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PotatoMcWhiskey has a stream going now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=live?JBuy10ndzvI Combat healing being primarily (only?) temporary HP is an interesting balance choice. Lets healing remain plentiful and powerful while making it so damage is still ultimately attritional to armies crossing the map and taking multiple fights. Anno fucked around with this message at 19:32 on Apr 23, 2023 |
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Apr 23, 2023 19:29
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Anno posted:PotatoMcWhiskey has a stream going now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=live?JBuy10ndzvI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBuy10ndzvI he's also streaming on twitch https://twitch.tv/potatomcwhiskey
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Apr 23, 2023 19:38
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Anno posted:Combat healing being primarily (only?) temporary HP is an interesting balance choice. Lets healing remain plentiful and powerful while making it so damage is still ultimately attritional to armies crossing the map and taking multiple fights. I'm happy it's like this because ~optimal play~ in earlier games was always to manual resolve even the easiest tactical combats to make sure all your healing abilities got used optimally. Or even going into a fight just to cast heals and run out. That gets old fast.
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Apr 23, 2023 19:45
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yeah healing being a temporary boost sounds interesting and like actual improvement honestly also from what ive seen so far anyway the AI seems alot more competent
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Apr 23, 2023 19:48
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Anno posted:PotatoMcWhiskey has a stream going now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=live?JBuy10ndzvI dig it, this is smart I still wish armies were a discrete unit assembled as a whole that could be dispersed (broken, combat ineffective, routed to friendly or allied territory), typically not entirely destroyed but that's an entirely different game, churning units is presumably the name of the game again, guess I'll see, few more days!
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Apr 23, 2023 20:26
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Hirotishi posted:While we've got you, Gerblyn, I was wondering--are there any big changes in damage calculation from planetfall? I feel like all the numbers (health pools, defense values) are a little bigger than I'm used to seeing, what's the story there? Can’t say too much because I’m on my phone, but the damage calculations are essentially the same. The biggest difference is that we gave units more HP. Originally we had Planetfall HP levels, but units died really fast, and it felt like one misstep led to losing a unit, which sucked. It also meant debuffs were meaningless since the optimal play was to kill units ASAP. More unit HP means combat is more forgiving, but also that different tactics become worthwhile.
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Apr 23, 2023 20:45
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Oh wow I didn’t know we had a dev in the thread. I don’t wanna be annoying or whatever, but Gerblyn, have you folks considered incorporating TTS or any other sort of accessibility features into the game? I know y’all are a small team and this isn’t intended to put you on the spot or whatever, but I feel like 4X and turn-based games could be really good fodder for that kind of thing. No worries if you can’t answer/it’s not in the cards but I’d really love to see something like that in a game like this, because the large amounts of text in these things make it really tough for me to play for very long.
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Apr 23, 2023 21:04
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The one change I am iffy about is only herpes can siege, but I can understand the logic behind it and I won't knock it until I have played and tested it myself. And even then it is just a small reservation and I am extremely hype for release! Going to end up with so many different types of dumb Elves lol  Edit: Heroes but I am leaving that autocorrect lol.
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Apr 23, 2023 21:11
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BurningBeard posted:
TTS and accessibilty options are something I’d love to see in the game, but yeah, we do have a small team and it’s not really been on the cards. It might be something we can add in the future, but I’m afraid I can’t promise anything. Sorry!
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Apr 23, 2023 21:40
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Gerblyn posted:TTS and accessibilty options are something I’d love to see in the game, but yeah, we do have a small team and it’s not really been on the cards. It might be something we can add in the future, but I’m afraid I can’t promise anything. Sorry! No worries I get it. Thanks for the response either way.
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Apr 23, 2023 22:08
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Noir89 posted:The one change I am iffy about is only herpes can siege, but I can understand the logic behind it and I won't knock it until I have played and tested it myself. Looking at the number of options I've seen for stacking T1 units, I feel like the game needs something to stop you from drowning the enemy in them. Like there's a faction trait that gives T1's +1 rank, there's a religion themed tome which gives them another +1 rank, and the tome of the horde lets you summon them and give all T1s +1 model. I think if anyone could besiege a city people would do it nonstop with trash units.
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Apr 23, 2023 22:17
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Noir89 posted:The one change I am iffy about is only herpes can siege, but I can understand the logic behind it and I won't knock it until I have played and tested it myself. When race customization goes too far (herpes not elves)
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Apr 23, 2023 22:31
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Being under siege gives something like 50% economic penalties I seem to recall? If so, then if any unit could start a siege, optimal would look like always sieging your enemy's cities with solo scouts every turn just to apply those penalties for every turn start.
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Apr 23, 2023 22:34
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I can't read. Anno fucked around with this message at 01:35 on Apr 24, 2023 |
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Apr 24, 2023 00:09
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Yes, I was affirming the above that people would siege non-stop if not.
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Apr 24, 2023 01:31
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Mzbundifund posted:Thyrork hasn’t posted in over a year so the OP won’t get updated, we’ll need a new thread I can arrange that no prob, just pm me the new title and op text, assuming you want to go with that (though a new thread would be nice too, just link them in each other's ops)
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Apr 24, 2023 07:07
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I'm halfway through the Potato guy's stream and I gotta say the unit models look fantastic
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Apr 24, 2023 09:13
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OwlFancier posted:Looking at the number of options I've seen for stacking T1 units, I feel like the game needs something to stop you from drowning the enemy in them. Yeah I am far from saying it is a bad change, I just generally prefer when games don't become to Hero dependent since I like it when the normal guys gets to take the stage, but I get there might be changes making it necessary. Game preordered and looking forward to release! Watching the stream, I like how the whispering stones can be used for other things than free cities since that is a finite usage of them.
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Apr 24, 2023 10:19
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I can't watch any streams of this anymore, I'd rather just play the drat thing myself
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Apr 24, 2023 10:39
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Noir89 posted:Yeah I am far from saying it is a bad change, I just generally prefer when games don't become to Hero dependent since I like it when the normal guys gets to take the stage, but I get there might be changes making it necessary. Game preordered and looking forward to release! When has Age of Wonders ever not had a big focus on heroes…?
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Apr 24, 2023 12:24
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I just said too dependent. I have played every single AoW since I was a kid, you have never been required to have a hero to attack cities before and I said I was iffy about it. Not that the sky is falling and the game will be poo poo.
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Apr 24, 2023 12:32
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I think I personally very much like things that constrain the focus a bit. AoW 3 was not really balanced for cities being foundable and devolved into high tier unit spam pretty heavily, so the addition of a real set of mechanics constraining how many cities you can have and thus how many resources you can get, as well as a focus on terrain resource availability, tracks well with making heroes a limiting factor on your major armies. I think a lot of games fall into a trap where they expand in scope but there is no "scale realignment" I guess I would call it, you're using tools designed to play on a small scale, but across a very wide area handling large numbers of the same elements. Good management games like factiorio and dyson sphere program add in new tools like blueprinting and robots to negate the need to draw out every conveyor belt once you scale up, because what works on the small scale becomes tedious on the large scale, and so those games become quite different after those points, you start engaging with them on a different scale level using different tools to handle that scale. And I definitely felt AoW3 reached tedium in the late game when you were still using the tools that work well with a couple of cities and scarce resources to engage with multiple identical cities all pumping out the same high tier units. So yeah, big fan of adding in things to constrain attention as you expand out. Games should either do that, or they need to introduce new ways to interact with the game as you expand. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 12:44 on Apr 24, 2023 |
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Apr 24, 2023 12:42
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Forcing the enemy to commit a hero and a bit of time to taking a town is a great solution to a problem that plagued the series for a while, namely how little effort it takes to take an undefended city with a random scout, and it being difficult to fight an actually engaging city battle without the defender having to waste units on doing nothing. (ironically, the first title had this problem the least, since pallisades would keep out enemies who didn't bring siege units, flyers, or wall climbers even without a garrison present, and these were either fairly slow and gave the defender time to react, higher tier, or a deliberate faction strength) Planetfall's solution with the free(ish) garrison was pretty cool for reducing the attention tax on defending your lands from low effort probes, and enabled some cool defense battle against marauding creeps that let you play a fight without having to think long term about losing units. However, it made offensive wars a slog sometimes, since you'd be fighting the Exact. Same. loving. Battle. Every. Single. Time. And sometimes these were too tough to autoresolve without losing units but too easy to be fun after the first one. Also, it killed off raiders as a niche a bit too hard. Having a siege that requires the attacker to actually commit an important and semi-limited resource (heroes) is good. Lowkey, it also encourages battles which are more fun. Instead of having to devote resources to keeping a bunch of units in the exact same spot, twiddling their thumbs and contributing nothing if they're not actually attacked, and usually still insufficient to protect the city against a commited but unexpected attack, the defender can buy time with walls (and other city defenses) and bring in emergency reinforcements from the general vicinity of the city for an actual big city battle that actually matters. I hope the siege speed balance is such that early game allows opportunism against careless players but has defences as a solid force multiplier to someone who actually commits to defending, midgame defences are a tough nut to crack that gives time to a midsized empire to actually react in time to protect their cities, but lategame armies can just go on a city stomping spree (assuming insufficient defenders) without having to wait forever in each and every siege. I guess we'll see. my dad fucked around with this message at 12:50 on Apr 24, 2023 |
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Apr 24, 2023 12:46
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OwlFancier posted:I think I personally very much like things that constrain the focus a bit. AoW 3 was not really balanced for cities being foundable and devolved into high tier unit spam pretty heavily, so the addition of a real set of mechanics constraining how many cities you can have and thus how many resources you can get, as well as a focus on terrain resource availability, tracks well with making heroes a limiting factor on your major armies. Agreed on this, I actually like the city cap since the vassal system from AoW3 is back again, being able to just make conquered cities vassals is great to stave off late game fatigue. The siege system itself seems really cool, I just wish you could get maybe an enineer or high tier type unit that allowed you to start sieges as well. I guess a major fear is that you either get to few heroes to push on many fronts or that you have to have a ton of heroes, that at least for me makes the individual ones feel less special. Like in Total War Warhammer you end up with tons of heroes and in the end game it's just mashing random skills on levelups every single turn. While in a game with less heroes leveling them up and using different builds really lets them stand out more.
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Apr 24, 2023 12:52
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Vassals being able to genuinely fend for themselves militarily and economically is a decent compromise with the garrison system, and a nice upgrade to AoW3 vassals who were fairly static and you had to game the system a bit to get a vassal army of actually useful size. Also not a slog to fight when you're the attacker, since you're fighting actual armies with a hero and a variety of units. I really like using vassals instead of annexing cities right away when on the offense in AoW3 (I'd usually annex a single major production center after the local-ish fighting is done, but not sooner), so count me in as a vassal enthusiast. my dad fucked around with this message at 13:11 on Apr 24, 2023 |
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Apr 24, 2023 13:09
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There definitely seems to be an overall greater focus on Heroes. In previous games Heroes were essentially just super units that got special rules for equipment and abilities by virtue of their unit-class being "Hero". Now Heroes are city governors, siege leaders, leaders of (previously faceless) independent cities, they can be captured, their corpse can be recovered, and they can be selected by the narrative engine as quest givers. Seems like a clear design goal to make Heroes feel more like actual characters of importance in the world to justify their unique rules/status.
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Apr 24, 2023 13:43
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Noir89 posted:The one change I am iffy about is only herpes can siege
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Apr 24, 2023 16:41
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OwlFancier posted:I think a lot of games fall into a trap where they expand in scope but there is no "scale realignment" I guess I would call it, you're using tools designed to play on a small scale, but across a very wide area handling large numbers of the same elements. Good management games like factiorio and dyson sphere program add in new tools like blueprinting and robots to negate the need to draw out every conveyor belt once you scale up, because what works on the small scale becomes tedious on the large scale, and so those games become quite different after those points, you start engaging with them on a different scale level using different tools to handle that scale. And I definitely felt AoW3 reached tedium in the late game when you were still using the tools that work well with a couple of cities and scarce resources to engage with multiple identical cities all pumping out the same high tier units. There was a lengthy design conversation in one of the AoW threads (no really?) some years back about how conversations around the game were impossible because everyone was playing their own version of the game. What made sense and worked for a player pushing to win at a good clip on a medium size map absolutely broke down in comparison to someone playing very slowly on the largest possible map trying to 100% it. Some mechanics did/do scale in the games based on game length/size iirc, but a lot of them warp and distort depending on what settings the player chooses before the game even begins. It's a really tricky problem, because who's to say the dude or dudette playing the gargantuan game that lasts six weeks is playing 'wrong' vs the aggro strategy fan who wants to smush the map in a few hours? It absolutely makes discourse around the game (and similar games) really tiresome though, people just talking past each other because they're not even playing the same game with the same goals. I do think their efforts at clamping some of the more obvious issues are laudable, I hope they turn out well. One more week!
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Apr 24, 2023 16:42
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I think that a good thing to push for is keeping all parts of the game relevant. So if early unit types just cease to be relevant, or if there's only one way all cities will turn out, those are, I think, not good in any circumstance because they make every game the same. Ways to keep as much of the content relevant as possible I think increases the amount of variety you will see in each game and I think that's generally just good for everyone. To that end I think that diminishing returns to keep the scale more constrained, and simply asking you as a player to operate within those constraints is desirable. A big map you have to spread your cities out or use more vassals. I like playing big, epic scale games but I still don't like micromanaging a dozen of the same city or same army stack. To that end I think I would favour larger maps but with a lot of uninhabitable space. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 16:55 on Apr 24, 2023 |
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Apr 24, 2023 16:52
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victrix posted:There was a lengthy design conversation in one of the AoW threads (no really?) some years back about how conversations around the game were impossible because everyone was playing their own version of the game. The problem is that it's very hard to pull this off within each system, never mind trying to do so without it feeling very artificial. It's easier and less obvious to go "OK well by the time you have 10 cities you probably have t3 units/buildings and also techs to double your production so t3 units are 20 times as powerful and take 20 times as long to build as t1 units so you only have to set one building 1/10th as often as when you only had one city". But that breaks down as soon as someone decides to blitz a little faster or slower than you expected, never mind if people start dragging the city density or research speed sliders. It's less of an issue in RTSs because attention is a resource as much as any other, but in turn based or real time with pause the limit isn't attention, it's patience. Tedium is a bad balancing mechanic. Splicer fucked around with this message at 17:37 on Apr 24, 2023 |
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Apr 24, 2023 17:33
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There's a couple of things I still wanted to confirm: 1) What is the meta-progression in the campaign layer, because I was under the assumption it was going to be similar to Planetfall's? I was thinking like, as you progress through the campaign and are presented with more and more challenging realms to play in, you would get stuff like heroes carrying over with their experience or starting with multiple Tomes or racial enchantments. Maybe I'm mistaken and this isn't the case, that there is no Empire mode equivalent in yet? 2) Regarding Tomes: once you unlock your first researchable Tome, are you able to pick any from all of them (as tier appropriate), or is a random selection of Tomes given for you to pick from? I figure that the latter is probably better for replayability and forcing the player to adapt instead of just picking an ideal build every time, but I imagine the multiplayer scene might prefer the former for balance. Sidenote: sheer customizability is cool, but I can't help but wonder that maybe they should've kept one trait fixed to a racial form in order to have some level of predictability. Like what's the competitive meta going to be, making sure to check and remember what traits other races you encounter in a game have because it turns out those elves are specced like generic dwarfs and not the treehuggers you expected?
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Apr 24, 2023 22:59
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I believe one of the streamers showed that as you beat games you unlock more modifiers for realm generation and your heroes also carry over in some way?
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Apr 24, 2023 23:01
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toasterwarrior posted:There's a couple of things I still wanted to confirm: I've gotten the distinct impression that the Pantheon system is less like Planetfall's Empire mode and more like a rogue-like unlock/progression system: unlocking more stuff to mess around with for your individual scenario games including more powerful/advanced start like options. You can pick from any Tome (as tier appropriate), freedom of Tomes matters because they influence your affinity points and thus affinity progression, you need to be able to influence those points during the game to allow for changing strategies/adjustments/transitions. "Some level of predictability" is kinda irrelevant if any part is unpredictable in cases like this, if any 1 trait can be varied you need to make sure to check and remember even if 10 others are fixed. Might as well make them fully free at that point; though limiting them to 2 is probably a good idea so it doesn't become overwhelming.
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Apr 24, 2023 23:16
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toasterwarrior posted:Sidenote: sheer customizability is cool, but I can't help but wonder that maybe they should've kept one trait fixed to a racial form in order to have some level of predictability. Like what's the competitive meta going to be, making sure to check and remember what traits other races you encounter in a game have because it turns out those elves are specced like generic dwarfs and not the treehuggers you expected?
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Apr 24, 2023 23:55
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I also hope there's some way to do some of the cool transformation buffs on animals/rando independent units. One of my favorite things in AoW3 and Planetfall is filling out stacks with the weirdo reward/befriend stuff. Late game I usually didn't have many units I could actually 'build' at all in a lot of my games.
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Apr 25, 2023 00:16
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That's probably a thing depending on world settings/modifiers. I figure neutrals in a frosty world have a chance to spawn with some sort of ice transformation and so on for the other sorts of themed worlds.
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Apr 25, 2023 02:07
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I think I saw that you can pick any lvl 1 tome at any time. Level 2 requires any 2 lvl 1 tomes. Lvl 3 tomes require 2 lvl 2, and 2 points of the correct affinity. Lvl 4 tomes require 2 lvl 3, and 4 points of the correct affinity. Lvl 5 tomes require 2 lvl 4, and 6 points of the correct affinity.
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Apr 25, 2023 09:12
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Wouldn’t work for Age of Wonders, and it seems like it collapsed under its own ambition, but I remember a pitch for a simulationist 4x that had your leader’s attention as a major resource. It boasted you could change anything in your empire from planet names to governor assignments to ship design, but you could only change five things before the turn ended and time progressed. The simulation handled the rest.
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Apr 25, 2023 11:34
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Can I highlight how sweet the tome system seems to be? Pick and match your choices with both internal in the tome and external with other factors synergies in small easy-to-grasp objects that are very thematic for the game, giving a very easy way to expand through DLC and perhaps mods! It looks like a really cool build-your-archemage system and I am really looking forward to try it out!
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Apr 25, 2023 11:38
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Triskelli posted:Wouldn’t work for Age of Wonders, and it seems like it collapsed under its own ambition, but I remember a pitch for a simulationist 4x that had your leader’s attention as a major resource. It boasted you could change anything in your empire from planet names to governor assignments to ship design, but you could only change five things before the turn ended and time progressed. The simulation handled the rest. Alliance of the Sacred Suns, though I think it’s changed names at least once. Hooded Horse, the people behind Terra Invicta, Manor Lords and a bunch of other “promising but maybe too much” strategy games are publishing it but also I’ve been vaguely following it for like seven years and it seems like every time I check it’s more of a nightmare.
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Apr 25, 2023 11:38
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