Let's talk zones!

[Teleros]

For @thorbjorn42gbf & @untrustedlife, scroll down to the bottom for my responses to you two, as responding to @Scal is the great majority of this wall of text .

@Scal

With the above said, it is clear the that role of the trapper and the hunting ground (hunting zone) is designed for a working class and not a fighting class, thus incompatible with the combat role and impossible as a combat concept.

I agree to the extent that a “kill bad guys here” zone would probably not work very well for offensive combat. Defensively, patrol & guard zones should be fine.

@Scal

Those are examples of indirect control as are the combat concepts I brought in this discussion.

I just feel you’re taking the indirect bit too far.

@Scal

You don’t get to choose if your villagers will assist in the construction of a house

No, but you know who will. The carpenter if he’s free, and any workers if they’re free. Same issue with gathering resources.

@Scal

place items or eat or sleep or stand by the campfire

These are all trivial issues though. If your carpenter wants to eat first then finish the last bed you ordered him to make… it’s no biggie, and is the sort of thing you should expect from a town management game anyway IMHO.

@Scal

In the same way you don’t get to choose what farms your farmer attend to first. You can select the area they farm and the crops in the farm, but from this point forward the farmers assume control.

True, but as it stands this really isn’t a big issue - especially given how plentiful food is ATM. If providing sufficient food for your town becomes more difficult, then yes I’d expect to be able to assume more control over what each farmer does etc (eg assigning farmers to plots, or suspending work on certain plots so that they can hurry to complete another one, eg to stave off starvation).

@Scal

You are an overseer, someone who has indirect control, not an overlord who controls every action of his minions. You set the goals and watch as they go on with their daily tasks, this behavior gives believability and immersion to the world of Stonehearth.

Bolded my issue with your ideas. From where I stand (sit?), your arguing for a military that is much more apt to set its own goals, which - especially for the military - I think is both potentially disastrous and very much against the style of the game.

@Scal

I don’t need deep knowledge of how scenarios and dungeons will work to know that having to give orders to several different units at small intervals is a horrible idea.

Again, you can’t actually say that, because as I thought I’d made clear, we don’t know how the scenario/dungeon model will work. To repeat myself: 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… If they decide to do it on their own, then they can lose you the game."

That’s about as micromanage-y as responding to the trader events that occur in-game at the moment. I think you’re misunderstanding my position, which is that a quest model like the trader events is, IMHO, a good model:

1. A wild quest appears! / You discover a dungeon! / You discover a scenario!
2. Do you want to do it? Yes/no?
3. If yes, which squad will you send off on it?

However, as we don’t know what the quest model will be like, we can’t exactly say much about it either way.

@Scal

Think of what Assassins Creed did with the ‘Send assassins to missions’ feature, a frustrating method of micro-management, where you had to check your assassins every few minutes to send new orders again, collect gold, recruit more assassins, check new missions, send to missions, rinse and repeat. This kind of lazy mechanic deserves no place in Stonehearth.

Indeed, it sounds like they should’ve added some decent automation to do at least the following:

1. Alert you when the assassins are back.
2. Auto-stockpile the rewards etc.
3. Alert you when new missions appear.

@Scal

As explained in my previous post, there is no toggle function.

I… am getting annoyed with you now.

Way back at the start of all this, you said (point one) that military units you recruit will explore the world on their own, and THEN (point two) that they could be set as a guard.

That is a toggle.

Then you go on to say (I’m paraphrasing, but w/e) "units not versed in exploration will prefer to hang out at town unless they decide to do a quest or are in a questing party. Again implying that their default behaviour is to potentially abandon their posts and go off playing D&D in the wild. Thus reinforcing the idea that you need to turn off their abandon friends & family exploration behaviour.

That is a toggle.

And then, you say in response to my stuff about Footman Bob, that “…suggesting that he is a guard. Him being a guard he wouldn’t follow the same behaviour of other warriors… thus not leaving his post…”

AGAIN, implying that if I want Footman Bob to be a guard, I have to TELL him to be one.

That is a toggle.

So please, stop it. Either the default behaviour of military units is to explore, in which case I must toggle off that behaviour, or it is to defend my settlement, in which case I do not need to toggle off the exploration behaviour. So far, you’ve consistently said and implied that it is the former.

Course, then you say “there is no toggle function”, which if anything makes it worse by implying that I can’t even set my idiot soldiers to guard so as to stop them from seeking fame and an early grave two biomes away instead of defending the town like they’re supposed to.

@Scal

A boring micro-management mechanic for the player to go trough.

Yes, but that’s why I made a separate topic to consider how best to handle offensive military actions.

@Scal

It is unfair and wrong to bring only a small portion of a text in order to subvert the writer’s arguments.

Don’t contradict yourself then .

@Scal

They can be used as synonyms, with no confusion or loss of meaning, for any effects of this discussion.

Thanks for saying in advance, was my point…

[quote=“Scal, post:22, topic:7972”]Alas, a quick browsing trough any search engine in internet shows in the first links that the words I used can be adquately used as synonyms:

51 Synonyms & Antonyms for HERO | Thesaurus.com (hero and warrior)
WARRIOR Synonyms: 68 Similar and Opposite Words | Merriam-Webster Thesaurus (warrior and guard)[/quote]
Congratulations on misusing the English language.

A synonym is a word that has exactly, or very nearly, the same meaning as another word.

Hero, warrior, soldier and guard DO NOT mean the same thing:

1. A D&D barbarian is a warrior, not a soldier. He is not a guard unless he is guarding something or someone.
2. A person who deserts their post and flees is not a hero.
3. A member of the Waffen SS (yes I went there) is a soldier, and may be a guard, but he is not a hero.
4. A prime minister who rallies his country during a tough war is a hero, but is not a soldier, warrior, or guard.

Now do you see why using these terms interchangeably was perhaps not the brightest idea?

@Scal

I also put into question the necessity of explaining the above as the point of this discussion is combat, not textual adequacy. To bring such a discussion is to try to undermine another’s arguments with supposed textual errors, which is counterproductive.

If you used English properly then there wouldn’t be any cause for misunderstanding, and so no need to make me give you a lesson in English language comprehension…

@Scal

There are a lot of games with direct control. Fortunately Stonehearth is not one of those games.

Way to miss the point. Again.

If you look closely, you’ll notice the second half of my sentence, specifically “instead of fighting my commands”. And, if you’d read my posts, you’d know that I consider things like “toggling all my military units to guard mode so that they’ll do the job I hired them for” is what I consider to be a case of having to fight my own units to get them to behave.

@Scal

As already explained, the player would hypotethically have at his disposal walls, towers, guards, patrol zones, many low level units and mid level units by the time he gets a squad or party of high level units, thus being way above petty concerns about goblin raids.

Glad to see you know so much about how the combat engine in Stonehearth is going to look.

Oh no wait, you don’t.

By the way, have you ever seen some of those Dwarf Fortress LPs that include goblin attacks? You can get 50+ goblins (I think I read of an 80+ strong goblin attack once)… that is a serious threat to a fort, which typically has no more than 200 dwarves in it, tops. Now, you may be a good player and you may have prepared enough traps, magma pumps and the like to wipe out the entire Chinese PLA in one fell swoop, but then again you may not have.

@Scal

Then don’t send Captain Ironblood in a campaign across the globe and he will be close when you need him.

I would, but your apparent fixation on having military units default to “let’s go exploring!” makes it that much harder…

@Scal

My post is clear and well written. I am not to blame for assumptions you create regarding arguments I hadn’t opened.

Uh-huh.

[quote=“Scal, post:22, topic:7972”]Your assumption is incorrect. There would be no ‘toggle’ option, as this would demand heavy micro-management when you have many units and would also encourage ‘turtling’ tactics in multiplayer.

As of now we can’t know if units will upgrade in class automatically when their level reach a certain number or if they need a new tool/weapon to upgrade or both.

If units upgrade automatically when reaching a certain level then guard units would need to be a different class.

If they only need a certain weapon/tool to upgrade or if they need both (required level and tool/weapon) then the guard units could be the first class of every fighting unit.[/quote]
This is actually worse than the toggle idea you started out with.

If (game design in which I find I don’t want to use certain units = bad game design) then (your idea is bad game design).

@thorbjorn42gbf

Yes you have a quite good point here. A solution would be a patrol city option or something that you could give your soldiers when they ask for something to do. Would that work foe you?

Meh. Call me a tyrannical overlord if you want, but the journal / NPC chat window is where they can do their complaining . You’re in the army now, son," and all that.

@thorbjorn42gbf

Yea. But they are also our citizens which makes it more fun if they could take an initiative to ask to do something instead of just getting the order. Explorers and adventurers are mostly people who took the choice them self. Right?

An adventurer class / profession that is entirely separate from the military I have no problem with. Choosing to create a unit to go off and explore, have adventures with or whatever is very different from having your city guard members doing it. I get that it’s nice to see more character in the individual hearthlings, but really IMHO that’s for the journal or again, the NPC chat log.

(Also: RATTLESNAKES?! )

@thorbjorn42gbf

Of course it would be irritating if the villages messed things up and Fx planted pumpkins instead of turnips but what i am trying to say is that isn’t it more fun if the Hearthlings make a few choices on their own or at least asks if they are allowed to do something different.

Not IMHO. I tend to approach these things with A Plan, quite possibly complete with technical diagrams, spreadsheets, and screenshots of awesome looking buildings. I don’t want the AI asking me “hey boss, can we screw things up do XYZ?” instead .

@untrustedlife

My god teleros, you clearly have never played majesty

I am entirely ignorant of it, and have gone just by the stuff @Scal has said.

@untrustedlife

If the player is the one giving quests via placing banners and setting rewards, i belive all of the “issues” you conjured up would be null and void.

You say that, but then immediately after…

@untrustedlife

Not all heroes would go for the same quest either

No! No! Bad hearthling! I want Alice to do this quest, not Bob!

[quote=“untrustedlife, post:36, topic:7972”]Basically im suggesting the player always be the one to make quests, think of your self as the dm of the game. You tell the heroes to go on quests when you want them to go on quests;. Or you encourage them to go on “quests” that you set up via rewards. think a “reward flag” over a monsters head that YOU explicitly put there and set a reward for. Or an Explore flag.

This way the player has “control” but not total control. and you don’t have to micromanage them. The heroes would hopefully have ai that can handle itself in the big bad world of stonehearth, and the ai should be smart enough to stock up on supllies on its own and fight the monsters as strategically as possible.[/quote]
As per the other thread, certainly I’m open to ideas on how to get military units to do specific (mostly offensive) actions, and yeah, perhaps a “target this” banner or w/e would work for that when Cthulhu comes along. But if I can’t tell Able Squad specifically to target Cthulhu, and just have to hope that the veterans in Able Squad do it instead of the clueless newbies in Baker Squad… urgh.

@untrustedlife

I could see a ton of possibilities, and you cna mak eteh flags as tactical as possible.

Going to snip most of the flag suggestions just to this, because perhaps they belong better in the other thread?

Let's talk military!

The biggest topic of disagreement in my previous suggestion thread… … was on the subject of controlling your military units, and how best to go about that without making it too similar to an RTS. As such, I thought I’d make a new topic to discuss this in detail. I should point out that, unlike the above topic, I have no firm ideas on how best to go about this. 1. Unlimited Map Size Unlike Dwarf Fortress or Gnomoria, Stonehearth is planned to have maps that are effectively infinite in size. …

@untrustedlife

Of course i would also be fine with radiant going about control of units in a sort of age of empires fashion or warcraft fashion, but its better to come up with various ideas of how to go about this. And we already saw a backlash from direct control.

Personally, I can think of only two ways to use direct control (ie StarCraft-style unit controls) well in Stonehearth:

1. Individual hero units.
2. When you take a break from town management and go take a handful of units into a dungeon - imagine it as a Baldur’s Gate mini-game or something.

Whether those actually make it into Stonehearth is another matter of course.

@untrustedlife

One ,more option is to go about it dwarf fortress style with the player choosing squads and giving squads direct orders, but when they are not on duty you cannot use them and have to rally them.

That might work out well. Little leery about direct orders to a squad, but it might work out okay.

Still - get these ideas in the other thread !

@untrustedlife

I would also like to be able to assign soldiers to a barrax (sorry i dont have time to look up how to spell this).

Agreed. I mentioned this specifically as a type of Ownership Zone in the opening post .