyShoe posted:My interpretation: Pretty much. I also just want more sites, better rewards/returns on naval clearing, and naval unit roster diversity. More/better reasons to go into the water, better naval combat. Sorry for being long-winded y'all
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Apr 17, 2023 22:34
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BurningBeard posted:Mass terrain manipulation stuff is my favorite in games like this. Makes you feel extremely powerful to change big masses of land like that. Like the big map bombs you could charge up that'd turn a big patch of hexes good/evil/frozen/etc. Love to feel like a mighty big wizard in between smacking a whole army to death with just your leader. High level Heroes were so broke in AOW 1, I loved it.
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Apr 17, 2023 23:02
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FWIW, splitting unit and building production queues off on their own is IMO a pretty decent way to handle naval warfare. If I thought having to juggle between unit production and developing a city was a headache in 4x games, holy poo poo was I even more dismissive of naval units because of that
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Apr 17, 2023 23:29
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BurningBeard posted:Mass terrain manipulation stuff is my favorite in games like this. Makes you feel extremely powerful to change big masses of land like that. Caidin posted:I liked playing the original Age of Wonders with lizards and maxed out water spheres. There was a spell in there that let you flood the map, and depending on the one you were playing you may well have locked down every other side while your amphibians ruled the soggy land. Now I’m thinking of Alpha Centauri plus Age of Wonders+civ6: gathering storm. Water floods (or fire melting ice caps), earthen dikes, wind-magic hurricanes, blizzards breaking against mountain ranges, nature marshes spreading disease and dampening hurricanes, tidal waves, disasters with upkeep costs, etc
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Apr 17, 2023 23:51
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| # ? Jun 2, 2024 09:16 |
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BurningBeard posted:Mass terrain manipulation stuff is my favorite in games like this. Makes you feel extremely powerful to change big masses of land like that. One of the reasons I always include the Forestation operation on my galactic empire runs. Even if it's not actually effecient to turn everything into a forest, I love the idea of being able to do so.
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Apr 18, 2023 08:06
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