Since I know how much you despise the idea of a less micro-managey system, we’ll talk about your idea.
Total war has a decent system for hundreds and hundreds of people… sometimes in the thousands. Not sure how it would hold up in a smaller setting (not saying I know how many hearthlings would be allowed.)
If we went full RTS micromanagement mode, it’s not an awful combat system, it’s probably not the best to fit the feel of Stonehearth as a whole (My opinion), but I suppose it might work.
I always found myself playing maybe the first 5 TW battles in a map actually on the field… but I grew tired of the long and drawn out slow paced feel that I tried to do auto-resolve as much as possible.
For now, given the current level of game as a model, I would guess about an average of 60-75 hearthlings or so in your main city. Granted, this isn’t a scientific estimate, but it seems like a reasonable number for a large population base without losing the ‘personal’ essence we currently have in the gameplay style. I can imagine more settlers in other parts of the world, but for the main city itself, I can’t see it going higher than 100, give or take. By that point, it feels like the settlers start to become more of a statistic than actual beings–and you also have to worry about the fluidity of the game engine itself with that many units and their pathfinding to calculate in one condensed area of the world map.
Yeah, I also hope it doesn’t get too large. I mean 200 dwarves in DF was more than enough to keep me scrambling all over the place to check in on the little buggers.
(Yes, I played the benevolent leader instead of the torturer in DF)
But that’s a different topic for a different time.
We don’t need to have a ‘feel’ defined for the game in terms of combat. It can be compartmentalised. We haven’t seen whether or not RTS controls would fit the “feel” of the game because nobody seems to want to make any effort to implement it and integrate it into that system cohesively.
At the first hint of a combat system that might actually involve some mechanical skill people get scared away and hide in their shelters from anything that might prevent them from watching their stonehearth movie.
You can make it optional. That solves everyone’s problems. Just like how in the developer videos they mentioned the depth at which you can be engaged in farming. You can either carefully construct a farming supersystem, or just do enough to live so you can do other things. Why doesn’t combat get that same treatment?
Some people want to be agriculture gods, some people want subsistence farming so they can do cool things. If the settlement gets to the point where things can sustain theirselves almost automatically, the next goal is expansion, which is the perfect place to start putting in hand of god type control.
They could even implement officer units that are required to enter full RTS mode, that way there’s not even just an immersion breaking “toggle” in the menu, it’s literally integrated, you need an agent on the ground to order troops directly. If you want some pansy SIMS gameplay, you don’t need to promote to that route.
I purposefully avoided the micromanagement talk with you… because i knew you would respond poorly… And you still did it!
Anyhoo. Let’s switch around. You just had an epic battle in Total War. it’s everything you wanted. Troops, formations, skills… the works.
Battle ends and you go to your town management screen…
And it looks like this:
Tell me that wouldn’t throw things off.
In any case, I doubt anything I say will sway you. I can guarantee the combat won’t be the SIMS… and I don’t think anyone wants a cloud of dust with cartoony graphics flying off anyways.
I don’t think anyone disagrees that the combat system is going to need a lot of work. There are just varying opinions on what that should be. There will aboslutely need to be some sort of control, i don’t think many people are disputing that. Twitch RTS style base building troop deployment just doesn’t seem to be an optimal route, especially with the possibility of very limited troops.
Did I say we emulate Total war entirely? Did I say we transition from a board screen to an in world screen?
No, you misunderstood what I said but instead of trying to understand, you get to pretend to be a nice guy who wants to discuss and learn and give internet hugs and have open discourse free from those mean nasty RTS players, while still managing to be passive aggressive as all H E double hockey sticks (Keep it friendly, kids).
I specifically mentioned Total war’s combat systems. Not its overall gameplay. This includes Squad control, formation selection, group movement, and assigning objectives without implementing 1 to 1 micro. When you tell your soldiers to climb a wall, they take their orders and execute what you gave them. That’s exactly the kind of orchestrate and observe feel the developers are talking about.
It’s a healthy balance of control and what they originally had in mind. You don’t have to rely on the AI being completely (Let’s get it started by the black eyed peas) because you can give them good orders.
Again, I get to enjoy this forum base’s pretentious faux-politeness.
You take a stepford wives approach to speaking with people.
I honestly just don’t want to make you angry. I’m sorry if what I said seemed sarcastic and I’ll admit the candy land thing was silly. Shake hands and carry on?
Who is angry? Do people on this forum honestly not express themselves with enough humanity that the slightest notch over 0 on the energy scale and people are buying bulletproof vests?
Looked angry to me… You made large scale claims against not just @Silas but the rest of the forums as well, and, as a rule, we try to defuse situations like that before we start flame wars. Again.
Always fun when people from more… robust… debating backgrounds end up here (yes, I include myself in this) .
I think we do - namely, that combat should feel like it meshes well with the rest of the game.
This is what I think @Silas was referring to with the candy land thing: if you have one kind of unit control for circumstances A, B and C (eg farming, trapping, harvesting), but circumstance D (combat) is completely different, it will likely feel jarring.
Remember the first implementation of the trapper? Radiant tried to implement more direct unit control, and most everyone decided that it didn’t work well, especially when compared to how other units were controlled. I can’t recall ever having seen any complaints about the zone-based trapper either.
And no wonder. Trapping doesn’t require any such skills. Nor farming, nor building, nor crafting, nor (it seems likely) will trading… just military stuff. Hence why it seems jarring to have SC2-style unit controls for military stuff when nothing else does. That’s @Silas’ point.
No doubt there will be mods that will give you traditional RTS unit controls over your military, and as I’ve said before, I can think of times even in a Stonehearth otherwise free of such unit controls where they could work… but I think the effect will be very odd when it comes to your regular military.
(Also, it’s probably worth considering the age rating of Stonehearth, and consequently the skill of many of its intended players. My 8yr old sister loves playing, but she’d definitely be scared away from it by micro-heavy combat.)
It won’t work for two reasons:
The min/max players will feel pressured into doing it. “Radiant why you make me micro so much?!” etc.
Assuming you’re not totally incompetent, if you fail to do farming well, your hearthlings will still be able to muddle through and live. If you fail to do combat well, some of your hearthlings could die - to say nothing of you losing the game potentially. As trade-offs go, that’s orders of magnitude more serious than “I don’t have a big surplus to trade” .
My gaming history is chock-a-block full of RTS games, I love playing them, and I still think Stonehearth would be a better game without combat that plays out like StarCraft 2. It may be similar to some RTS games in that you order your workers to gather resources, but frankly the impression I’ve had from Stonehearth is that it’s far more like Gnomoria or Dwarf Fortress or various other town-management-with-combat games out there.
Then in the very next breath say “and/or if people who aren’t babbies want they should be allowed to micro their military units”, which to me at least as hidden “… just like in SC2 or whatever” attached to the end. Probably for @Silas too.
Go back and read @Silas’ initial response to your raising of Total War - he likes it for battles with hundreds or thousands of units, but isn’t sure how well it would work with Stonehearth, where you’ll be an impressive player to have even 100 soldiers, probably because he’s thinking of ruddy great big formations of soldiers lining up several ranks deep and all that, as opposed to your first sentence in the quote directly above.
Good heavens, you were the one who started out talking about “babbies” in reference to, as I see it, anyone who disagreed with you, remember?
Moving on, I wouldn’t mind talking about squad-level controls. If anyone’s played Dawn of War (1), you’ll know that combat generally works something like this:
Select a unit in your squad. Whole squad is now selected.
Target the enemy squad.
Your squad gets into combat. If in melee, they split up of their own accord to fight individual enemies. YOu have no control over specific unit targeting.
Now, DoW has quite a lot of the more complex commands (move, stop, hold ground, attack-move, plus special abilities), many of which could very likely be done using zones (especially hold ground), but what about controls like these for Stonehearth squads:
-Attack
-Stop
-Use guard zone (ie hold ground)
-Retreat (to what though? Town banner?)
Obviously, I’m assuming squad combat, with the goblins appearing in squads as well, but might this end up working? Assuming a population of, let’s say 100, you’ll probably have no more than 20-30 soldiers, which means probably no more than 5-6 squads* unless I suppose you want one-man squads (not sure this is a good idea, but how do you stop it in practice, especially with casualties etc?). As per the intro to the Kickstarter video (ie, where it ends with Cthulhu marching up to that tower and roaring), combat should be reasonably paced, such that players have time to (re-)act etc without the need to play like a SC2 pro to maximise unit effectiveness.
*I’d have a limit of 8-10 hearthlings per squad, though depending on your army you might want more numerous but smaller squads.
“Gah, it never fails. Just had a big, epic battle, and then my soldiers go and get lost in the stupid Lollipop Woods again. Great. Now I need to wait until I pull another yellow card so they can get back out…”
Keep in mid they want players to be able to conquer , for example, goblin villages as-well. So combat needs to be able to play out on a large scale as-well.
Something neither dwarf fortress or gnomoria has at the moment. (dwarf fortress has plans for something like this though, and you will control soliders by battallian at that point . (because you will be recriuting hill dwarves for an army of 1000+ soldiers and will be REALLY zoomed out). (eg one squad is a tile)
I honestly just don’t want to make you angry. I’m sorry if what I said seemed sarcastic and I’ll admit the candy land thing was silly. Shake hands and carry on?
.
*Walks off the topic*