Waypoint and "Find" System for the Trapper

Playing around with the Trapper a bit, I think it feels a bit too much like “micro-management”. The Trapper needs a lot of attention if you do not want to send him to a distant place. What would be nice would be the ability to send him to walk along different waypoints. This way we could just define some checkpoints to reach during his journey and take away the need to take too much care of him. Might be an interesting option as there will be no auto-scout function.

In addition I have lost my Trapper out in the woods here and there. With the fog of war you might have an idea where he is and find him after a while. However, would be also great to have a short-key to select the Trapper.

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Totally agree. Also a tad frustrating that I have to be near some critters before deploying traps. Having a patrol area would be preferable for the trapper to walk through on his/her own and, similar to the carpenter, keep a certain amount of pelts in stock.

yup, i would agree with the sentiments here… and perhaps instead of assigning a waypoint, you would also (perhaps) drag an area on the screen (a hunting designation) where you know the trapper would stay within…

although at the end of the day, they’re accomplishing the same task…

and just so im clear, are we saying Alpha 2 was pushed out the the bleeding edge steam folks? stuck on my laptop right now, and was just curious why there wasnt more fanfare! :smile:

Steve, there was actually quite a bit of “fan fare”, a live launch on the stream with about 141 people watching. It was great, we got to see their deployment tools and all. If you saw all that, then I apologize, you must be talking about something else. It was announced on Desktop Tuesday.

i beg to differ, my good sir… it was mentioned in today’s update… :wink: but the exact quote was:

Alpha 2 will go out in the next few days, as we complete our testing cycle.

now, i havent seen the stream yet, so if Radiant pushed it live then, well… thats just pretty cool to do with your fans! :+1:

edit: yep, right around the 02:30:00 mark, @Tom starts going into the patch notes… thats just awesome… :smile:

Thanks for the feedback guys. We certainly want to add waypoints in the near future.

For now we’re not going to add automation features like “trap in this area” to units like the trapper, for a couple of reasons:

  1. A big part of the Trapper’s design is intended to give you something to play around with while your longer-term orders are queued up. Merely turning on some kind of automation works against that.
  2. Going down that path basically doubles the amount of work for units like the Trapper. We need to design and implement the manual way of trapping and the automated way.

These direct-control units are definitely an experiment for us. Let’s see how the game feels once the class tree is a little more fleshed out and we can make any course corrections as we go.

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I think that some sort of secondary function while in town would be useful down the road to make the trapper a little more autonomus (as they just stand around most of the time when not in use).

Something like tanning returned hides to be used by the weaver or something along those lines would be cool and would allow the trapper to be of more use when not under direct control.

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What if you had to craft a workbench to make the trapper autonomous?

I think automating the trapper wouldn’t work. Automated critter hunting is in my opinion already farming. It could be part of the normal farming too, if I think about Alien Nation’s tech tree (cow farms => dung, dung => fertilizer, fertilizer => more wheat) that was actually working pretty nice. It wasn’t required to have a cow farm and fertilizer production but it yielded extra gain - this sort of micro managing was announced to be possible if players really wanted to go the extra mile if I’m not mistaken.

I would prefer having some local farm as secondary phase of food production - at the beginning, you have to hunt food yourself, after that you can automate it. Of course, the trapper would need to evolve to something else by then as it would become somewhat obsolete.