If you go with random loot chests, having highly visible icons would ruin some of the exploration. Having the player visually hunt for chests would be more engaging, and there could always be a potion to craft to reveal the chests with icons. I love the idea in general of having player managed gameplay elements (for example having to spot shifty assasin type enemies infiltrating your town) which could also be made easier/mitigated with economy sinks such as potions, or class roles. Some of the Anno games featured quests where youâd have to spot and click on certain characters who were hanging around what was otherwise just normal city-builder game decoration (which is to say your happy citizens going about their lives) It made the player feel a lot more connected to their little towns.
Perhaps you could tie watch tower type structures (or a simple brazier to be mounted on a podium, as opposed to a large prebuilt item) to monster loot. This was you can somewhat control the drip feed of player progress, tied in with monsters.
Hearthlings could have a âtravelâ mode/routine, when theyâre far from home switching to an alternate needs system where they camp in the wild. Over time they would wear out and need to go back to civilisation.
While itâs ideal to have some sort of engaging and intuitive system of uncovering the map (wouldnât it be great if the procgen maps could always have some kind of reasonable progression block for the player to overcome, such as evil bramble walls or a raging river needing bridging) I think players also also happy to accept much more conventional and reasonable game mechanics. Something as simple as the town being deeded neighboring land by the monarchâs messenger for completing a certain quest, then having the new space simply appear. Or even simply âraidsâ where the player sends a band away to a separate map to battle and loot.
Some more context on this prototype and its intent:
The core question we wanted to answer is whether we could have exploration without distracting you from your town. This was a step in answering that question, but we have not come to a definite conclusion.
New islands became summonable based not only on whether you collected enough McGuffins (placeholder for summoning crystals, or some other such thematically-appropriate objects) but also on your townâs progression. We used net worth as the measure for simplicity, but if this ever made it into the real game, we would use something more involved/challenging/meaningful (town happiness was one idea we considered, but itâs too hard to raise quickly, which was a requirement to be able to test the experiment quickly).
The choice of biomes and sharp transitions are, again, a time-saving measure for the experimental prototype. Dropping in a mod to test out an idea was super efficient, and we are super thankful to @BrunoSupremo, @Froggy, @RepeatPan, and @Vargbane for their work. This is a great example of the community measurably helping us push the game forward. That said, if we were to incorporate something similar to this feature into the game, the biomes that might appear on a map would not be as arbitrary. Just brainstorming here, but they could be something like a volcano rising, or a part of the map getting desertified due to a drought, or a fire golem burning down a forest. These would afford more believable transitions rather than a cutoff line between one biome and another.
A scout class is something we considered, but to make it a real class with enough usefulness beyond walking around would have taken more work than we wanted to sink into a throw-away experiment. The watchtowers and footman exploration are, again, the simplest implementation that was sufficient to answer this stage of the question.
In this second prototype, treasures were only revealed (with icons and a notification) when discovered by your military or watchtowers. Like everything here, this was (surprise!) a placeholder for a real reveal. Since watchtower range grew over time, you would typically place a watchtower, and go back to your city, then get notified when it revealed a new treasure.
Exploration on a separate detached maps is something weâve been mulling over, but we are trying to keep the town the focus of the game, and having a separate map drags the playerâs attention away really hard. Alternatively, if itâs just a case of send an adventuring party, they disappear for a while, give you some dialog choices, then come back with loot, it feels unengaging for a game like Stonehearth; we want things to happen in the world, not offscreen!
Weâre exploring some ways to have the island addition less of a predefined growth outwards, but more of a player-controlled terrain replacement that can happen relatively close to the town; perhaps a future DT will expand more on this idea.
Currently it is very painful for hearthlings to go on long-range trips due to a variety of AI deficiencies. As we continue to improve the AI system, this should become less of an issue, although we are still evaluating how far we want to push this.
Weather, seasons, etc. are not at all mutually-exclusive with this path. This prototype is specific to exploring geographic exploration. âHow would it feel if the map was not the same endless wilderness?â
Keep in mind that exploration is just a feature weâre, ahem, exploring. We may have dedicated two DTs to it, but this doesnât mean that we are set on having exploration become a focus of the game or a separate core mode; Stonehearth is still very much about building a cool city and seeing your hearthlings live their lives in it; what we are trying to figure out is whether exploration can enrich that experience.
When you mention player-controlled expansion, my mind immediately jumps to the way that the Rollercoaster Tycoon series allowed you to buy land to expand your park.
One of my favourite parts in the early missions in RC1 was always buying up the scenery around the park, and connecting up tiny corridoors of land that I could build rollercoasters through. There was an immense sense of achievement when I could save up enough to buy up those attractions!
I wonder if Stonehearth could do something similar as far as land-claiming? We already have a mechanic based around the land youâve claimed with buildings, but perhaps if thatâs expanded upon (just having a building might not be enough, there might be a requirement for a hearthling to have passed through with X time period, and the player may be required to actively claim land using banners which only claim a certain radius of land â so you need something like a road or wall with banners along it and regular patrols in order to properly maintain control over the area) then weâd have more of a challenge to expand towards cool/valuable terrain features and locations.
This would have to be coupled with more reasons to actually claim land â perhaps the most basic one being that hearthlings feel safer and happier in an area marked out as being part of your town, while out in the wilderness theyâre more susceptible to fear and fatigue? Another option is to make it so that unclaimed points of interest attract enemies to set up camp â so if thereâs an abandoned goldmine and you donât claim it, eventually youâll find itâs full of some kind of enemy forces.
What Iâm imagining is a system where the player wouldnât be sending out expeditions so much as blazing a trail to the point of interest, establishing a permanent hold over it with easy transport so that they can exploit what it offers. Itâs all very colonial, heheh, but I guess thatâs kind of the point. Itâs not just about sending parties out into the frontier to see whatâs there â if thatâs the kind of gameplay you guys were after, then simple FoW would be all youâd need. The bigger issue is tying that exploration into the wider town-building experience, and I think thatâs where the âreaching out to secure territoryâ idea comes in. Thereâs a sense of achievement from driving a new trail into the frontier and securing a new outpost; it both is and isnât a distraction from town-building â it is, because youâre not looking at your main town area while youâre pushing the frontier, but itâs also literally about increasing/building onto your town.
I suppose that one way to make that more viable while working within currently available systems and gameplay is to borrow another mechanic from Rollercoaster Tycoon: worker patrol zones. We sort of have this in Stonehearth already with the trapperâs zone, but Iâm thinking that if we could set up patrol zones or flags for soldiers, and assign hearthlings to work in a certain area and ignore jobs outside that area (it could be a blacklist/whitelist toggle, which would be really useful for marking areas off-limits if, say, a goblin camp shows up there), then we could easily enough establish multiple towns within a single map.
I donât really like the magic âpotionâ idea, so much as a scout-based exploration.
To reiterate what I was describing here, itâs somewhat similar to Thief hero options in Disciples 2 - where he can scout the ruins to discover whoâs guarding them.
The difference is, when in Disciples Thief fails the mission, he dies. While some consequence for failure is good, dying is not really appropriate for Stonehearth. So instead we can get an âestimateâ of treasure and guarding monsters without really knowing how accurate it is + a chance that the monsters will notice the scout and attack him.
So, to improve chances of an accurate scouting info, we may choose to spend more time for a hearthling to observe a landmark, at the cost of increased danger of being discovered. Influence of his stats on hiding/observance is also good.
what I would love to see is rather than flat out stark changes in biomes they make climate based on elevation. letâs say there is a massive mountain in your map, the base around the mountain at ground level would be forestry, further out away from it there would be chances for lakes and rivers, heck there could be rivers near the foot of the mountain too, and finally as you reach edges of maps you might come across a beach or desert area, As you go up the mountain however you find it getting colder in nature so you start to see snow-covered cliffs and peeks. Iâd prefer if my biome was primarily a specific area with blending into small patches of other biomes based on the terrain shape and height and distance from the center of the map. that seems more realistic and interesting to me personally. In terms of exploration while I do think there should remain some kind of fog of war of sorts I donât know about making everything on the map flat out invisible until you move a hearthling there. And much like EVERYONE ELSE following the development of the game I genuinely think there should be randomly generated dungeons and mines for you to send hearthlings to explore. How you would expect players to micromanage those individual adventures is something else entirely tho. Itâs already a game about build > defend > survive. So to also then follow hearthlings into a dungeon and manage their adventure there would be something else entirely.
This has always been my favourite idea of in-map variation â basing it on realistic (or at the very least, believable) geography so thereâs still one overall âbiomeâ type but the terrain features actually interact with each other to create variation. If thereâs a mountain at one end of the map and a beach (whether itâs a lake or saltwater ocean) at the other, then there should be rivers flowing down into it. Beside the rivers should be denser forests or even rainforests, and down near the beach should be swamps/wetlands/marshes. Of course thatâs all based on a temperate biome; for a desert it may be that there are canyons/mesas hiding rivers and oases, wide sand plains, and dunes marching from those plains towards the canyons/mesas to show how sand carried in sandstorms is deposited when the canyons/mesas create a wind-break.
Having a believable graduation between different features adds soooooooooo much to the story of how a world/map was formed, and enables the player to explore some really cool gameplay and storytelling too. For the desert example, it might make sense to start out in the canyons because of the shelter and resources they provide; but later on explore around/across the dunes to find a large flat plain with a rocky outcrop suitable to build on when it comes time to expand into an epic city. The terrain itself can provide a guideline for your townâs expansion; of course the player is free to ignore that (cliff cities are awesome, after all!) but itâs nice to have that kind of gentle guiding hand for âcasualâ saves where thereâs no real plan in place. Letting the game unfold organically is a major attraction to a lot of us, and if the terrain seems to have unfolded in the same organic fashion it just makes that whole playstyle that much more immersive
About going around to find relics and âturtlingâ
Why not give both options. Example suggestion:
After some time/development/etc. if you do not add new land, a trader will visit you and offers you a relict.
Iâm not sure if the Devs are aware of this creation for FO4 but I thought it was an appropriate response to "what would the game look like if exploration was a part of the core loop" FO4 Sim Settlements
Its completely different genre but it is a really creative solution to resolve two contrasting elements of gameplay, homebody settlement player and always away from home adventurer.
If my suggestion were having to click on every Hearthling every time they collected an item, Iâd agree with you. But having certain limited, not-every-action-in-the-game quests/events/enemies require the player to actually inspect their world more closely can be engaging and fun, as given in my example of the Anno games. It wasnât a frequent event, but it was lovely for the game to ask you to actually take a proper look amongst what otherwise was just âdecorationâ
And in regards to my thought on a chest scouting âpotionâ, itâs more to do with giving the player more options/difficulties to choose from. Either looking around manually to spot unhighlighted chests, or utelise the âpotionâ system which already provides the player with a range of map-wide, single use abilities. A craftable economy-sink item that would provide icons above the chests making them easy to locate, in this example. Then players who canât be bothered or find it difficult to hunt around initially have a way to make that part of the gameplay more accessible. Iâve always found these types of management/building games to be more enjoyable when the player is given multiple, intertwined options for achieving their goals.
The exploration idea work work really well with the nothmen, It may just be me but I think it would make sense in their gameplay, but rayyaâs children I think of of the monument builders and a lot more stationary.
looking back at this prototype and reading steam comments I think Terotrous puts the idea the best in relation with races âI feel like an interesting way to include this content without altering the base gameplay overly much would be to have one of the races be more functioned on the current, city building path, and another race more focused on the exploration-combat oriented path. That way people can choose which style they prefer.â realing making each race have a different play style. Ascendncy would build up towns while like the northmen would be the explorers
That could work yosmo⌠the northern alliance is supposed to be a bunch of warriors/hunters⌠like vikings⌠and im sure they explored alot as well.
wagons