Feedback Request: About the goblin campaign

Now that A10 is out there, I’d really appreciate some feedback on the goblin campaign. In your playthroughs, do you engage with the goblins? Do you just ignore them? Do you give them tribute? If so, for how long? Are wolves spawning for you? Do they murder all your people? Did you feel sufficiently warned about them? Can you get your people safely away? How many footmen do you usually muster to drive off the threat, if that is what you choose to do? In short, how’s it going, here on the outskirts of the Red Kiln Empire?

Obviously, the goblin campaign has plenty of bugs, and ways to stop it dead in its tracks (build a moat, never click the dialog boxes) and we really appreciate all the reports you guys have been filing about those, but in this thread, I’m particularly interested in hearing about how the game feels if you choose to engage with the encounters as written.

If you have any questions about the encounter system as it is now, I’d be happy to answer those too.

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I’m on day 14 of Deepmun in release 293 and haven’t yet encountered the goblins, so I’m not sure if that counts as relevant feeback. Heh, sorry!

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@martyrsvale, that’s good feedback! What’s your net worth? They only come after 1500, I think. Also, what kind of environment did you settle on? They have trouble finding settlement locations on cliffs. Finally, do you get zombies?

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Net worth was 1490 when I checked -__- So yes, after chopping down a few more trees the dialog showed up! :smiley:

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I like the Goblin campaign overall, but what I don’t like is the wolves. They take too much from your supplies imo. Also everybody runs away, even your soldiers. Give us a chance to kill the wolves or let them take less.

I understand you need to destroy the Goblin camp to get rid of the wolves, but I’m not actively searching the map for the camps until I get attacked. I have too much to control.

Once my trapper stumbled upon a camp with the wolves still sleeping. So I sent my soldiers to it with the party feature to get rid of the camp before they would steal my stuff. While I was destroying the camp, the wolves woke up, ran towards my town and took all again! I cursed and quit the game.

This is not fun.

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So, the goblin raiding parties just wiped out my entire village over the course of two nights. I had three footman, and knew that the goblin home was close. I had built up next to a cliff, and they’d spawned their village on the cliff above. Villagers were also spawning in from there, so I had to have access, or everyone dies. The village was so close to mine, that the combat music was constantly triggering (I wish I’d thought to get a screenshot). I usually ignore the goblin’s demand for two reasons: One, that they always demand more, and two, I know I will eventually have to deal with them anyhow.

The fateful night in question, I had not only a pack of three zombies spawn, but it seemed like 6 to 8 goblin raiders as well. Everything seemed to be okay until I realized that my main fighting force had gone off to go hug the gobln chief. In the mean time, half the village was slaughtered trying to defend the zombies. The zombies ran after the goblins as they made off with some of the loot, and that brought the whole pain train od defending hearthlings and my poor three footman (who were refusing to use the nice shields I made them), and the bloodbath continued.

The quickest solution I could come up with was to grab everyone into a group and have them rally somewhwere away from the ladder up the cliff on our side of the world. So I did that, and destroyed the ladder. I later confirmed that the ladder needed to be on that cliff somewhere, as I nearly lost the poor soul who joined us that morning.

In making the new ladder for him to get down, another raiding party spawned, and continued the other party’s progress by destroying the other half of all of our stockpiles before taking out the remaining hearthlings. A trader happened through as well, so I ended up selling things to him. For what it’s worth, intended or not, the raiding party did not attack any of the objects clustered around the starting fire.

I felt semi-warned enough, but not prepared enough, especially as close as they were. I’d even increased the number of footmen I usually play with from one to three, as I knew there would be undead about. The first two attacks we survived, and then that whole mess just spiraled out of control.

I didn’t get far enough to experience the wolves just due to how close the initial camp was to my own. I wish I could give better combat directions to my hearthlings in general. Perhaps just telling them who to focus on would be great. I’d feel less out of control that way, but still hands off enough by not saying “use x skill here,” and letting the hearthlings figure out how they’re going to kill the guy with their skills.

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Thank you @Maevyn and @Canth for your gripping accounts! It’s really helpful to us as we figure out how to tone the challenge. We’re actively looking into a.) scaling the encounters up slowly and b.) improving combat control. I’ve also turned down the numbers on the wolves just now; let’s see how that goes whenever we do another push to latest.

More feedback/tales of life on the border welcome!

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Happy to help! All the pain now makes the game better for all later, after all!

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I’ll do a full play-through today and get back to you Steph :slight_smile:

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The moats thing is a big deal, for me. Not because Goblins can’t swim (nobody can right now), but because it’s a type of problem that I’ve seen in nearly every game of this type. If terrain can stop enemies, and terrain can be shaped, you can always, ALWAYS find a way to defend yourself perfectly with the terrain.
I’m curious what Radiant has in mind to address this potential problem!

Things that come to my mind that might be necessary;
-Enemy needs to be able to recognize obstacle when simply walking to you fails, e.g. moat, cliffs, walls
-Enemy then has specialized responses for some obstacles, e.g. bridge-builder goblins, rock climber/ladder goblins, bomb-carrying goblins (Helm’s Deep, anyone? Maybe minus the kamikaze.)
-Enemy expands outward and surrounds in a proper “siege”, denying you resources

Without a really adaptive enemy, it’s easy to run into the Dwarf Fortress problem: you can get a sustainable population, then wall up and survive indefinitely while everything else goes to ruin. This only applies to the combat-centric approach, of course; if you choose to bribe the goblins, then it’s all well and good! “Dumb” enemies like animals that can be walled out are good, too, so that building is rewarded. But I feel like intelligent enemies should be intelligent, at least somewhat, instead of just being animals with dialogue boxes.

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TBH I think the wolves should be quite a bit less scary. I mean, on the one hand you have the undead, which might include people you used to know and love - and then you have… wolves. Just seems like the latter are a bit too scary for being, basically, rather ordinary animals. Let’s not forget that IRL humans are very good at exterminating any and all other apex predators :stuck_out_tongue: .

I’d tune the wolves to be more like, oh, glass cannon raiders or ambushers perhaps:

  • Health: Low - I’d have them as the weakest enemies in terms of health.
  • Attack Speed: Much higher than most units.
  • Damage: Low - armour should be good at blocking their attacks. This makes them ideal for savaging lightly armoured civilians, but poor vs actual military units.
  • Movement: Noticeably faster than humans & goblins.
  • Special Weaknesses: Take bonus damage from Trappers (and Shepherds?), and future hunter-related classes.
  • Scariness: Low - humans are quite used to fighting animals.

So, were I in control of the goblins, I’d want to distract the Ascendancy’s military with my own guys, then send the wolves in to attack the lightly defended settlement and kill all the workers & craftsmen.

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very good ideas for the wolf @Teleros

it would be cool if the wolves could get “upgrades” to make them more like heavy units. though based on this pic it might already be planned…
http://stonehearth.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/desktop-voxel-wolf-rider.png

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Just to reiterate, the point with the damage vs attack speed bit is to keep the DPS the same, but make armour very good. Eg:

10 dmg / sec = 10 DPS
2 dmg / 0.2 sec = 10 DPS.

Both are the same over time, but the latter will just give wolves broken teeth if they try biting into someone wearing chain mail :laughing: .

Well that’s the wolf rider, which certainly is (or should be) a much scarier proposition :slight_smile: . Still though, I don’t see why you couldn’t get dire wolves. Or werewolves.

Or even zombie wolves :smiling_imp: .

I mean, come on: is there any reason why non-humans can’t be raised to serve a lich :slight_smile: ?

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I think the goblin campaign ignores what I though Stonehearth was aiming for. The campaign arrives at the same time every game, with the same looking camp and goblins. When you kill them, right away another quest starts. As of now, I think Stonehearth is more of a Timber and Stone “Story” Mode than a sandbox survival, since the same things happen every day. I thought that Stonehearth would be more like Factions spawning at a random time in game, with differently structured camps, and side quests would be random, if there ARE any. But for now the goblins will stay the same stuff, do the same stuff, every single time. I hope this can be changes in the future.

plz excuse meh rambling rants, tho

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really…? do you just mean the same time as in once you have 1500 net worth, or do you mean they always come at the same time for you, as in on the third day they camp appears (just an example day btw)?

[quote=“FerretBandit, post:14, topic:12321”]
with the same looking camp and goblins.
[/quote]well i was guessing that TR was working on making new/different versions… just gotta be patient

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Yeah. I’d rather have them come at random after you hit 1500 net worth instead of right away.

Not that I know of…

As a first iteration, its fine. I feel like there should be some leadup with some pre-existing camps on the map or something, but other than that, its fine.

The wolves and the thieves are probably the worst parts about it. The wolves scaring everybody is really frustrating, because you cant effectively kill them without getting a little lucky. What is worse is that they just mindlessly attack food, even if you are wailing on them. The thieves have the same issue, except that they move too quickly for your footmen to actually attack them, so they will drag your footmen all the way back to their camp. Even if you do hit them, they drop the item, then path to another one and take that. Its just frustrating and not much fun then.

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Have any of you gotten the sense, from the game, that there are (relatively) peaceful ways to resolve the situation with the wolves? How important is it to have peaceful solutions to combat options?

We wanted this encounter to have non-combat solutions discovered via a mastery of the in-game systems, but from your feedback, I’m getting the sense that we either went too far in making the combat punishing, or didn’t go far enough in telegraphing potential non-combat solutions. Alternatively, perhaps peaceful solutions want additional reward (as opposed to just reduced numbers of citizen deaths) in order to be viable options.

As to why the wolves are so powerful, well, they were specially trained by the goblins to be ferocious!

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Has the radiant team ever think of maybe having a cut-like- scene when a new event happens (with skip option ofc) that give subtle hints? Like everybody gathers around the camp fire and bubble thoughts pop over their heads discussing varied options 1) Fighter yells for combat 2) trapper/tamer expresses a peaceful alternative to the wolves? 2) carpenter suggest walling them off, or something to that degree using existing ppl we have in our settlements (maybe 5 or so hearhtlings).

If by peaceful you mean not fighting the wolves, then yes, I’ve managed to release them by attacking the camp, slaughtering the resident goblins (so, not entirely peaceful) and breaking the cage so the wolves explode in joyous puffs of dust

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