Let's talk zones!

[Teleros]

@Scal

Stonehearth can be an Interactive Town Manager for some or an Adventure Role Playing Game for others.

I think I can pretty confidently state that it won’t be the latter by default, or at least not unless they add in a DF-style Adventure Mode. As all the media etc released has made pretty clear, town management will play a crucial role in vanilla SH, just like mining places a crucial role in vanilla Minecraft.

@Scal

With the above said you also seem to have misunderstood my suggestion, where you took one of the suggested AI actions, the ‘explore’ action, and wrongly judged it as the core point of my suggestion when in fact it is only one of the many actions the units could perform.

When you only mention exploring and guarding and nothing else… yeah I’ll jump to conclusions obviously .

@Scal

But to clarify on the ‘explore’ action, units versed in exploration and more in tune with the wilderness (like hunters, druids, beastmasters) will prefer to stay outside of town, hunting and exploring

But aren’t they basically like trappers then? “Hey Mr Hunter, go hunt in this here zone, but don’t hunt in this other zone (hunting suspended) because there be goblins nearby” etc. The trapper works in exactly that fashion already.

@Scal

others units would prefer to remain closer to home unless if it decides to do a quest or in a party which is questing.

This sounds like too little control over your military though. “Where’s Able Squad?” “Oh, half of them joined your druid on a quest, and the others are on the wrong side of town.” “WTF?!”

I may exaggerate, but the point of the military units, which is what, remember, you started talking about here, is that you have sufficient control to at least point them at the enemy. A military force that decides to bugger off and do its own thing without regard to you is an utterly unreliable one.

@Scal

This adds immersion to the game and belivability in our units varied personalities.

It adds tremendous amounts of frustration. If I decide to send a squad off on a quest, at the risk of my town being less well defended, that’s MY decision as overseer/god/the guy running the show. If they decide to do it on their own, then they can lose you the game.

@Scal

This is not a game where every ‘soldier’ is named ‘soldier’ and devoid of any personality

I never said they were or should be automatons. But there’s a difference between “Footman Bob is easily scared and dislikes goblins” and “Footman Bob has deserted his post to go explore a dungeon”. The former is personality, the latter is a reason to hurl keyboards at monitors .

For reference:

[quote=Team Radiant]Stonehearth is a game about exploration and survival in an epic fantasy setting.

The game is equal parts Sandbox, Real Time Strategy, and RPG.[/quote]
From https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1590639245/stonehearth

@Teleros

Third, your banner idea is exactly the kind of micromanagement Radiant are trying to avoid. It just provides a means for StarCraft 2 players and/or Koreans to assign specific targets rapidly with their ungodly-high actions per minute (APM) skills, making it the most efficient way of doing things.

@Scal

Throwing an attack banner near a goblin stockpile is no different than setting your military patrol zone near a goblin stockpile, at least in essence as banners can be much more

Offensive actions I’ve been thinking more on - I just made a new topic specifically to discuss this issue.

As for this specific point… no, if only because a patrol zone is useless without a squad ordered to patrol it. That’s somewhat more complex and slower to set up than just slapping a banner down.

[quote=“Scal, post:20, topic:7972”]The ‘Banners’ concept comes from Majesty (Majesty: The Fantasy Kingdom Sim - Wikipedia), which was a combination of many genres (like Stonehearth is) and it had a unique twist.

Instead of choosing an area for your units to go, it allowed you to set a gold reward, which made going to the banner and killing whatever is there much more interesting for the heroes in your kingdom, the bigger the gold reward you set in the banner the bigger the numbers of interested heroes.[/quote]
Honestly, that game strikes me as very gimmicky (though I note in the description etc it does make a point of saying you’ve got various spells as well as rewards etc to help herd the hired help in the right direction)… you clearly must be ruler of a fantasy kingdom if nobody has the brains to order your feudal barons to stop bickering, line up and do as they’re damn well told before the latest mythical beast razes half the kingdom.

Also note that the point, apparently, of Majesty was the combat. That’s not the same with Stonehearth: like Gnomoria or Dwarf Fortress, there’s a big element of… well other stuff frankly. Mega-projects, town management, etc - all of which cannot be done when you have no idea from one day to the next whether your idiot soldiers will actually be there to defend said mega-project.

@Scal

still a similar system could be used, where the banners could become interesting to heroes depeding on the location and dangerousness (known and uknown) where the banner is located.

1. There’s no sign of any heroes in Stonehearth, just the hearthlings you recruit and train up.

2. “Hey guys, my town is under attack by goblins! Help!” “Meh, goblins are low-level and its a safe zone. I’d rather go over here.” “But-” GAME OVER!

3. The best way to think of the military units in Stonehearth is like, oh, say the colonial militia in the New World when the English were colonising it. Ie, locals who chose to take up arms to defend their fellow settlers, as opposed to wandering Conan-wannabes after fame & fortune. Did those colonial militia go off and attack people? Sure, but they didn’t half-arse it - or if they did, that colony was in trouble the next time the native war parties came a-calling…

@Scal

A far location with unknown dangerousness is much more likely to make strong heroes interested than a close location with goblins. While a close location with goblins is much more likely to make weak recruits interested than a close location with zombies and skeletons.

Yay, so instead of curbstomping the goblins about to stumble upon the trade caravan, I’m forced to have a vaguely fair fight and hope said caravan isn’t scared off, attacked, or whatever. Urgh.

@Scal

There is also no incompatibility between my suggestion (first quote) and your military patrol zones if you leave the patrol zones to do their single role as patrol zones for guards. Even truer to this is the fact this was posted under the patrol zones topic, suggesting that my idea was originated from the discussions of the yours.

For starters, your idea as written seems to assume that guarding stuff is something you must set, and that the exploring is the default option. “Hey newbie, want to be eased into this game called Stonehearth? Well tough, because your army wandered off and now everyone’s dead!”

@Scal

With all the above said (excluding Teleros quotes), the ‘banners’ concept has been thoroughly explained, proving this last quote to be misinformed and in lack of touch with the reality of the aforementioned concept.

Piffle. You start by apparently assuming exploration is the default behaviour, and describe only 3 modes: explore, guard, or micromanagement-banner.