Hey all,
So, this is the first of many posts with our long term plans for All Heroes Die. I talk a bit about what this post is here on the blog.
Any and all feedback is welcome and desired! Tell us what you think. Some of this may not make sense to because it's still in dev team shorthand, so please ask questions. I've found that our tasks make the most sense to us when we are forced to explain them to others. I didn't want to wait any longer to get this out though, so here you go.
Romtos
Member
I got mentioned on the blog post! :P I appreciate your renewed efforts for public communication. There seemed to be a direct correlation between twitters, blogs and build releases and the amount of user activity on the forums. You need to keep communicating to make this project viable and keep people interested. Postponing a build is not a killer, but neglecting the curiosity of you fanbase is. I like what your thoughts are on this in the blog!
Since the forums are somewhat more quiet now, I guess this'll be the only reply for the moment, but take my opinion with a grain of salt. I'm no developer. I'll go over the list item by item.
Warfare / Military
"Ability for militia brought with you to add to the chances of success in explore events."
In addition, I think it might be a good idea to let the number of miltia be able to increase succes changes of events in general.
I'm thinking here along the lines of the ruling event where you suddenly hear rumbling outside and there is a monster.
Now it's just about the heroes military skill. More military is no advantage, because you just got more to lose, since it's a fixed percentage or a fixed number decrease when you fail.
However, something like this might already be implemented with the new warfare system. :)
Trait Set
"More traits, better ones, and an improved structure to them."
I think that the trait system could be improved by increasing its interlinkage to other elements. (Which would be strong element in the game overall). For example: A 'library structure' in your city could enable the trait 'scholar'. A dead/murdered parent could enable the trait 'vengeful'. It shouldn't be too difficult to implement, but since the traits are so crucial, the system should get some more love.
"Keywords (utilizing current system)"
Keywords? What keywords? :P Confusion!
Diplomacy Design
I think that a simple point system a la civilization or europa universalis would suffice. Please let more races be moddable though. :P
Explore / Map
I think exploration is a particularly difficult element, which you still might want to subject to a major overhaul. I'm still vouching for a system where you don't select the individual hexagon to explore, but rather send an exploration party, since the choice which hexagon to explore is arbitrary at any rate. The explored hexagon would simply be selected for you.
Families / Marriage / Children
"Add ability to have a non-slotted family member gain traits without player input."
This. Extended family is a must. The options are endless.
Ancestors / Spheres
"Ancestors / Spheres is currently clunky and may not scale well to our content plans. Need to revisit design & revise."
Whatever the end result, I think it should not be neglected. Ancestors are a cool way of keeping your heroes in the running. You just need a solid system what their stats are and how they contribute. Not very related, but I want to stress this again. 1/year per turn is too long. You cannot properly connect to the heroes when they die so quickly. Seasons would be awesome, and generate a 4x longer game. Though more numbers are possible (semi-annual, montly, bi-montly).
Agency
"Track a global Agency pool, collected when heroes die. The total adds to incoming heroes' XP totals at a conversion rate."
I need some more elaboration on what this is, just like keywords. :)
Reputation System
"Hook up and revise as needed."
What are your plans with this? I wonder what the design philosophy is on reputation.
Starting Houses
"Implement starting house choice during character creation."
I wouldn't prioritize this just yet. One house works fine for the moment. All in due time.
Ages
"Change name of age based on the tech choices the society makes."
How do you imagine this? I don't follow.
Society / City
"Current plan is to revise the tech tree to represent the placement of structures in your city."
While this is possible and feasible, don't neglect the endless options of society traits, which can also represent buildings where appropriate.
"Other minor houses, guilds, crime, etc in your city - tracking their state."
This could be big enough to justify another control tab for your city! :)
Tooltips
"Discuss and settle on a solid design philosophy behind the tooltips: how much should the player know, etc..."
Just want to remind you of your own idea that there could be an in-game option how much tooltips reveal. I would imagine something like None/Normal/Extended
None doesn't show anything (just go on the description of the choice a la KODP), Normal shows percentage change of succeeding and which skill is utilized (as the current system nicely provides) and Extended shows the name of the next events when succes or failure occurs. This would be very useful.
Modding
Don't forget the publish at one point the list with all possible conditions and consequences and stuff.
Event Engine Enhancements
"Ability to condition events based on if & how many times actions have been taken by various heroes (in aggregate or specific) in the past."
Event Engine enhancements are crucial for the long term. Mods crave for this. Moar options is better.
That's it, I hope it's useful. I really like what I see here. Can't wait for the next build. :)
Therlun
Member
Hmm, interesting.
I wonder though, will there be enough "game"?
The current beta is still in the early stages but there are still hints at and foundations for a fun heritage-game if you will allow me to use that obsolete word. :)
What I feel is missing is the "other" half.
Both KoDP and Crusader Kings have, in addition to their event-system/family management respectively, a second side. In both games that second side is a "normal" gameplay frame. Only through that basic gameplay (economics if a clan in KoDP, diplomacy of a family in medieval Europe for CK) do the unique approaches in both games actually work though.
Right know ADH is lacking the glue that keeps its promising individual parts together.
Outside individuals and peoples to interact with in a system of rules and breaking rules.
A world that is not wholly dependent on you.
Non-event based decisions.
Farming.
joefreemer
Administrator
Hey guys, this is Joe, the new designer at Macguffin. Thanks for the responses!
@Romtos: Keywords are tags that are attached to Events and Event Choices. These would be words like "Dragon," "Magic," "Undead," etc. These will be used in the short term for traits, and as a tool for future features. For example, the Dragonslayer trait would only kick in when the Dragon keyword was present.
For Agency, I will kick this over to Scott.
@Therlun: I am not entirely sure I understand what it is you're suggesting. Are you suggesting having more city management and/or more evidence that things are happening in the world outside of your heroes?
Therlun
Member
Sorry for being hard to understand. I try to spice up my posts and at the same time try to be concise. It was not so much a suggestion, more of an emotional status report.
I miss some basic rule set. I don't just want more happening or more options in the city management. I miss core concepts that create a foundation for the game you play and that carry over from session to session.
=> In KoDP you always had to take care of food. It was a pretty simple system. A screen with a few sliders, number of farmers and herders, number of cows (for milk). It required only a very small amount of attention from the player compared to the ever present events. But food was still essential. The food system had ups and downs, was influenced by randomness within a rule system of how harvests would go. It would influence your actions (trading for food, raiding, growth of your clan). Food was a single resource that could greatly influence your game in many different ways.
The events in KoDP gave the game a flavour and atmosphere it's what made the game so great. But the basic rules of food, wealth, interaction with other clans gave the game a foundation and direction. Events on the one hand and the basic rules of those underlying, often quite simplistic, concepts on the other hand interacted and supported each other.
In contrast ADH is a string of positive feedback in the "resource game". You spend turns, you gain stuff to upgrade stuff to increase your income. There is little consumption of anything (the only thing consumed right now are soldiers you lose) and little to DO with the stuff you gain but directly invest it to gain more of the same stuff next turn.
Then there is a parallel game of unfolding the story.
I miss something that connects all the decisions and options in the game on the lowest gameplay level (above story that is).
Sorry if I'm still hard to understand, I will think about it some more and try to find a better explanation. :)
I understand what you're saying, Therlun.
Basically, what you're seeing is that the first real system we put into the game dealt with events--how they triggered, whom they could target, how consequences were doled out, etc.
Other features were primarily dictated by what the events required, and ended up fairly skeletal as a result (long story short: I'm a primadonna, and put in a lot of feature requests that allowed my writers to do More, Better, Faster things.)
Now that that's out of the way, the other parts of the game are being worked on--parts that actually flesh out the mechanical interaction of the various parts and pieces.
All that said, AHD is slightly more event driven than KoDP. Rather than simply providing flavor, they are the driving experience behind the narrative. KoDP could be played without any events at all, since you could ostensibly become king simply by using the existing mechanics. The frequency with which events fired in KoDP reflects that, I think.
TLDR: You are totally right, and building that underlying structure is what we've been working on.
MarkDey
Member
On tooltips and restricting the information available to the player, if people want to know the nitty gritty details, they'll just look at the events file and figure it out themselves and perhaps post it online as a reference for others. If there are no tooltips, then this just makes it more difficult for the players to figure out. If the tooltips show all of the information, then that could spoil potential outcomes based on the event names. An in-game choice would be my preference, but that would mean you would need to implement fully informative tooltips anyway, and then scale back the information shown to the player depending on what they select.
I also agree with Therlun's concern that there is nothing to do with your stuff right now. It seems like the goal is to build up your outpost on this continent, get strong enough to find the Fifth House, get stronger to fight the Fifth House, and then finally defeat the Fifth House thanks to your heroes and advanced civilization. Encounters with the natives (sentient and not) and the environment are side-quests (although they could be rather detailed.)
If the end game is the fall of the Fifth House, then I guess the actions of the player's society afterwards are dealt with in an epilogue, possibly based on prior actions and societal traits. (Things like, do we sail back home? Do we stay here and subjugate the frost giants? Whatever.) However, breaking the strength of the Fifth House (taking over their city or what have you) could also be a mid-point in the game, and you have to chase down or convert the remnants. I haven't thought much about how to make a mop-up operation interesting, but I am certain it can be done.
Also, here's a question. Why have a hex based map as opposed to a square tiled grid or a point-to-point area map? I'm guessing that it may be due to the warfare functionality that we haven't seen yet, but I just don't know.
MarkDey
Member
Ack - ninja'ed by Graham. So, as often as KoDP has been brought up, is it something I should go find and play to get some perspective on AHD?
Asked a different way, is AHD intended to be like a modified version of KoDP, or are there significant differences planned?
@Rom - The vision for getting Agency hooked up correctly is that Agency dumps into a collective pool for the whole society, and that total number gives each new generation of your heroes an XP boost. The more in that pot, the bigger the boost. It is meant to create interesting decisions for your choices to gain either Ancestor Power or Agency.
@MarkDey - Although AHD owes a good bit to KoDP, they are definitely different games. That said, it's an awesome game and well worth playing. You can get it from A-Sharp here.
@MarkDey - It's interesting. My idea on tooltips was originally to have them show all sorts of game info to the player, so they could make informed decisions. Back then, though, that at that point I was still viewing the game as a more EU-style number-crunchy strategy game. The game continued to evolve the other way, towards a much more storytelling RPG style, supported by strategy mechanics. At this point, I've come to agree that we'll scale the tips back a good bit, and see where that leaves us. We'll need most of the "extra" info anyway for debug purposes, so I think in the long run a switch for extra info might be in the cards.
Joe and I were talking about the comments on a lack of compelling turn-to-turn gameplay. His thought is that this is in large part because the system of gathering and spending resources is broken & lacks sinks to make the money related choices interesting. He's taking a look at all of that this week, and we're going to review & figure out where to go with it. It's definitely one of the weakest areas in the game at the moment, IMO.
On the map hexes - the biggest reason is that the hexes make it easiest to support diagonal movement on the map while still leaving contiguous borders for the explored territory. There were also a bunch of technical pains-in-the-ass with what we were doing for Explore on a grid map; earlier versions of the game were actually on a grid.
Romtos
Member
On the issue of gathering and spending resources, I have some ramblings which come forth largely from my few tries with writing events. One of the major stumbling blocks was the lack of resources and stats to modify. Increasing gold and happiness are the most obvious one on successful events, while decreasing military and happiness was most obvious for failed events. Also, there is only so much you can do with gold, and relics are useless altogether. Also, I'm not sure if there is any implication of low happiness.
The solution would like in an interlinked system of resource pools each with inflows and outflows. I'll continue now how I might envision such a system, which was done rather well by e.g. KODP. I suggest there should be a Food Stock, where foodstuffs produced by the farms is dumped each turn. Similarly, the population size determines the outflow out of the Food Stock. Farms in turn cost some maintenance each turn, and their number can be adjusted by the player. The maximum amount of farms is limited by the amount of arable land, which is primarily a given (it might be increased and decreased in one way or another, but not on a turn-by-turn basis). I could imagine that farm yields could be increased by some technological investments. Gold is raised by taxes, which depend on population size and population happiness. Farm maintenance, Good production and Temple maintenance are the major outflows of money. Good production increases happiness. Happiness is decreased each turn by a fixed amount. Temple maintenance gives more relics, which can be used for performing magic, which can be all kinds of crazy stuff. In addition to this whole system, there are a few more elements. First, there is the military investments, which is as it is a fixed cost per unit with no maintenance, just like technology and (possibly) buildings in the city. This means that the whole circular system described before can lead to some 'profit' (or a loss, if you screw up :P) which can then be used for this fixed costs. Last, there is event related inflow and outflow (like the gold mine event, or a pay protection money to the frostgiants event) which can be a fixed one time amount of a cost which is payed each turn. Each can relax or strain your income circle. I made a pretty flowchart as well, albeit somewhat incorrect, since population happiness and size together form the tax income, not separately and there is no arrow indicating the decrease of happiness each turn. In the end, there are four piles of resources: Gold, Foodstuffs, Good, Relics, each circularly related to gold. I don't claim this is a perfect system, but it's an example how a imo well functioning system could look like, where each element has its inflow and outflow. The rest on the game could be build on this 'glue' as Therlun put it.
Edit: As a small side note, this system is so predictable I think it would benefit from a minor amount of randomness, a la good/bad/meh/ok harvest, which can possibly be influenced by stuffing some magic relics up nature's throat to get your way as in KODP.
Edit2: Second side note, my magnificent picture misses the income from ruling.　But it doesn't change any of the systems. Possibly that's the only part which actually provides income above the break-even level with the other circular flows. Not sure about that.
Edit3: Last edit for now, I promise! (Going to sleep anyway) I added the ruling income, also added another use for goods which might fit nicely in the yet to be designed diplomacy system. Also more circles is good. Anyway, I hope that at the least this post served to provide some inspiration how a system might be done. :P
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