That Which Sleeps - Eldritch Snooze Simulator

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extraordinary: Jun 9, 2011

Beta Backer here, too.
I love the concept. Only thing I am slightly annoyed with is that information about this game is really spread out and while the FAQ helps it still seems like you have to dig through countless topics to be up to date.

# ¿ Apr 6, 2015 18:58

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# ¿ May 18, 2024 10:24

extraordinary: Jun 9, 2011

Brackhar posted:

Oh, the beta is not out yet?

Supposedly sometimes in April.

# ¿ Apr 6, 2015 20:32

extraordinary: Jun 9, 2011

Normal Adult Human posted:

going to the bay12games forum and searching for that which sleeps and then filtering for the dev's posts is also pretty good. The official forums are like, 90% the dev talking with two guys who are just basically asking "can i mod this??" over and over.

Yeah, I read that thread. I am actually really hyped for this game, the designers come from the right place.
I just wish they would hurry up and release a beta instead of spending all their time on the modding tools.

# ¿ Apr 6, 2015 23:09

extraordinary: Jun 9, 2011

Geokinesis posted:

There is going to be a poll for a new race added to the game up in the next day or so. From what I remember one of the potential races will be minotaurs?

From what I gathered, Minotaurs, "Daarth" (runners-up from another vote, some kinda magical race) and a third, unknown race, I guess.

Bloodly posted:

I wonder if you can uplift one of those tribal or non-civs into civs rather than using them as-is as fodder? It doesn't seem clear.

Yeah, basically, this can happen through various means. Like, you could end up with an Orc Monarchy and all that.

I just want to digg into the AI and see how they coded all of that, tbh.
Or rather, I want to see a playable version and see if all that works as they said. Or could work.

# ¿ Apr 7, 2015 09:53

extraordinary: Jun 9, 2011

So yeah.
They are going over the game mechanics next announcement.
But bar them concurrently releasing the modding tools, going from what they say I am not expecting beta till the middle of may.

# ¿ Apr 17, 2015 17:52

extraordinary: Jun 9, 2011

Josef bugman posted:

To quote star wars "do not want".

Ahh well, it was kind of on the cards, but I would love to have started playing this ASAP.

Yeah, I mean, I am happy they can completely overhaul the whole game but the wait is really annoying.

# ¿ Apr 17, 2015 19:44

extraordinary: Jun 9, 2011

Josef bugman posted:

What are they overhauling?

Well, compared to November, they remade the maps completely. It's now done with hexes so they can dynamically change terrain. New Hero/Minion art, more races, religion, a few new gods and cultures etc.
And their philosophy is basically to make everything really modular and have the basics of everything in the code down now instead of later having to completely rewrite it when they implement rival old ones, for example.

# ¿ Apr 17, 2015 20:07

extraordinary: Jun 9, 2011

Lprsti99 posted:

I hope this means I can make the seas rise and drown whole cities.

Afaik something like this is planned, as well as Deep Ones (incest villages included) and I think Dagon as a lesser evil?

e:fb;

For some interesting and in - depth answers for once:

Josh posted:

Jalak posted:
One of the first things you said about what you can do at the start of a game is rile up some Orcs. How? What specific actions do you need, what are the results and how do the Orcs react along with the other Orcs surrounding them? Also, how powerful would a completely unified Orc horde be in, say, the North Burns scenario and how difficult would it be to achieve?

This is a fun question to answer because when we had our first playable builds we saw how fun it was to play the political system, and leading wars mid-late game were a blast as well - but the early game had a "tempo" problem where if you decided to play a long game and go for complex challenges early you'd just be skipping turns. To solve this we started making certain otherwise "complex" challenges/actions that would normally lead to a lot of clues much simpler and also safer to do, and we balanced this around the idea of "dangers already present in the world." Most specifically in the North Burns that comes in the form of orcs. Orcs being a natural danger that routinely formed into hordes to rampage so it shouldn't cause much alarm if they did so again (unless accompanied by demons of course). So we made some easier paths to unite tribes and make it less punishing, so that with a certain path you could have an army ready to march in just under 10 turns. In addition you can pursue this path anywhere you find orcs, and since an orc nation can rise from any sufficiently advanced orc tribe modifier it also gives you a stealthy way to introduce armed forces to areas of the world that may seem safe.

To answer the specifics of your question:

- Orcs can be recruited in a variety of ways, and you'll pursue different paths depending on your strategy. Any Orc Agent, or an Agent with the proper Orc Minion, can perform a simple challenge to kill the Orc Chief and claim dominion over the tribe. You can also rally the shamans of the tribe to call them over to your side, prop up an orc notable to all with you, corrupt the current Orc Chief, or just go the old-fashioned route of conquering them. Some of these tactics lead you to directly controlling the orc nations, some of them lead to the orc nation becoming a part of your faction, and others simply have them allied with you. Each comes with pros and cons - for instance if you have an Orc Agent controlling three tribes and he dies, they may go back to war to find a successor.

- You can also build Unique Buildings to help rally the tribes, and if you are Karth you send out a summons to rally the orcs to your side. If you chose a certain scenario option you also will begin with the Shadar Orcs who can help militarize the ragtag orc tribes.

- There are orcs everywhere, but if you mean the Orcs of the Wastes in Northern "The North Burns" they are quite strong when unified - but even then the entire horde might have trouble getting through the Pass into Cylaria if it is properly defended. Orcs lack natural siege weapons and discipline, both important elements to fighting in small areas - fight in the plains and orc hordes can easily overwhelm your opponents. The AI is designed to want to pin orcs into areas that limit their deployment, so you'll need almost always need to cause a distraction. Aventura though lacks a natural defensible POI and almost always falls to an early Orc Horde - sometimes if you just take one tribe you fail to take Aventura itself but that's almost a better result - in victory the AI often leaves itself vulnerable. One of my favorite "early orc" strategies is to tie in to a weak general and get some corruption, then let him defeat my hordes. The conquering hero returns with glory and prestige and can, with the proper motivation and some strategic help, quickly rise to power.

extraordinary fucked around with this message at 20:37 on Apr 17, 2015

# ¿ Apr 17, 2015 20:33

extraordinary: Jun 9, 2011

Really pumped to finally get the modding tools. (Not as pumped as I'd be for beta but better than nothing.)

# ¿ Apr 20, 2015 14:06

extraordinary: Jun 9, 2011

1stGear posted:

Which is kind of terrifying. We're in full-blown Molyneaux territory at this point and if it weren't for how impressive those three initial devlogs were, there'd be a lot more wariness about this game.

Videos are coming this week so I am hoping this turns out really good. All I can tell is that Josh is working on it passionately. And he codes too, wasn't Molyneaux only ever Producer?

# ¿ Apr 21, 2015 04:42

extraordinary: Jun 9, 2011

Iunnrais posted:

I watched the devblog videos. The first couple got me really excited, and then... they stopped showing off game mechanics, and started focusing on map editing and mod support? Why would I care unless the game is good? They stopped just short of actually explaining how the game works... they said "next time we'll go into challenges" and then never did. It seems like those challenges are the actual meat of the game, and based on whether those are good and interesting or not will determine whether or not I'd be willing to buy this thing.

Is it just that the kickstarter backers are the only ones who get this info, or do the backers only care about modding for some insane reason? Because I think the devs are shooting themselves in the foot with this advertising strategy. I don't care how the mod interface works, merely knowing that it can be modded is nice enough. Tell me about the game!

That's hopefully changing over the next few days/weeks since they practically finished the modding tools and are now recreating their scenarios with them.
I think they'll do a few mod-tool videos and then start right into gameplay videos and considering beta is prolly coming in May there will be a few gameplay videos floating around.

# ¿ Apr 22, 2015 05:21

extraordinary: Jun 9, 2011

Normal Adult Human posted:

good dev josh says they made a gameplay video and are going to release it today/tomorrow instead of on the weekend. So not understanding hype or marketing works for us today

Are you sure he meant gameplay videos? I'd actually tip on them releasing a few more modding videos first.

# ¿ Apr 23, 2015 11:33

extraordinary: Jun 9, 2011

If they are going the route I think they are going:
coding wise, if two completely identical heroes, down to traits and stats and all that, spawn and they always react the same to the same event then I do think it is possible to code that. Same for rulers and all that. The randomnes comes into play by introducing half randomized stats and traits. And a looot of events. Otherwise yeah, it could certainly work out pretty dull. But Afaik Josh said something along the lines of minimising randomization.

# ¿ Apr 26, 2015 20:57

extraordinary: Jun 9, 2011

Gantolandon posted:

I agree it's possible, but I would be more confident if I saw something that even resembles a gameplay. It's common sense to finish the core features first and I don't understand the logic of showing off completely superficial things instead. It's like trying to present an FPS shooter and starting with the options menu.

I asked the same on the beta forums and paraphrased, they basically built the game completely new after the success of the kickstarter and are using the modding tools themselves to recreate it.
The map in the last few updates wasn't even one of the scenarios, it was quickly thrown together to test the impact of all the changes on the ai.

# ¿ Apr 26, 2015 21:35

extraordinary: Jun 9, 2011

It's actually been postponed to sometimes during the week. And still missing two of the three videos so yeah.
I mean, I get that dates can slip but they slip a lot.

Edit:^^^ You will never be as spergy as the guy whose every post ends in "I need to know this for my touhou mod, you see. Let me tell you about it."

# ¿ Apr 26, 2015 21:48

extraordinary: Jun 9, 2011

Normal Adult Human posted:

The mod tools release or the beta release or both?

Mod tools. Nothing specific about beta except that they'll continue working on it after the mod tool release.

And there were already some mod proposals. Warhammer, which could work, some others that seem pretty generic and, I poo poo you not, a My little Pony mod.

# ¿ Apr 26, 2015 22:07

extraordinary: Jun 9, 2011

Gantolandon posted:

That sounds a bit sketchy, to be honest. Even if they were forced to rebuild the entire game from the scratch (which is a warning sign in itself), they should at least have some gameplay from the earlier version. At very least, they should be able to describe the system they're trying to make accurate enough that the player understood how are they going to play the game.

Right now it seems like they're slapping together different elements into the gaming equivalent of primordial soup and hoping for some gameplay to emerge eventually.

They do actually have one or two gameplay videos up on their youtube channel. Combat, too.

# ¿ Apr 26, 2015 22:09

extraordinary: Jun 9, 2011

First thing I'll do is making a map inspired by TSW. Island overrun by fishmen, desert having problems with undead and eastern Europe country having problems with monsters. Sprinkle minor factions in, custom cultures so orcs, elves, humans and dwarves can live together in a single city and the real fight is between three giant cabals fighting for power.

Plop down as Azlan and watch how the ai handles it.

PS: another info I remembered: first two goos in beta will be Karth and Belial, I think. Two at a time released.

# ¿ Apr 26, 2015 22:20

extraordinary: Jun 9, 2011

There are a lot of scenarios that would be great mods.

I don't understand the anime or pony stuff though.

Black Company, LotR, Silmarillion, more fantasy or horror that I even want to write.
But why anime. :reject:

# ¿ Apr 26, 2015 22:26

extraordinary: Jun 9, 2011

Normal Adult Human posted:

I was surprised that azlan wasn't the first god they were planning to add, since he by all evidence seemed like the first one they made and was the most fleshed out. Karth being the second. There's so little info about belial other than he can make birds appear from anywhere.

Belial is repeatedly cited as the newb god because you can recover more easily.

And those are only the starting agent slots, I think they get more with more power.

The thing I am wondering though. They got 25 agents or something in the game.
Any action by an agent aquires fame. The more fame the more heroes will hunt him. So, barring the agents really hard to get...what if you run out of them? I'd rather have some of them be a bit more generic.

# ¿ Apr 26, 2015 22:30

extraordinary: Jun 9, 2011

Demiurge4 posted:

Moloch is super cool in my mind, probably even more so than Azlan because he's loving with the world itself instead of peoples heads. I'm really interested to see how that plays out for him.

Moloch bros!

And Karth seems cool too. Just a big, angry orc with a mission.

Seraph and Inatha are like the same to me. Which one is the voice guy and which one the ice one?

Edit: am I the only one who diggs Limos? He's Nagash the Musical

# ¿ Apr 26, 2015 22:35

extraordinary: Jun 9, 2011

Really hope Dhaath win, because Minotaurs seem so bland. The Yizrii would be cool too, though.

# ¿ Apr 27, 2015 05:41

extraordinary: Jun 9, 2011

Demiurge4 posted:

I'm kind of digging the Minotaur ideas they have because I don't think I've ever seen Minotaur society done in any medium before.

WoW?

The derail of the "sexy races" in that thread really was kinda awkward. You just know if it had continued they'd have pulled out their furry art.

Iunnrais posted:

I might be odd in this, but I actually hope minotaurs win, because I want the cliche stuff to be available first. A good grounding foundation that you can start sticking weirder stuff onto without becoming lost. And in a game where you need to REALLY UNDERSTAND what the AI's reaction is going to be to something, I want the base stuff to be as familiar as possible, in as many places as possible. How else can I meaningfully tinker?

I know where you are coming from, but I am pretty sure there'll be another race vote before the final release, and considering those races aren't implemented in the Beta right away anyway, it's kind of moot. I'd love to see their design document though.

quote:

quote:
extraordinary wrote:
I think you answered a similar one once. If two identical heroes/rulers, same stats, traits, everything, get the same event, do they always react the same way to it or did you add a slight bit of randomness, say a +/- 1 to courage with a chance modifier to it?

They would take exactly the same decision.

Okay, I am now a lot more confident in them being able to do the AI.

extraordinary fucked around with this message at 07:03 on Apr 27, 2015

# ¿ Apr 27, 2015 06:11

extraordinary: Jun 9, 2011

New update:

Josh posted:

Not Our Best Week

This month continues to be a slog, even the relatively modest goals we set for this weekend were missed. Still, progress is made - and the game continues to just look better and better. We found time to work on the Military Screens and they're turning out well and we put out an order to an artist for some of our heraldry GUI objects and frames which will flesh out both the military and political gui screens. That's good news because things will start looking even better, but it's also a depressing reminder of how far behind we are as I had originally scheduled these updates to occur after the Beta had launched.

We did NOT release the Mod Tools, lacking the time to fix some issues found we'll be releasing them once we've fixed them. We do have the two remaining videos to release, and we're preparing a video on Military Combat which has been often requested.

In summary, a depressing week - still, nothing restores cheer like a release so we are going to keep working full steam to fix those issues and release the mod tools.

Enough Excuses, show me something

Modding Tutorial #2 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VARmgV8uEzs

There's a lot to be said about the military system and the glimpses you've seen of the back-end will help us explain how the system works in the upcoming video. We designed it to be a complex but easy to use (isn't that what everyone says) system that rewards long term strategic planning and interacts well with the other elements of the game.

Here's a details view of a rather straightforward political quest - the circular icon is the same you would see on the map representing the quest, the number beneath it is the current Threat (which determines if Heroes will come to perform the quest). The two tags beneath the description help the AI figure out which skillsets will be most useful, and the icons beneath it what desires are met by this Quest. The current dangers are listed at the bottom, and adding to this list is your most "passive" method of disrupting a questing hero, and you can see the target of the quest to the right. Of note is that not all quests will have targets, but ones that do you can often help that individual to strengthen the quest against the heroes.

The quest succeeds if the Heroes overcome all of the dangers, which are generated based on the difficulty of the quest, the danger of the POI (Security for a City), and the strength of the Target. You can see this GUI page isn't quite finished - we need some markers for Success/Failure and better structure in the middle but we're leaving that until after Beta.

Sorry for the brief update, as always you can ask questions here or in the Ask Us Anything thread - but we'll be trying to work as heads down as possible on the mod release.

# ¿ Apr 27, 2015 08:59

extraordinary: Jun 9, 2011

Sooo Josh said he's finishing up the fixes and is going to release the tools.
Will be interesting.

# ¿ Apr 30, 2015 22:02

extraordinary: Jun 9, 2011

One video left about events I think?
Thursday release of working mod tools and end of May hopefully the beta.

# ¿ May 5, 2015 20:57

extraordinary: Jun 9, 2011

Yeah...it's basically just a few more assets and nothing else. Yeah, you can make minions and tags but without anything to compare it is useless.

# ¿ May 8, 2015 21:34

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# ¿ May 18, 2024 10:24

extraordinary: Jun 9, 2011

gently caress it, backed with 50 bucks if you make a kickstarter. Only got one disappointment in four right now, might as well.

# ¿ Apr 14, 2017 15:37

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