Impression - Where to begin

[Xaos]

Hi all.

So after a long hiatus, I decided to see if this project was still going. I started up a game. I figured, let me do an easy sandbox to see if I can remember/figure out how to play. I was greatly disappointed with what has changed and I'd like to share my impressions.

The Good:

- Graphics have greatly improved. The game is a lot more fluid than it used to be. No crashes or issues at all.
- Creatures have learned new moves that look really great.

The Bad

-Controls are far from intuitive. It was incredibly frustrating trying to figure out how to do everything. There are no resources available/ help menues to find this info.

- "Claiming" doesn't exist in the form I was used to. Apparently you have to build a road right next to a room or portal to claim now. Hopefully this is just the alpha way of doing things and not the final game, because it seems pointless. Build 1 section of road next to something to claim is neither immersive nor practical.

- Roads... I learned early on that they are mostly useless (except 1 section to claim as above) because the enemy AI seems to make it their number one priority to destroy them. Regardless of how much you upgrade them, the strongest roads are destroyed in a second, so why bother?

- Constant waves of enemy death. I was playing an easy game and could not keep my minions alive. Apparently you need to be an expert on traps and defenses right from the start to survive now. It has become a constant turtle game.

- Dark Mother. Is there a point to feeding her anymore? You used to be able to spawn enemy units by feeding them to her from your prison. Now it seems to do nothing. Feeding her a knight did allow me to build knight beds, but after feeding her over a hundred knights, they never spawned for me. Same with those troglodyte things. Those no longer spawn after feeding, either. Rogues were the only human unit that spawned, and that unlocked long before I figured out how to feed the dark mother.

- Unit AI seems exponentially worse than I remember. It takes forever for your imps to do what you've queued for them. It is odd that when you cycle through them in the creature menu, some of them show 'idle' when there is work to be done.

Production is constantly broken/slow with out any indication of why. My whole base was frequently flashing red. Would be nice to know what I have to fix to get the production working right. It was possibly due to not having enough workers because enemy always killing them.

Conclusion.

Being on constant defense was not much fun. Hard to go out exploring when you are using all your time rebuilding what the enemy destroyed and hoping enough units respawn before the next waves of enemy. Spent most of the game toggling the rally-all flag on and off. Takes too long for minions to do jobs so progression is slower than the enemy. Too frustrating to play in its current form.

[Sebt]

Hi. Xaos, long time no see.

I'm constantly reminding Rasmus about proper tooltips and I hope we will finally have some good help options made throughout development.

Feeding to DM is temporarily removed because Rasmus don't want player to control humans, however some mechanism to control them may have been taken into consideration. Any ideas for it are welcomed. This mechanism was initially made to get blueprint to make creatures and later to get technology of items they use, which enable player to create them.

The AI or more about "Imptelligence" [Mello Tonin] is something we've discussed lately and I think we can expect some major improvement over it.

Do you have some ideas how to fix some of the issues you've listed above?

[Xaos]

Played again today on peaceful mode so that I could actually get to try stuff.

- Production woes

I realized that, when I finally had time to investigate, that clicking on a room item will show you at the bottom what is missing. Except... for when the problem is storage. There is still way too many items in the game. The fix for intuitive production investigation is detailed pop up messages. "Baking table is missing X", or "Not enough storage for bread". Something like that would go a long way towards helping the player concentrate on other things. Right now all you get is "Production is Slow". When I see this message I was thinking "well no SH**. I can see that by the red flash and the big snail Icon. Tell me wtf is wrong!"

- Dark Mother.

With this functionality off, the game is, for the most part, broken. When will this be turned back on? And on the feeding, can't you set a toggle on the prison room for "Feed every creature to the DM automatically"? OR at least some sort of pop up message that says "Creature X is in your prison".


- Combat improvements.

Please add a toggle behavior for "immediately stop what you are doing and auto rally on attacked, then go back to what you were doing before hostilities". The way it is now is an excessive amount of micro management. It was rough on easy game. I can't even imagine what it would be like now on impossible.

Enemies should have a better strategy than "Destroy all roads, then kill whatever imps you can catch" Shouldn't their main focus be on getting to the Dark Mother?


- Information

You really should take some time to put together a help file. Detail controls, menus, Rooms, Creatures, World. Doesn't have to be a whole tutorial scenario, just a built in text file that players can refer to.

- Unit AI.

Simply have your minion KEEP DOING WHAT IT WAS DOING IN THE SAME PLACE until there is no work left of that type. The constant juggling of priorities is what is causing the issues here. I think you should work on making the units work as a team instead of each of them checking their own priorities. They need some sort of behind the scenes forman to keep them on track.

Many games use what is known as a 'Work Order' system, where the AI assigns a certain number of units to a job. They do that job and nothing else until it is done.

Example. I queue up 10 blocks to be built. The AI assigns 2 imps to this "JOB" and they are the only ones that do that job and they do it until it is complete.